How we calculate the numbers

We use NHS England's monthly Referral to Treatment (RTT) Full CSV extract. This is the same file journalists and analysts download from NHS England's RTT page.

The file holds about 180,000 rows per month. Each row is one combination of hospital, commissioner, specialty, and pathway type.

For HospitalWaits we filter to Incomplete Pathways — patients still waiting. We group the data so each trust + specialty pair shows up once.

A note on wording: on the rest of the site we say “hospital” because that is what patients search for, but NHS England reports by NHS trust— an organisation that often runs several hospital sites. A figure shown against a “hospital” here is the trust-wide median for that specialty across all of the trust's sites, not one building. Independent providers are labelled separately.

We currently show data up to May 2026. Our refresh runs on the second Thursday of each month, about 4 days after NHS publishes.

NHS England groups wait times into weekly bands: 0–1 weeks, 1–2 weeks, and so on up to 104+ weeks. NHS England publishes a median in its provider-level workbook; the full data extract we ingest carries the week bands instead, so we compute the median from those bands and spot-check it against NHS England's published figures (April 2026, Oxford University Hospitals ENT: ours 13 weeks vs NHS-published 13.98 — we report the lower band edge, deliberately conservative).

For each trust + specialty:

1. Add up patients across all weekly bands to get the total list size
2. Count up from week 0 onwards
3. The first band where the count passes 50% of patients is the median
4. We report the lower edge of that band, to stay on the safe side

Example: 4,500 of 9,000 patients have waited 14 weeks or fewer. 5,200 have waited 15 weeks or fewer. We report the median as 14 weeks.

A GP practice may tell you a routine referral to a given department will take, say, 10 months — while this site shows a 13-week median for the same department. Both can be correct, because they measure different things.

Our median is NHS England's published RTT measure: the median time waited so far by patients currently on the list. It pools urgent and routine patients, counts waits that haven't finished yet, and is weighted towards people who joined recently. At a long-wait trust, that snapshot reads far below what a new routine referral will experience, because urgent patients move through quickly while routine patients accumulate in the tail.

What your GP quotes is usually the prospective wait to a first routine outpatient appointment — the slowest lane of that pooled queue, looking forward.

This is why trust × specialty pages also show “9 in 10 within” — the 90th percentile of the same NHS distribution, quoted as the upper edge of the band so the bound is genuinely true. For a department with a 13-week median, that figure might be 41 weeks: much closer to what a new routine referral should plan for. The % within 18 weeks figure is the fairest way to compare hospitals, because the same definition applies to all of them.

The national“9 in 10 within” figure (shown on procedure and national specialty pages) pools every provider's published NHS week-band counts — NHS trusts and independent providers alike — into one national distribution and reads the 90th percentile of it, quoted at the upper band edge. Unlike the national median (a median-of-provider-medians proxy, documented below), the pooled p90 is exact and patient-weighted.

We spot-check our computed medians against NHS England's published provider workbook. Source: NHS England RTT waiting times statistics.

NHS England publishes one median wait per hospital per specialty per month. That single number is a pool. It averages every consultant in that specialty at that hospital.

Different consultants run their own lists at very different speeds. A hospital's pooled median might be 14 weeks. But one consultant might run a day-case list at 6 days. Another may run far longer.

The wait you see on this site is the average across consultants, not what one specific consultant will give you. NHS RTT data does not break this down by consultant.

This has two practical effects:

• Your own wait depends on which consultant you get. If your GP can ask for a named consultant through the NHS e-Referral Service (e-RS), it is worth asking about.
• Right to Choose works at hospital level, not consultant level. You can pick the hospital. You cannot pick the named clinician.

Every public NHS waiting-time tool has this same catch — including NHS England's own My Planned Care. It is built into how the data is published. It is not a choice we made.

If consultant-level data ever becomes available — for example, through Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) or the NHS Data Access Request Service (DARS) — we will use it.

We flag this catch under the median on every results page rather than bury it here. Clinicians spot this first when they read hospital-level data, and they are right to.

NHS England publishes waiting times at the specialty level, not the procedure level. One median covers every patient referred to that specialty at that hospital.

