Cataract surgery: the 1-week providers, the 17-week trusts — and the free NHS route most patients are never told about

Cataract surgery is the most common operation in England — and right now 626,320 patient pathways are waiting for ophthalmology (NHS England's monthly RTT publication, latest month, all providers reporting), more than any other specialty. The live provider-by-provider figures update on this site every month. If you're one of them, or waiting to be referred, there is one fact that changes everything and that most patients are never told:

The fastest cataract providers in England are running median waits of 1–3 weeks, they are free on the NHS, and you have a legal right to be referred to them.

The gap, in the NHS's own numbers

Every month NHS England publishes waiting-time data for every provider treating NHS ophthalmology patients — 344 of them in the latest month. We load that file and rank it. The spread for eye care is the widest on the site:

• At the fast end: 1–3 week medians at dozens of providers — Practice Plus Group's Plymouth hospital at ~1 week, its Portsmouth surgical centre at ~2, SpaMedica sites across the country (Preston, Blackpool, Swindon, Colchester, Bexhill and more) at ~3 weeks.
• At the slow end: 16–17 week medians at some large NHS trusts — with thousands of people in each queue (one trust has ~6,800 waiting at a 16-week median, another ~4,400 at 17).

Same NHS funding. Same surgery. A four-month difference depending on where your referral goes.

The part nobody explains: those fast providers are NHS care

The 1–3-week providers at the top of our ophthalmology rankings are mostly independent sector providers working under NHS contract — SpaMedica, Practice Plus Group, Newmedica and others. For an NHS patient, treatment there is:

• Free — funded by the NHS exactly like a hospital trust,
• Regulated — CQC-inspected like any NHS provider, with ratings shown on our pages,
• Yours to choose — under the NHS's legal Right to Choose, you can ask at the point of GP referral to be sent to any provider in England that holds an NHS contract for that care.

This matters because cataracts are exactly the case Right to Choose was designed for: a planned, high-volume, well-standardised operation where the queue you join is decided by a referral form.

Two honest caveats. First, choice applies at the point of referral — if you're already deep in one hospital's queue, switching means asking your GP to re-refer, which restarts the clock and is only worth it when the gap is large (for eye care, it often is). Second, complex eyes — very high prescriptions, other eye disease — may genuinely need a hospital eye service; your GP or optometrist will say so.

"Should I just pay privately?"

Search for cataract waits and you'll mostly find pages built to sell you a £2,000–£3,500 per eye self-pay operation. Sometimes that's a reasonable choice — we list a small number of verified self-pay prices ourselves, clearly labelled, for people who want that option.

But it should be your third option, not your first. In order:

1. Check the NHS wait where you'd actually be treated — compare every provider's ophthalmology median. Your local trust might be a 4-week trust, not a 17-week one.
2. Use your Right to Choose — if your area's wait is long, a 2–3-week NHS-funded provider may take your referral. Our GP letter generator drafts the request for you.
3. Then consider paying — knowing exactly what wait you'd be paying to avoid, which is the only way a £2,500-per-eye decision makes sense.

See it for your own postcode

Enter your postcode and "cataracts" on our homepage search to see every NHS provider near you ranked by wait and distance — NHS trusts and NHS-funded independent providers together, each linked to its NHS source data and CQC rating.

Every figure above comes from NHS England's monthly Referral to Treatment publication (latest month, ophthalmology, providers with 50+ patients waiting; medians are the published lower band edge). Methodology, including how we treat independent-sector providers, is documented in full here. We have no commercial relationship with any provider named in this article.