A patient came into our Canterbury Road rooms last winter with two written quotes for the same lower wisdom tooth. One was a little over $200. The other was close to $700. Neither practice was doing anything dishonest. They had simply written down two different procedures, because they had looked at the tooth two different ways, and only one of them had looked at an X-ray before writing the number down.
That gap is the single most common thing people ask me about, so it is worth pulling apart properly. On an Australian dental receipt, a wisdom tooth removal is recorded as one of four item numbers, and the difference between them is not price banding invented by the practice. It is a description of what physically has to be done to get the tooth out.
The four item numbers
The Australian Dental Association publishes the schedule that every practice in the country uses to describe treatment. For a wisdom tooth, you will see one of these:
| ADA item | What it describes |
|---|---|
| 311 | Removal of a tooth, simple. The tooth is fully through the gum and comes out with forceps and an elevator. |
| 322 | Surgical removal, no bone removed. The gum is lifted as a flap to reach the tooth, but the bone is left alone. |
| 323 | Surgical removal requiring removal of bone. Some bone around the crown has to be taken away before the tooth will move. |
| 324 | Surgical removal requiring bone removal and division of the tooth. The tooth is sectioned and lifted out in pieces. |
Read down that list and you are reading a ladder of steps, each one added because the tooth would not come out without it. A 324 is not a 311 with a bigger invoice attached. It is a flap, a handpiece, bone removal, sectioning the crown away from the roots, sometimes sectioning the roots from each other, then sutures and a longer appointment.
What decides which one your tooth is
Four things, mostly, and you cannot see any of them by looking in a mirror.
How much of the tooth is through. A wisdom tooth sitting fully in the mouth with a visible crown all the way round is a candidate for a 311. One with a gum flap half over it usually is not, because the flap has to be lifted before there is anything to grip.
The angle. Lower wisdom teeth very often lie tipped forward into the second molar, which is called mesioangular impaction. A tooth wedged under the bulge of its neighbour cannot be lifted straight up. The crown has to be cut away from the part that is jammed, which is what pushes a case to a 324.
The roots. Two roots running roughly parallel come out together. Roots that curve apart like a pair of tongs, or hook backwards at the tip, will not follow a single path out of the socket, so the tooth is divided and each root is removed on its own line.
How deep it sits, and what is next to it. In the lower jaw the inferior alveolar nerve runs along the jawbone underneath the roots. On a panoramic X-ray we look specifically at whether the root shadows cross that nerve canal. That does not always change the item number, but it absolutely changes how the tooth is approached and how long the appointment needs to be.
This is why we take an OPG (item 037) before quoting anything. It is the wide panoramic film that captures both jaws in one image, including the parts of a wisdom tooth still buried in bone. A bitewing (item 121) will not do it; bitewings show the crowns of the back teeth and nothing of the roots. Quoting a wisdom tooth from a visual look alone means guessing at three of the four things above.
Why those two quotes differed
The cheaper quote was a 311, written after a visual exam. The dearer one was a 324, written after an OPG that showed the tooth lying almost horizontally with a hooked distal root. The tooth was always going to be a 324. One quote had simply been made before anyone had the information to make it.
Where that hurts is on the day. If you have budgeted for a simple extraction and the tooth turns out to need bone removal and sectioning, either the fee changes mid-appointment or the appointment stops and gets rebooked. Neither is a good afternoon.
So the useful question to ask any practice, ours included, is not “how much” but: which item number are you quoting, and did you decide that before or after the X-ray?
What the numbers look like
We do not publish a flat fee for wisdom teeth, because a flat fee covering four different procedures would be meaningless. What we give you instead is a written, itemised plan with the specific item numbers for each of your teeth, before anything is booked, so you can take it to your health fund and get a rebate figure rather than an estimate.
For a sense of the relative gap between the four items, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs publishes its administered fees openly. Under the schedule effective 1 July 2026, DVA pays $162.30 for a 311, $263.35 for a 322, $300.80 for a 323 and $404.60 for a 324. Those are not our fees and they are not private fees; they are what a government scheme has costed each step at. But the shape of the ladder is the point: roughly two and a half times the work between the bottom rung and the top.
For private context, the ADA’s 2022 fee survey, reported by CHOICE, put the national average for a simple extraction at $205. Surgical items sit well above that, and they vary more, because the work varies more.
We accept DVA cards at the Blackburn practice, and we have HICAPS on site, so if you hold extras cover you can put the plan through the terminal and see your gap rather than being told about it afterwards.
If the patient is still 17
Wisdom teeth start causing trouble in the late teens, which lands some patients inside the Child Dental Benefits Schedule by a matter of months. CDBS runs to age 17 for at least one day in the calendar year, and it covers extractions. It also covers inhalation sedation, item 88943, at $77.60, which is worth knowing, because that is the happy gas. The benefit cap is $1,158 over two consecutive calendar years, or $1,132 if the child’s window opened in 2025. We bulk bill CDBS here, and a bulk-billed CDBS service cannot carry a co-payment, so if your teenager is eligible and the teeth genuinely need to come out, get them assessed before the eighteenth birthday rather than after. CDBS does not cover general anaesthetic.
What we do and do not offer
I do all the complex extractions at Whitehorse Dental, wisdom teeth included, in our own chairs on Canterbury Road. That matters mainly because a 323 or a 324 here does not automatically mean a referral out, a second consultation fee somewhere else, and a wait for a third appointment. The tooth is assessed and removed in the same practice by the same person, working from the same OPG.
What we do not offer is general anaesthetic or hospital sedation. Everything is done under local anaesthetic, with happy gas available in the chair and oral premedication if you would rather arrive already settled. There is a ceiling TV above the chair and you choose what is on it. If a case genuinely needs a hospital theatre, I will say so and refer, rather than start something in a dental chair that does not belong there.
Before you compare two prices
Ask for the item number. Ask whether an OPG was taken first. Ask whether a surgical case would be done in-house or sent elsewhere, and what that referral would add. Three questions, and they will tell you more about a quote than the dollar figure at the bottom of it.
If you want to know which of the four items your own teeth fall under, that is what an assessment is for: an exam, an OPG, and a written plan. You can read how we approach wisdom teeth removal in Blackburn, or, if you are still working out whether the tooth needs to come out at all, start with whether wisdom teeth have to come out. If you have already been told you need a surgical removal and want to know what the fortnight afterwards looks like, the recovery timeline sets it out day by day.
Call us on (03) 8838 8820 or text 0435 025 318. We are at 129A Canterbury Road, Blackburn, with on-site parking and Saturday appointments from 9am to 1pm.