“Trauma and Orthopaedic Service”, for example, rolls knee replacements, hip replacements, fracture clinic, carpal tunnel release and complex spinal surgery into a single number. These have very different real-world waits.

When you search for a specific procedure on this site (e.g. knee replacement), we route you to the specialty most likely to treat it (Trauma & Orthopaedics) and show you the specialty median — because that is the best procedure-related number that exists in the published NHS data.

Why we still show it:the specialty median is the strongest evidence available for comparing hospitals. A trust that is fast for the whole specialty tends to be fast for the procedures inside it. The reverse is not guaranteed — a fast specialty median can still hide a long wait for one specific procedure on one consultant's list (see the pooled-list catch).

What to do with this:use the specialty median to shortlist hospitals, then ask your GP at referral for a procedure-specific estimate. Your GP can ask the trust's referral coordinator how long the wait is for your procedure specifically.

We'd rather flag what this site can't do than pretend it can do everything. The most important limitations, all flagged by working NHS consultants and data specialists during the 2026 launch:

1. Wait-to-clinic is not wait-to-operation. The published RTT median rolls together everyone on the pathway from referral to first definitive treatment. For an operation (e.g. knee replacement), that pathway usually involves an outpatient clinic visit first, then the surgery booking. The number we show is the median referral-to-treatment time across the whole specialty — not specifically the wait you'll experience between clinic and operating theatre. If you're already on a consultant's list waiting only for the operation, ask the trust's waiting-list coordinator how long that segment is — it may be shorter, or much longer.
2. Upstream data quality is the ceiling. Our calculations are only as good as the RTT data NHS England publishes. Clock starts and stops, pathway validation, and consistent submission across providers are not perfect across England — and the published files themselves are large, complex, and change format occasionally. We don't re-validate the upstream data independently; we cite to the NHS England source URL on every page so you can audit any number we show. If you're an RTT validator or data-quality lead and spot a discrepancy, please email mustafa@doctor-data.co.uk.
3. We are not the only NHS waiting-times tool. NHS England runs myplannedcare.nhs.uk — the official patient-facing waiting-times portal. HospitalWaits differs in three ways: (a) we let you sort by wait + distance against multiple alternatives at once rather than looking up one hospital at a time, (b) we explicitly surface the Right-to-Choose option and auto-draft the GP letter, (c) we show every trust in England in one ranking. Use both. For a single named hospital lookup, myplannedcare is excellent.
4. Private-alternative listings are body-region matched. When you search a specific procedure (e.g. hand surgery), the “Private alternatives” section only shows listings whose advertised procedure relates to the same body region. If no editorial listing matches your body region, the section is hidden rather than show an unrelated listing. We do not have any commercial relationship with private providers in V1 — see the sponsorship policy.
5. eRS service type — Advice & Guidance vs Refer-and-Treat. Some services listed here are technically Advice-and-Guidance-only at the NHS e-Referral Service (eRS) level. A patient referred to one of these would have the referral bounced or converted to an A&G message rather than booked as treatment. The published RTT data we use counts referrals-to-treatment but does not distinguish A&G-only services from full Refer-and-Treat. Before acting on a Right-to-Choose recommendation from HospitalWaits, ask your GP to confirm in eRS that the destination service accepts referrals — not just A&G. This gap will become more important from April 2026, when A&G is set to become mandatory in many specialties. We're working on cross-referencing the eRS service catalogue to surface this directly; if you have access pathways or NHS Digital contacts who could help, please email mustafa@doctor-data.co.uk.
6. Trust eligibility rules are not always coded into eRS. Many NHS trusts apply restrictions on the patients they accept — second-opinion-only services, specific Integrated-Care-Board catchments, specific clinical indications, age restrictions, sub-specialist-only acceptance, and so on. These rules frequently appear in eRS as free text rather than in the structured decision tree, which means a referrer can technically send a patient who isn't valid for that service and the referral gets rejected later. HospitalWaits shows the trust's overall capacity from RTT data; it does not currently surface these service-level eligibility filters. If you're a GP using HW to support a Right-to-Choose conversation, check the destination service's eRS description for restrictions before sending the referral. We're grateful to a working NHS GP for surfacing this gap during the launch month; a “service eligibility” layer is on the roadmap subject to finding a credible structured-data source for the restrictions.

