Who writes this, and where every figure came from

Arch Reckoner covers one subject: replacing a whole arch of teeth with implants, and what that is billed as. It is written by the Arch Reckoner editorial desk — editors who read published fee schedules, regulator pages and clinical literature. Not one of us is a dentist, a dental technician or any kind of clinician, and no dental professional reviews this site.

That is not a formality. On a health subject, the person who can tell you what your mouth needs is a licensed dentist who has examined you and looked at your imaging. We can tell you what documents say and what they cost. Those are different jobs, and mixing them up is how people end up paying for treatment nobody examined them for.

The rules we work to

• A figure without a document does not get printed. Where nothing public answers a question, the page says so and prints no number. That is why there is no "average cost of full mouth dental implants" headline figure anywhere on this site.
• Someone else's number stays someone else's. Consumer cost guides and vendor claims are quoted with the name of whoever published them attached, every time they appear.
• Absences are facts. When a schedule prints no line for a code, we say so — it is usually more informative than the fees around it.
• No clinic is named, ranked, recommended or linked, here or abroad. This site does not broker patients.
• No forms. There is nothing to fill in, no quote request, nothing that collects a health detail. The way to get a quote is set out in words on the cost page.
• Banned as claims: permanent, painless, guaranteed, lifetime, risk-free. Where one of those words is what people actually search for, the page puts it in quotation marks and explains what it means to the person using it.

The documents behind the figures

Everything numeric on this site comes from one of these, each read on 24 September 2026:

• New York State Medicaid Dental Fee Schedule, effective 1 January 2025 — the implant ladder, the removable implant denture lines, extractions and conventional dentures. Published in the American Dental Association's Medicaid fee-schedule library at ada.org.
• Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Dental Fee Schedule, January 2025 — the only one of the three carrying fixed full-arch prosthesis lines with a payable amount. Its implant lines are marked as a covered benefit for Children's Special Health Care Services only. Same library.
• Delaware Dental Fee Schedule, effective 1 April 2026 — every implant code present, every one allowed $0.00, published by Delaware's Division of Medicaid and Medical Assistance.
• Cleveland Clinic, patient pages on implant-supported dentures — quoted for definitions, healing times, risks and the replacement interval, with its own last-updated date of 18 October 2022.
• Froimovici and colleagues, "Fixed Full-Arch Implant-Supported Restorations: Techniques Review and Proposal for Improvement", Dentistry Journal, 13 December 2024 — quoted for survival figures and complications, with the review's own attributions kept intact.
• CareCredit consumer cost guides — quoted as a lender's published claims, with the market-research study they cite named alongside.
• Medicare.gov and Medicaid.gov — quoted for what the public programmes do and do not cover.
• The Federal Trade Commission's guidance on its Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule, for the page about before-and-after photographs.

The three fee schedules were machine-read with a small extractor written for this site, and the extracted text of each is kept alongside the site's working files so any figure can be traced back to the line it came from.

What this site is not

It is not a directory, a referral service, a comparison of practices, or a way to find a surgeon. It has no view on which system, brand or technique is best, because forming one would require clinical expertise nobody here has.

If you find an error — a fee misread, a schedule superseded, a source that no longer says what we say it says — write to the desk. Corrections are made to the page and noted in it.