What's the Average Number of Trays Needed for Invisalign Refinement?

An Invisalign refinement is a series of aligners used to enhance the position of teeth after the course of original treatment is finished.  This enhancement may involve the use of a couple of aligners 2-3 to do minor enhancement and can also range to a dozen if the enhancement is more substantial.  Most refinements are less than 10 aligners though I have had some that involved a more significant number of aligners.

It has been my experience that the number of original treys that you have from Invisalign treatment is usually two to three times the number of Invisalign refinement treys that you will receive.  In other words, if you start with 20 Invisalign trace initially, the refinements would have be any where between 7 to 10 trace.  Of course, this depends on each specific patient’s malocclusion as well as the severity of crowning pretreatment.  Our goal in Invisalign treatment is to get the majority of the movements with initial treys and then the smaller movements with the refinement treys.  Hence, most of the time, we are able to do this in 10 treys or less.

There is no average time or number of trays for invisalign refinement.  Too many variable to give an estimate.  I have had patients that need 6-10 aligners and i have patients that need 20 aligners for refinement.