12-hour A&E waits are up 28% in a year — what NHS England's own data shows, hospital by hospital

In June 2026, 49,466 patients in England waited more than 12 hours in A&E for a bed after a doctor had already decided to admit them. A year earlier, the same month's figure was 38,683.

That is a 28% rise in a year — and it is happening in summer. These are the months when emergency departments are supposed to catch their breath before winter.

This article explains where those numbers come from, what they do and don't mean, and how to see the figures for your own local hospital.

Where the numbers come from

NHS England publishes a monthly dataset called A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions — every trust with a major A&E, every month, freely downloadable. We ingest it the day it's published and verify our totals against NHS England's own statistical commentary before anything appears on this site. June 2026's headline figures reconcile exactly.

Three numbers matter:

• Attendances — how many people came through the doors. England, June 2026: about 2.44 million across all department types.
• Seen within 4 hours — the constitutional standard. For major (Type 1) A&E departments in June 2026: 61.2% of patients were admitted, transferred or discharged within 4 hours. The standard says 95%. It was last met nationally in July 2015.
• 12-hour waits from decision to admit — the "trolley wait": the clock starts when a clinician decides you need a hospital bed, and stops when you get one. This is the number that rose 28% year on year.

That last definition matters more than people realise. The 12-hour clock starts at the decision to admit — not when you walked in. Someone counted in that 49,466 may have already spent six hours in the waiting room before their clock even started. The published figure understates total time in the department, by design of the measure — a point NHS England itself acknowledges.

The spread between hospitals is the real story

National averages hide the same thing in emergency care that they hide in planned care. In June 2026, of the 121 English trusts with a major A&E:

• 14 trusts saw fewer than half of their A&E patients within 4 hours.
• The trust with the most 12-hour waits recorded 2,391 in a single month — while several trusts recorded fewer than ten.
• Adjusted for size, the starkest figure belongs to a mid-sized trust where roughly 1 in 12 attendances ended in a 12-hour wait for a bed.

The differences are not explained by size alone — some of England's biggest departments run above-average 4-hour performance, and some smaller ones run the longest trolley waits. Bed availability in the hospital behind the A&E, and social-care capacity behind that, drive most of it.

What these figures are for — and what they are not for

Be careful with this data. Three honest rules:

1. It is not a live queue. Everything above describes a published month, not tonight. A handful of trusts publish their own live waiting-time pages — where they exist, our hospital pages link to them directly, so you get the live number from the hospital itself.
2. It is not triage advice. In an emergency, call 999 — the ambulance service takes you where you need to go, and clinical urgency, not averages, decides how fast any individual is seen. For minor injuries, an urgent treatment centre is usually faster than any A&E; 111.nhs.uk will route you.
3. It is accountability data. If your relative waited 16 hours on a trolley, the published figures tell you whether that was an outlier or that hospital's pattern — which is exactly what a PALS complaint, an MP letter, or a journalist's question needs.

See your own hospital

Every English trust with a major A&E now has a page on this site showing its monthly 4-hour performance, 12-hour waits (with the year-on-year change), attendances, a 12-month trend, and how it ranks nationally — with every figure linked to NHS England's source file:

Find your nearest A&E departments and their figures →

The data updates monthly, about five weeks after each month ends. If a hospital's pressure figures look bad, remember what they usually mean: not a failing A&E team, but a full hospital behind it.