How we get our data

Waiting times

Every wait on this site comes from NHS England's monthly referral to treatment (RTT) statistics, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The latest file covers August 2026. NHS England publishes about two months after the month ends, so figures are always a little behind.

"Treated waits" use completed pathways: people whose treatment started that month. We add NHS England's admitted and non-admitted bands together and read off the point where half had waited (the median) and the point where 9 in 10 had waited (the 92nd percentile), spreading people evenly within each weekly band, which is NHS England's own method. "Waiting now" uses incomplete pathways, the people still waiting at the end of the month.

Small numbers

NHS England publishes no median or 92nd percentile where fewer than 20 pathways sit behind a figure. We apply one rule to every figure from the same hospital, specialty and month: if fewer than 20 people were waiting at the end of the month, or fewer than 20 were treated during it, we show nothing for that row. No band, no "within 18 weeks" percentage, no count. The row reads "Too few patients to show" instead, sits at the bottom of any ranked list, can never be tagged the shortest wait, and has no page of its own. The JSON endpoints and the MCP tools return null for every figure on such a row, with "suppressed": true and the reason. A percentage built from a handful of people would mislead more than it informs.

The data is collected by specialty, so we never show a wait for a single operation.

Source: NHS England, Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting times, monthly full CSV.

A&E

Monthly A&E figures by trust come from NHS England's A&E attendances and emergency admissions statistics, published about two weeks after the month ends. Figures for individual hospitals come from NHS England's Emergency Care Dataset performance tables, which NHS England labels experimental and which leave out sites with under 100 visits a month. "Within 4 hours" means seen, treated and then admitted, transferred or sent home within 4 hours of arrival. We do not yet show live waits.

Trend charts use every monthly RTT file from April 2024, processed the same way.

Hospitals and places

Hospital names, codes and postcodes come from NHS England Organisation Data Service (ORD API); postcodes.io (ONS Postcode Directory), under the Open Government Licence v3.0, last refreshed 2026-10-14. Independent providers are reported by site, so a hospital group appears once per hospital. Distances are straight-line miles from the middle of your council area.

What this site is not

It is not medical advice and it is not part of the NHS. Your own wait depends on what you need and how urgent it is. In an emergency call 999; for urgent help call NHS 111.