Press and data

This month in one line each

• 7,158,164 people were waiting for planned NHS hospital care in England at the end of August 2026, up 26,479 on the month before.
• The biggest fall in the median wait at a large NHS trust was at Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, from 13.8 to 12.9 weeks.
• The biggest rise was at Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust, from 9.5 to 10.6 weeks.
• 359,314 people were waiting for an MRI scan in August 2026; 22% had waited over six weeks against a standard of under 1%.
• Ambulances in England reached life-threatening calls in 8 minutes on average in September 2026, and serious calls such as stroke in 31 minutes.

Waiting list figures to August 2026; next NHS England release 12 November 2026. Source: NHS England, Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting times, monthly full CSV.

Local angles

Every council area has a page ranking the hospitals within 25 miles for each specialty, with the shortest wait first: /area/<council>/<specialty>. Every trust has a page with the trend over 24 months. The this month page lists the trusts whose waits moved most.

Data downloads

• Any page's figures as JSON: add /api in front of the path, for example /api/specialty/cardiology.json or /api/tests/mri-scan.json. OpenAPI description.
• Live A&E waits, read every ten minutes from the trusts' own pages (UHCW (University Hospital Coventry), University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust, Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust, Leighton, Birmingham and Midland Eye Centre and Midland Metropolitan, MKUH (Milton Keynes), UHB (Good Hope and Heartlands), Warrington, Hereford County, NCIC (Cumberland Infirmary and West Cumberland), RCH (Treliske)): feed, with hourly history per source.
• For AI assistants and agents: an MCP server at https://checkwaitingtimes-mcp.earljoey0.workers.dev/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key) with eight tools over the same figures, and llms.txt explaining how to read and cite them.
• Embed the live A&E panel on your own site with an iframe: <iframe src="https://checkwaitingtimes.co.uk/embed/live-ae" title="Live A&E waits" width="100%" height="420" loading="lazy"></iframe>. Add ?trusts=RKB,RJE to limit it to particular trusts (ODS codes).

For NHS trusts and ambulance services

If your trust publishes a live A&E wait on its own website, we can read it and show it here with a link back, as we already do for 11 trusts. If you would rather send figures directly, a small JSON feed is enough; there is no contract and no charge. Corrections to any figure are made within a working day: email the page link and the right number.

Method and contact

About the data. Questions: hello@checkwaitingtimes.co.uk.