NHS England statistics: waiting lists, A&E, cancer, ambulances and GPs
NHS England statistics are the official monthly figures on how the health service in England is performing, covering hospital waiting lists, A&E, cancer treatment, ambulance response times and diagnostic tests. NHS England Digital, the former NHS Digital, publishes workforce counts, GP appointment data and patient registrations. Fact-checkers use them to test claims about waiting lists, missed targets and staff numbers in England, which differ in definition from the figures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
What it publishes
- Consultant-led referral to treatment (RTT) waiting times: the number of incomplete pathways, waits beyond 18, 52, 65, 78 and 104 weeks, median waits, and clock starts and stops, by provider, commissioner and specialty.
- A&E attendances and emergency admissions by department type, with the share of patients admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours and waits of more than 4 and 12 hours from decision to admit.
- Cancer waiting times against the 28-day Faster Diagnosis Standard and the 31-day and 62-day treatment standards, by provider, commissioner and cancer type.
- Ambulance Quality Indicators: call volumes, mean and 90th centile response times for Categories 1 to 4, handover-related measures and clinical outcome indicators such as cardiac arrest survival.
- Waiting times and activity for 15 key diagnostic tests, including MRI, CT, non-obstetric ultrasound, endoscopy and echocardiography, with the share waiting six weeks or more.
- Monthly NHS workforce statistics for hospital and community health services staff from the Electronic Staff Record, plus separate general practice and primary care network workforce series.
- Appointments in General Practice, counting booked appointments by mode, health professional type, time from booking and attendance status.
- Supporting series such as bed availability and occupancy, patients registered at a GP practice and NHS vacancy statistics.
Key datasets
- Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting times
Monthly consultant-led elective waiting list for England by trust, integrated care board and specialty, with annual files back to 2011-12 and a national time series from 2007. Measured against the NHS Constitution standard that 92% of incomplete pathways wait under 18 weeks.
- A&E attendances and emergency admissions
Attendances by Type 1 (major), Type 2 and Type 3 (minor injury and urgent treatment) departments, four-hour performance against the 95% standard, and decision-to-admit waits over 4 and 12 hours, by trust, with a monthly England time series.
- Cancer waiting times
Performance against the 28-day Faster Diagnosis Standard and the 31-day and 62-day combined standards introduced in 2023, by provider, commissioner and tumour type. Monthly figures are provisional and are later finalised.
- Ambulance Quality Indicators (AmbSYS and AmbCO)
Response times by category for each ambulance service in England, with a CSV and spreadsheet time series from 2017 under the Ambulance Response Programme, and clinical outcome indicators published with a longer lag.
- Diagnostic waiting times and activity (DM01)
Waiting list size, six-week waits and activity for 15 key tests by provider and commissioner, with data from January 2006. The operational standard is that under 1% wait six weeks or more.
- NHS Workforce Statistics
Headcount and full-time equivalent hospital and community health services staff employed by NHS trusts and other NHS bodies in England, by staff group, with leavers and joiners. Excludes general practice.
- General Practice Workforce
GPs, nurses, direct patient care and admin staff in practices in England as headcount and FTE, with fully qualified GPs shown separately from GPs in training. Snapshots are taken on the last day of each month.
- Appointments in General Practice
Appointments recorded in practice and PCN systems in England by mode, staff type, booking-to-appointment time and attendance, at national, ICB and sub-ICB level. Covers almost all practices but only what is recorded in appointment systems.
- Patients Registered at a GP Practice
Registered patient list sizes by practice, age and sex in England, useful as a denominator for patients-per-GP calculations.
- Bed availability and occupancy
Average available and occupied consultant-led overnight beds by sector (general and acute, maternity, learning disability, mental illness) for each NHS provider in England, from the KH03 return. Critical care beds are reported separately.
APIs and downloads
- NHS England statistical work area downloadsEach work area page links to XLSX and CSV files, including full CSV extracts for RTT and a CSV time series for ambulance indicators. No API key is needed. The site uses a bot check, so automated downloads may be challenged.
- NHS England Digital publicationsEach publication page offers CSV and XLSX files and often a dashboard. No API key is needed; the site uses a bot check that can block scripted access.
- My Planned CarePatient-facing site showing average waits by hospital and specialty from the Waiting List Minimum Data Set, updated weekly. Not an official statistics release and no bulk download.
