Methodology

Waiting times

Every wait 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.

Treated wait uses 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 (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. A band such as "9 to 17 weeks" runs from the median to the 92nd percentile.

Waiting list totals count pathways, so a person waiting for two things is counted twice. NHS England's headline figure is calculated the same way.

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.

The row reads "Too few patients to show", 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.

The data is collected by specialty, so we never show a wait for a single operation. Trend charts use every monthly RTT file from April 2024, processed the same way.

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

Scans and tests

Diagnostic waits come from NHS England's monthly diagnostics (DM01) file: the people waiting for each test at each provider, and the share who had waited over six weeks. The standard is that fewer than 1 in 100 wait over six weeks.

A provider is listed only with 20 or more people waiting for that test.

When we update

We check NHS England for new files every morning; the last check was 19 October 2026, and every source line on the site shows that date. RTT figures appear on the second Thursday of the month, about six weeks after the month they describe; the next release is expected on 12 November 2026.

A&E figures are monthly too, about two weeks after the month ends; the latest cover September 2026. When a new file appears, the whole site is rebuilt from it the same morning.

NHS England's release days for the rest of 2026/27, each a Thursday at 9.30am: 12 November, 10 December, 14 January, 11 February and 11 March.

Every source line says how often its figure changes: Live (a trust's own wait, read every ten minutes), Weekly (My Planned Care) or Latest monthly (NHS England's statistics), then the month it covers and the day we last checked. When the next release is more than two weeks late, the line says "older than expected".

A&E

Monthly A&E figures by trust come from NHS England's A&E attendances and emergency admissions statistics. They cover every A&E a trust runs, so the trust trend on a department page is the whole trust.

Figures for individual departments come from NHS England's Emergency Care Dataset (ECDS) performance tables, which NHS England labels experimental and which leave out sites with under 100 visits a month. Those sites show "No figure".

Seen within 4 hours means seen, treated and then admitted, transferred or sent home within 4 hours of arrival. The standard is 78% for this year, rising towards the NHS Constitution's 95%.

A main (type 1) A&E is consultant-led and open 24 hours, every day. Specialist units (eye, dental) treat one kind of problem only and keep their own hours.

Ambulance response times come from NHS England's Ambulance Quality Indicators and cover the whole ambulance service area, not one hospital. The England figures beside them are the national averages for the same measures.

Live waits

Some trusts publish a live A&E wait on their own websites. We read each one every ten minutes and show the figures together; everything else on the site is monthly.

Each trust publishes its own measure, usually the longest wait for people whose condition is not urgent, or the number of people waiting. Everyone is assessed soon after arriving and seen in order of urgency, so a serious condition is seen well inside the published wait.

Pages carry the figure as captured in the daily snapshot, with its capture time, and refresh it in the browser every two minutes. A figure older than an hour is hidden and last month's share seen within 4 hours shown instead. Labels: short is under 2 hours, moderate 2 to 4 hours, long over 4 hours.

The wait by hour chart averages the published waits we have recorded for each hour of the day since 14 October 2026. It appears once a week of readings exists and says how many days it covers; nothing is modelled.

Distances and travel

Distances are straight-line miles from the middle of your council area, or from the department itself on its own page. Travel times are estimates: straight-line distance with a third added for roads, at 25 miles an hour. No routing service is used.

"Wait plus travel" adds the published wait to that estimate so a closer busy A&E and a further quiet one can be compared. Open sites come before closed ones; a site with no live wait is placed by travel time alone.

Urgent care, phone numbers and opening hours

Urgent treatment centres, minor injury units and walk-in centres come from NHS England's ECDS performance workbook (a site with all-type figures but no type 1 or 2 figures is a type 3 unit) and the NHS Organisation Data Service register of trust sites, with addresses from the same register. All Open Government Licence v3.0.

Phone numbers, A&E opening times and facilities for hospitals come from the NHS website (www.nhs.uk), where each trust supplies and confirms its own entry; that content is released under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (NHS website terms, section 3.3).

For urgent care units we use the NHS website's service directory where a listing matches the unit's name and postcode, and otherwise OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database Licence). Every hours or phone figure names which of those it came from.

"Open now" is worked out in your browser from those hours and is only as good as the listing; bank holidays may differ. NHS 111 can book you in.

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 2026-10-19. Independent providers are reported by site, so a hospital group appears once per hospital.

A few source names are corrected for display (typos, missing apostrophes, abbreviations); the slug and URL never change.

Paying privately

Private pages list independent hospitals within 25 miles that report the specialty to NHS England, nearest first, with the NHS wait each one reports. Nothing paid affects the order.

A price shown beside a hospital is that hospital's own published self-pay price, checked by hand, with the month it was checked. Guide ranges run from the 10th to the 90th percentile of those published prices in England. Private waits are what hospitals claim, not measured. Prices and claims over nine months old are hidden. A written quote from the hospital is the only figure to rely on.

Privacy of what you type

Postcodes, places and dates you type are matched on your own device. Nothing you type is sent to us, and "Use my location" works the same way.

What this site is not

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