About half (45%) of dental clinics in Russia operate illegally or in violation of the law. In particular, they lack licenses or registration in the Federal State System for Monitoring the Movement of Medicinal Products and the State Information System for Monitoring the Circulation of Goods. This was revealed by a study by the Public Consumer Initiative (OPI), the results of which were published by “Izvestia”.
The top 10 regions with the largest number of dental clinics violating the law include St. Petersburg (80%), Moscow (78.5%), Sverdlovsk (72%) and Chelyabinsk (67.2%) regions, Tatarstan (65.4%), Omsk (62.2%), Voronezh (61.4%), Nizhegorod (59%) and Samara (54.4%) regions. At the same time, among individual entrepreneurs, violations were detected in 56%, and among legal entities — in 11.5%.
OPI noted that this disproportion is “particularly alarming”, as, according to experts, the market share of individual entrepreneurs in dentistry accounts for more than 70% of the total number of private practices. Overall, the volume of the dental services market in 2025 exceeded 800 billion rubles. The presence of a significant part of this turnover in the gray zone poses direct threats to the lives and health of citizens and “damages the country’s budget system and honest business”, emphasized OPI (The Moscow Times).