The Doctor Data Wait Score™is our own 1–10 score. It lets you compare a hospital's wait to the national median for that specialty, at a glance.

• 10 means much shorter than the national median (excellent).
• 5 means about the same as the national median.
• 1 means much longer (poor).

How we work it out:

diff   = (trust_median − national_median) / national_median
raw   = 5 − diff × 5    // shorter wait = better
score = clamp(round(raw), 1, 10)

Worked example (national median for hip replacement = 14 weeks):

• Hospital at 7 weeks → score 8 (Good)
• Hospital at 14 weeks → score 5 (Average)
• Hospital at 21 weeks → score 3 (Below average)
• Hospital at 28+ weeks → score 1 (Poor)

The score shows on every hospital + specialty page as the WaitScoreBadge. Click any badge to come back here.

We add up patients in bands 0 through 17 — everyone in their first 18 weeks of waiting. We divide by the total list size and round to one decimal place. This matches the NHS's own 18-week standard.

Hospital postcodes come from the NHS Organisation Data Service (ODS) API. We turn postcodes into map coordinates using postcodes.io.

We then work out the distance from your postcode to each hospital using PostgreSQL with the PostGIS extension and ST_Distance(geography, geography). This is true geographic distance — not the straight-line shortcut. We show distance in miles.

For aggregate demand statistics (which specialties get searched, from which areas) we log the postcode district only — the outward code, e.g. SW1A — never your full postcode, and never alongside any identifier. District centroids come from postcodes.io outcode data (ONS-derived, published under the Open Government Licence). Details on our privacy page.

We show the 18 NHS Treatment Function Codes (TFCs) that have real patient demand and clear names. We leave out:

• C_999 (Total) — the cross-specialty sum
• X02–X06 (Other ...) — mixed catch-all groups that would not help anyone searching for a specific procedure

Some providers in NHS England's RTT data are Independent Sector Providers (ISPs). These are private hospital groups like Nuffield Health, SpaMedica, Optegra, and Practice Plus. They hold an NHS Standard Contract to deliver specific specialties for NHS patients.

The NHS still pays the bill. The hospital itself sits outside the NHS Foundation Trust structure.

From 7 May 2026, after feedback from our consultant friend-tester Joe, we show ISPs in a separate bandbelow the NHS hospital list. They carry an “Independent — NHS contract” pill. Mixing them into one list confused two different kinds of provider. It also risked unfair framing — for example, calling a named private hospital the “slowest” in a head-to-head against NHS hospitals.

Right to Choose at ISPs: the NHS England Patient Choice Guidance 2024 says Right to Choose covers ISPs that hold a qualifying NHS Standard Contract for that procedure.

The deal is procedure- and area-specific. An ISP may hold an NHS contract for cataract surgery but not hip replacement. Or one area but not another. Ask your GP if NHS referral to that ISP is supported for your procedure in your area.

Cancer pathways are separate from Right to Choose. The 2-week-wait (2WW) / Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS) pathway is set by law as a different route from RTT. Right to Choose does not apply to the cancer pathway itself.

When someone searches a cancer-suspicion term — for example colorectal cancer or lung cancer — we still show routine surgery wait times. People already on a cancer pathway need this to compare surgical capacity across hospitals. But we add a clear banner at the top to explain the 2WW/FDS pathway. That way someone who is not yet diagnosed does not mistake routine waits for their urgent diagnostic timeline.

Private alternatives are different again.The “Private alternatives” section below NHS results lists private hospitals working outside the NHS contract route. You pay them yourself. Right to Choose does not apply. These are editorial listings only — we take no payment from them in V1.

The Scotland pages use Public Health Scotland's Stage of Treatment Waiting Times open data (monthly, roughly four weeks behind).

