After a tooth is taken out
What is normal in the first few hours and days, how to stop bleeding that restarts, and the difference between something for your dentist and something for a hospital.
Call 999
For anything life-threatening:
- Serious difficulty breathing, noisy breathing, or difficulty swallowing your own saliva
- Swelling under the tongue or in the floor of the mouth, or swelling closing the throat
- Collapse, or someone who cannot be roused
- A suspected severe allergic reaction — widespread rash or hives with breathing difficulty, swelling of the lips, tongue or throat, or feeling faint
- Chest pain, or any other emergency that happens to have arrived on the same day
These are rare after an extraction. None of them waits.
Go to an emergency department
- Bleeding that is filling your mouth faster than you can keep up with, or that you cannot get under control and cannot reach anyone about. For bleeding that simply will not settle, ring your dentist or the urgent dental service first, keeping the pressure on: the treatment is usually a dressing or a stitch in the socket, which a dentist does and an emergency department generally cannot
- Swelling that is spreading — towards or under the eye, or down the neck — particularly with a temperature, feeling unwell, or difficulty opening your mouth
Ring a dentist, the same day
Most things that go wrong after an extraction belong here. They need dental assessment, and a dentist is the person equipped to give it — an emergency department is set up for the serious complications above rather than for routine post-extraction problems.
- Bleeding that keeps restarting but settles each time with pressure
- Pain that gets worse after the second or third day rather than better, especially a deep ache spreading towards the ear or temple, often with a bad taste. Dry socket is the common cause, and a dentist can treat it straightforwardly — which is why it is worth ringing one rather than sitting in an emergency department.
- A temperature, or pus or a foul taste coming from the socket
- Numbness in the lip, chin or tongue that is still there the next day, or that feels altered rather than simply numb
- Pain that is not improving after about three days
Who to ring, in each nation, is at the foot of the page.
What was done
A tooth was removed from its socket. The gum and bone around it now have to close over the gap, and most of what follows is about leaving the blood clot in that socket alone while they do.
That clot is the whole of the aftercare. Nearly every instruction below is a different way of saying do not disturb it.
Today
While you are numb
The anaesthetic usually wears off within a few hours, though it can take longer. Until normal feeling has properly returned:
- Do not eat, and do not drink anything hot. You cannot feel a burn, and you cannot feel your own cheek.
- Try not to bite or chew your lip or the inside of your cheek. It is easy to do without noticing, and a bitten numb lip is sore for days afterwards.
Once the feeling is back
Have something soft, and cool or lukewarm, and chew on the other side. Avoid anything hard, crunchy, or with small pieces that can work their way into the socket. No straws: the suction can lift the clot.
Leave the socket alone
- Do not rinse your mouth today — not with water, not with mouthwash, not with salt water. Rinsing is what lifts the clot out. Salt water starts tomorrow.
- No poking with a finger or tongue, and no sucking at it.
- Rest. Sit up rather than lying flat, keep your head above your heart, and leave sport, heavy lifting and bending for another day or two.
Bleeding, and what is not bleeding
Pink or blood-stained saliva is normal, and is not bleeding. A very small amount of blood mixes into a mouthful of saliva and looks like a great deal more than it is. Expect it today, and some on the pillow tonight. Swallow it rather than spitting — spitting can start the socket off again.
Active bleeding is different: blood welling up and filling the mouth, or a steady drip, rather than a pink tinge. If that happens:
- Roll a clean, damp swab or handkerchief into a firm pad. Damp, not dry — dry gauze sticks to the clot and pulls it away when you take it off.
- Put it directly over the socket, not beside it, and bite down firmly.
- Keep biting for 20 minutes, by the clock. Sit upright, stay still, and do not talk or spit.
- Do not keep lifting the pad to look. Checking part-way through is the commonest reason this does not work: it disturbs the clot that the pressure has just started to form.
- After the 20 minutes, check. If it is still bleeding, do it once more with a fresh pad.
If two full rounds have not stopped it, that is the line between normal and needing help — see the top of this page.
If you take a blood thinner, do not wait for the second round — and do not take the pressure off either. If the bleeding does not stop after the first 20 minutes, or stops and then starts again, get help while you are still biting down: ring your dentist or the urgent dental service, or have somebody else ring for you, and keep the pad in place while you make the call and while you travel. That advice is specific to anticoagulant and antiplatelet medicines, and it is the one place where this page asks you to escalate sooner than everyone else.
The first 24 hours
- No smoking and no vaping. Smoking makes a painful socket considerably more likely and slows healing. Leave it at least 24 hours — that is what SDCEP advises — and 48 if you can manage it. Longer is better still: there is no hour at which it becomes safe, only a point at which the risk begins to fall.
- No alcohol and no exercise for 24 hours, and leave the alcohol until tomorrow is past if you can.
