How to find out NHS waiting times

There is no single number called “your NHS waiting time.” The wait depends on three things: the specialtyyou're referred to (e.g. cardiology, T&O), the hospital doing your first outpatient appointment, and the date your GP made the referral (the RTT clock-start). Once you know all three, you can look up the most recent published median wait and get a realistic estimate of how much longer you have left.

The fastest free way: search by postcode and specialty on the tool below, then compare hospitals near you.

Search NHS waits near you →

When to use it: you know the specialty you need (or are referred to) and want to see which hospital near you has the shortest wait.

How to use it: on the HospitalWaits homepage, type your postcode, pick the specialty, and submit. The results page ranks every NHS hospital in England by median wait for that specialty, with distance from your postcode and CQC ratings visible.

You can also browse by specialty, hospital A–Z, or specific procedure (e.g. knee replacement, cataract surgery).

Source the data comes from: the NHS England monthly Referral-to-Treatment (RTT) release. We update within 24 hours of each release.

When to use it: you want the raw source, want to look at trends over many months, or are a researcher / journalist.

How to use it: visit the NHS England RTT statistics page. Each month NHS England publishes a set of CSVs and an Excel workbook with waits for every trust and every specialty. The file you usually want is the “Provider-level” Excel.

What the NHS official page says: these are the only authoritative figures. They cover consultant-led referrals only (community physio, district-nurse services, and many mental-health services are reported in separate data sets).

Drawback: the workbooks are large, the tabs are not labelled in plain English, and you have to translate Treatment Function Codes (TFCs) to specialty names yourself. HospitalWaits does that translation for you.

When to use it:you've been referred and already know which hospital you've been sent to.

How to use it: go to myplannedcare.nhs.uk, pick your trust, then pick the specialty. NHS England updates this site with the typical wait for new referrals at each provider. Some trusts also publish their long-waiter breakdown (% over 52 weeks, % over 65 weeks, etc.).

What it does well: shows the typical wait for your hospital quickly, and its postcode search can compare average waits at hospitals near you.

What it doesn't do:rank every hospital in England on one screen, show how a hospital's wait has trended month by month, or help you act on a faster option. HospitalWaits does all three — including generating the GP letter to switch under Right to Choose.

When to use it:you're already on a waiting list and want to know how much of your wait is behind you (not ahead).

How to use it:at your next GP appointment, or via your GP's reception, ask: “What date was my RTT clock started for the [specialty] referral?” Combine that with the median wait at your hospital (from Method 1) to estimate how much longer you have. If you've already waited longer than the published median, raise it with your GP or call the hospital's booking team.

Why this matters: the RTT clock measures from the day the referral was received by the hospital, not from the day your symptoms started. Many patients over-estimate their wait because they count from symptom onset. The official clock is shorter.

When to use it:your local hospital has a wait that's longer than what you can tolerate, and a different hospital nearby has a meaningfully shorter wait.

How to use it: under the NHS Constitution, every patient in England has the legal right to choose any NHS hospital that offers their treatment, for their first outpatient appointment. You can ask your GP to refer you to a different hospital — they should do this via the NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS).

How to make the ask: use the free GP letter generator to print a pre-filled letter with the hospital you've chosen. Take it to your GP appointment. See the full guide on Right to Choose.

Caveat: switching restarts your wait at the new hospital. It is only worth doing if the new hospital is meaningfully faster than your remaining wait. Use Method 1 to compare before you switch.

The RTT release covers referral-to-treatment for consultant-led outpatient care. Diagnostic tests (MRI, CT, ultrasound, endoscopy, audiology, sleep studies, etc.) are tracked in a separate monthly release called DM01. NHS England publishes DM01 at the same cadence as RTT. If your GP has ordered a scan, the wait you care about is the DM01 wait at the imaging unit, not the RTT wait at the outpatient clinic.

HospitalWaits surfaces DM01 waits where we have the data — see the methodology page for details and limits.

Several NHS services do not publish RTT waits because they are not consultant-led:

• Community physiotherapy — usually self-referral or GP-referred to a community team, not consultant-led.
• NHS dentistry — separate access data set.
• NHS GP appointments — primary care, separate.
• NHS mental health (most pathways) — tracked via the Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS) and the NHS Talking Therapies (IAPT) returns, not RTT.
• Maternity — tracked separately via NHS England maternity data.

For those services, ask your GP, your trust's referral team, or check the relevant NHS Digital data set. We don't fake numbers we don't have.

• NHS England — Referral-to-Treatment (RTT) statistics
• NHS My Planned Care
• NHS England — DM01 diagnostic waits
• NHS England — Patient Choice guidance
• How HospitalWaits calculates median waits, distances, and trends (methodology)