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From two days for a guard to twelve for a long span — the schedule a lab quotes, item by item.
The single crown is the baseline: 5-7 working days end to end. Inside that week sit roughly one day of CAD design, 30-45 minutes of milling on a 5-axis wet miller, one 6-8 hour sintering cycle and about half a day of quality control. The machine is never the bottleneck; the queue and the checks are.
Bridges scale with span. A 4-unit zirconia bridge is quoted at 6-8 working days; a 6- or 7-unit span at 8-12. The extra days are design time and the longer, more conservative sintering schedules that big frameworks demand.
Full-arch zirconia bridges and immediate-load full-arch cases are quoted at 5-10 working days. The range is wide because the verification burden is wide: these cases succeed or fail on the records sent at intake.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
Night guards and bite splints are the fastest line in the lab at 2-5 working days — digitised, then printed or vacuum-formed. The classic delay appears before manufacture even starts: a hard full-arch guard needs about 2.5-3 mm of occlusal room, and existing restorations must be checked for that clearance before the impression.
PFM and full-metal work is the slow lane at 1-2 weeks, because casting a Ni-Cr or titanium coping and firing porcelain in 3-4 cycles at roughly 700-1,000 °C cannot be compressed the way a mill-and-sinter workflow can.
Two schedule items deserve their own line. A documented fit-check appointment adds 7-10 days on a 3-unit bridge but catches fit errors before the seat; and when a lab's remake rate climbs above roughly 5% of crown volume, the lost days usually trace to preparation or margin problems upstream, not to the bench. Material choice interacts with every one of these schedules — see the materials comparison page.
Further reading