When it publishes
Most NHS England performance statistics (RTT, A&E, cancer, ambulance and diagnostics) are published together at 9:30am on the second Thursday of each month, with occasional exceptions listed in the 12-month calendar. A&E and ambulance data cover the previous month, while RTT, cancer and diagnostics data run about two months behind. NHS England Digital workforce and GP appointment releases follow their own dates in the publications calendar, usually in the second half of the month. NHS England is being brought into the Department of Health and Social Care, so some addresses may change.
How to use it to check a claim
- For a waiting list claim, open the latest RTT statistical press notice and check whether the figure is total incomplete pathways, the estimated number of unique patients, or the number waiting over a threshold such as 52 weeks.
- Note whether national RTT totals include NHS England's estimates for trusts that did not submit data that month; the press notice lists non-submitting trusts and the overview time series includes the estimates.
- For A&E claims, check whether the four-hour figure covers all department types or Type 1 only, as Type 1 performance is much lower than the all-types figure.
- For 12-hour A&E waits, confirm whether the claim refers to waits from decision to admit (the long-running trolley wait measure) or total time in the department from arrival, which comes from the Emergency Care Data Set, is published as a separate supplementary analysis and gives much higher counts.
- For cancer claims, name the standard: 28-day Faster Diagnosis, 31-day or 62-day. Then check whether the month quoted is still provisional, because final figures replace provisional ones in later releases.
- For GP numbers, check whether the claim uses headcount or full-time equivalent, all GPs or fully qualified GPs (excluding trainees), and whether locum FTE has been finalised.
- Compare like months year on year rather than month to month, as A&E, GP appointments and GP workforce figures have seasonal patterns, including the August intake of GP trainees.
- Use the provider and commissioner files to test local claims, and record the data period and the publication date you used.
Common mistakes
- RTT figures count pathways, not people. Some patients wait on more than one pathway; NHS England's own estimate from the Waiting List Minimum Data Set puts unique patients at around 85 for every 100 pathways in mid-2026.
- The NHS Constitution standards, such as 92% within 18 weeks and 95% within four hours, differ from the interim goals in yearly planning guidance, which are often lower. A claim that a target was met or missed needs the specific threshold and year named.
- Changes to recording rules create breaks in series, including the removal of community service pathways from RTT from February 2024 and the 2023 move to three cancer standards.
- Appointments in General Practice records booked appointments in practice systems; NHS England Digital says it should not be used to infer total GP workload.
- My Planned Care shows mean waits for patients currently waiting at a hospital for planned care and excludes cancer. It is a patient information service and differs from the RTT official statistics.
- All of these series cover England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland publish their own figures using different targets and definitions.
How long is the NHS waiting list in England?
The figure is published monthly in NHS England's Referral to Treatment statistics, usually on the second Thursday of the month. The headline counts incomplete pathways for consultant-led care at the end of the month, so it counts waits rather than individual patients. The same press notice gives an estimate of unique patients, the median wait and the number waiting more than 18, 52 and 104 weeks.
What is the A&E four-hour target in England?
The NHS Constitution standard is that 95% of patients attending A&E are admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours of arrival. NHS England's monthly A&E release reports performance for all departments and for major (Type 1) departments separately. The standard has not been met nationally for several years, and planning guidance has set lower interim goals, so check which benchmark a claim refers to.
Where do official GP numbers for England come from?
NHS England Digital publishes General Practice Workforce statistics monthly, with a snapshot on the last day of each month. Tables show GPs as headcount and full-time equivalent, and split fully qualified GPs from GP registrars in training and locums. Staff employed by primary care networks, such as clinical pharmacists, are published in a separate Primary Care Network Workforce series.
Is NHS Digital still the source for these figures?
NHS Digital merged into NHS England in February 2023. Its statistics continue under the name NHS England Digital and still sit on digital.nhs.uk, while NHS England's performance statistics sit on england.nhs.uk. Citations should name the organisation shown on the release page and the publication date.
Questions answered using this source
- How long is the NHS waiting list?
- How many GPs are there in England?
- How long are A&E waiting times?
- What are ambulance response times in England?
- How many staff work for the NHS?
- How do I check NHS waiting times for my hospital?
- What are the NHS cancer waiting times?
- Is the NHS waiting list coming down?
Links checked 2026-10-13. This page describes what the source publishes and gives no verdict on any claim.