- Soft food, and keep chewing away from the socket.
- Keep brushing your other teeth, normally, twice a day. Clean gently around the socket rather than avoiding that whole side, which tends to cause its own problems.
- Painkillers if you need them. Paracetamol first. If you take a blood thinner of any kind — warfarin, apixaban, dabigatran, rivaroxaban, edoxaban, clopidogrel, ticagrelor, prasugrel, dipyridamole, a daily injection such as enoxaparin, or aspirin a doctor put you on — take paracetamol and not ibuprofen, aspirin, diclofenac or naproxen. These raise the bleeding risk alongside those medicines. If your medicine is not on that list and you are not sure which kind it is, ask a pharmacist before taking ibuprofen. And if paracetamol is not enough, or you cannot take it, ring your dentist rather than reaching for ibuprofen — there are other options, and they are a phone call away. If you are not on one, ibuprofen is an option if you normally take it safely — it does not suit everyone, and a pharmacist can tell you in a minute whether it suits you. Follow the packet, and take them regularly for the first couple of days rather than waiting for pain to build.
- Do not take aspirin as a painkiller, whoever you are. It thins the blood and can restart the bleeding. This means aspirin you would buy for pain — if a doctor has put you on a daily aspirin, keep taking it, and see below.
If you take a blood thinner
Do not stop it on your own. Not aspirin prescribed by a doctor, not warfarin, not apixaban, rivaroxaban, edoxaban, clopidogrel or any of the others. Stopping one of these unsupervised carries a risk that is considerably more serious than bleeding from a socket.
If your dentist or doctor agreed a specific plan with you for this appointment — missing a dose, delaying one, taking it at a different time — follow the plan you were given. That is a decision made about you, by someone who knows your medicines. This page is not.
If nobody discussed it with you and you are unsure, ring and ask rather than deciding yourself.
The next few days
Roughly how it goes when nothing is wrong:
| Day 1 | Oozing and pink saliva. Soreness as the anaesthetic wears off. |
| Days 2–3 | Usually the worst of it. Swelling and stiffness peak now, then start to settle. |
| Day 3 onwards | Steadily better. Pain that increases from here is the thing to ring about. |
| Week 1–2 | Swelling gone, and the socket closing over. |
Salt water, from tomorrow
Half a teaspoon of salt in about 250 ml — a mug — of comfortably warm water. Hold it over the socket and let it fall out of your mouth rather than swilling and spitting. After meals, for five to seven days.
What matters more than the exact figures: start the day after, not today, and be gentle with it rather than swilling hard. Sources agree on waiting until the next day; they vary on the strength and the count, and any of them is fine.
Swelling and bruising
Both are expected. Swelling usually peaks around day two or three and then settles over the following week; bruising can outlast it and often tracks downwards under gravity, which looks worse than it is.
What is not expected, and is worth ringing about, is swelling that is still increasing after day three, swelling that spreads rather than staying local, swelling with a temperature, or swelling that makes it hard to open your mouth or swallow.
Stitches
You may or may not have any — plenty of extractions need none.
If you do, ask or check which kind you have. Most are the dissolving sort and disappear over one to two weeks, but not all are, and non-dissolving stitches need taking out at an appointment. If a stitch comes away early and the area looks and feels as it did, that is usually of no consequence. If the wound opens, or bleeding restarts afterwards, ring.
The socket itself
A hollow you can feel with your tongue is normal. It fills in from the bottom over several weeks. Leave it be.
Your dentist’s instructions come first
The instructions you were given by the dentist who treated you take precedence over anything on this page. They know what was done, what they used, and what they gave you; this page does not. Where the two differ, follow theirs, and ring them if you are unsure which is which.
- Advice on managing post-extraction bleeding — Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, updated 8 July 2026
- Salt-water rinsing after an extraction — University Hospitals Dorset, January 2026
- Post-extraction haemorrhage, Management of Acute Dental Problems — SDCEP
- Aftercare instructions, dental extractions — University Hospitals Dorset NHS Foundation Trust, January 2026
- Instructions following removal of teeth — East Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust, June 2025
- Care of the mouth after dental extractions under local anaesthetic — University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust
- Dental extractions: post-operative instructions — University College London Hospitals
- Care of the mouth after oral surgery — Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, leaflet 004 v5
- Advice for patients after a dental extraction — The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, reviewed January 2026
- Tooth extraction after care — Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust
- Advice after tooth extractions — Wirral Community Health and Care NHS Foundation Trust
- Removal of teeth, post-operative care advice — Bedfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust
- Management of dental patients taking anticoagulants or antiplatelet drugs — SDCEP, 2nd edition, 2022
- Out-of-hours emergency dental treatment — HSC Northern Ireland
- Dental emergencies — NHS Inform; How to find an urgent NHS dentist — NHS; Dentists — NHS 111 Wales