What is the average length of time a surgeon should honor a facelift price quote? Are Instagram surgeons driving pricing up?

Most surgeons will give a written price quote for 6 months, occasionally stretching this to 12 months. You state you received a price quote in 2008 and a second quote in 2015. No business will honor a 7 year old quote.

Thank you for your question. Every surgeon has a different policy as to how long they will honor their quote. In my practice, we honor quotes for 6 months. It is common for fees to increase year over year. Each year a surgeon gains more and more experience, and often times someone who is really great at facial rejuvenation for example, will specialize in that procedure and begin limiting their practice to their "specialty". The more specialized, the surgeon becomes an "expert" and can demand a higher price for his or her time. The cost of practice overhead increases year over year for staffing, disposables, rent, utilities, etc. Most surgeons pick a dollar per hour they need to make in the operating room and increase that fee by 5-10% year over year. Facility fees and anesthesia often change year over year as well.

Most of the time your quote should have a timeframe on it. In addition to increased costs all over, as you age there is simply "more work to be done". I honor quotes and will typically extend my quoted fee if there was a reason someone couldn't follow up with surgery. Hope this helps.

This is a tough question to answer as there is no right or wrong answers. I think in general surgeons honor quotes for about a year. There are many factors that go into pricing. This includes the anesthesia fees and also the facility fee. Usually the surgeon has no control over this fee and unfortunately, they always seem to be rising. Surgeons choose the fees they charge for the procedure and pre-and postoperative care. Often this can be a supply and demand response. If your surgeon is highly sought after, he or she may be able to charge higher fees. A brand-new surgeon can charge a high fee also, find out that he or she is not having patients sign up for surgery and subsequently lower fees. I think most plastic surgeons, along with professionals in all fields, would agree that five years is too long a time to honor a particular quote.

In our office, when we give quotes they are ideally honored for 1 year. We however explain this to our patients upfront so they understand our office protocol. Our quotes are only honored when signed.

Facelift prices are practice specific. As that surgeon has gained experience, the practice appears to have raised their prices. You really don't want to go to a surgeon where the price can be negotiated in my opinion. The length of time that a quote would be honored is usually stated on the written quotation, assuming that you have one. However, 3 months would be a reasonable amount of time in my opinion. You could of course politely ask if the earlier quotation could be honored, but I am doubtful that it would be given that several years have passed since it was written. Of course, as we have a free enterprise economy, you are free to seek additional consultations and other quotations that are more to your likening if you think that the price point is too high. A word of advice is don't go to a surgeon that guarantees to undercut any other quotation that you bring into the office. Caveat emptor!

Thank you for your questions. It is common for prices to change amongst all surgery disciplines. In our office, we give our patients a quote with instructions on specifically how long a quote will be honored. Most offices will give their patients 3-6 months on a quote. I hope that helps!

In our practice, we generally honor surgical price quotes for 1 year after the initial consultation. Of course, there are always exceptions and unique circumstances, but this is our standard practice.

Face Lift prices can range widely between surgeon and in different parts of the country. More experienced specialists are generally more expensive than less experienced generalists. Surgeons practicing in larger, more expensive coastal cities such as New York and Los Angeles are generally more expensive than physicians in smaller cities. Choosing a top NYC plastic surgeon in the prime of their career would likely result in very high prices as evident through your experience. All that being said you want to choose an experienced surgeon with a good reputation and someone whom you feel personally comfortable with in face to face conversation. You can find someone to fill these criteria at a variety of different price points but you may need to travel out of NYC if you want significantly lower prices.

You are going to have to vet the market yourself.... having trained in NYC, I know that a lot of the price has to do with having a Park Ave office and a certain amount of mystique....and you can’t really peg it to actual quality metrics.... that’s not to say that you won’t get a great facelift, but there are certainly many (not all) surgeons who do wonderful facelifts and if you do a bit of homework you will discover that most do not charge at that end of the spectrum... facelifts are not exceedingly complex operations, they just require finesse and meticulous technique... as long as you find the right surgeon, there will be little to no delta between 15-25k

Good luck