• Not comparable with England. Scotland measures the outpatient stage and the inpatient/day-case stageseparately (“stage of treatment”); England's RTT measures the whole referral-to-treatment pathway. We never place the two side by side.
• Medians are “waits so far”of people still on the list at month end (ongoing waits) — half have already waited longer than the median. “9 in 10 within” is the 90th percentile of the same distribution.
• No Right to Choose.Scotland has no equivalent of England's legal right to pick an alternative provider, so these pages inform conversations — they do not suggest switching boards.
• “Not published” means PHS withheld or qualified the figure. It never means zero.

The Wales pages use the Welsh Government's StatsWales referral-to-treatment open data (monthly, roughly seven weeks behind).

• Not comparable with England.Welsh open pathways include therapy and diagnostic stages that England's RTT counts differently, and the specialty taxonomy differs. We never place a Welsh median beside an English one.
• Published directly, not derived. Wales publishes the median and 90th-percentile wait itself, in decimal weeks. We ingest those figures unchanged rather than estimating them from banded counts.
• Open pathways are patients still waiting at month end — half have already waited longer than the median. Welsh targets are 95% within 26 weeks and 100% within 36 weeks.
• No Right to Choose.Wales has no equivalent of England's legal right to pick an alternative provider, so these pages inform conversations — they do not suggest switching health boards.
• “Not published”means the figure was withheld or suppressed at source. It never means zero. The “South East Wales Region” pseudo-provider in the source data is excluded because it partially overlaps the health boards.

The Talking Therapies pages use NHS England's NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics (published ~6 weeks after each month ends). Figures are per provider, England-wide.

• “Median referral → treatment” is NHS England's published median days from referral to starting a course of treatment among people who accessed the service that month (Median_WaitAccessingServices).
• The 6-week and 18-week percentagesuse the national standard's own basis: of the people who finished a course of treatment in the month, the share who had started within 6 (standard: 75%) and 18 (standard: 95%) weeks of referral. Because this counts finishers, it can look healthier than the experience of people still waiting — which is why we show the median and the waiting-list count alongside it.
• “Too few to report” means NHS England suppressed the number to protect privacy (small counts). It never means zero, and we never render it as 0.
• The area findermaps your postcode to your NHS sub-ICB (via postcodes.io) and lists providers with recorded patient activity for that area in the latest month. Providers whose local activity was entirely suppressed don't appear — the NHS service finder (linked on the page) is always the complete directory.
• Provider figures are provider-wide medians — a provider serving several areas reports one national figure, so local experience may differ.
• We deliberately do not rank services by recovery rate: recovery percentages depend heavily on case mix, and ranking on them would mislead.

Trust pages show an “A&E pressure” block built from NHS England's Monthly A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions statistics. These are monthly published figures, not live queue times — they indicate how pressured a department has been, never how long you personally would wait tonight. In an emergency call 999; if unsure, call 111.

• “Seen within 4 hours (A&E)” is the Type 1 measure — major, consultant-led emergency departments — computed exactly as NHS England does: (Type 1 + booked Type 1 attendances minus their over-4-hour attendances) ÷ (Type 1 + booked Type 1). Booked appointments are included because NHS England's own headline includes them.
• “12+ hour waits for a bed”is the published count of patients who waited more than 12 hours from a decision to admit to admission (“trolley waits”). It undercounts total time in A&E — the clock starts at the decision to admit, not arrival.
• Attendancessum all department types (Type 1 major A&E, Type 2 specialty, Type 3 urgent treatment centres/minor injury units, and booked appointments) across the trust.
• Where we ever cite “emergency admissions”, we count admissions via A&E only. NHS England's headline additionally includes admissions arriving by other routes, so its number is larger.
• Trusts running only urgent treatment centres or minor injury units (no major A&E) show no pressure block — the measure would not describe them.
• Why not live waits?A handful of trusts publish live feeds; most don't, live figures break silently, and a live queue length still can't tell you your wait (triage priority decides that). We show the complete official monthly record for every trust instead, and say plainly what it is.

• The national median is a proxy.Three different national calculations exist on this site, and we'd rather name them than blur them. (1) The headline national median (national pages, procedure pages, this page's worked examples) is the median of each provider's median — a rough stand-in, not patient-weighted. (2) The dashed national line on hospital × specialty trend charts is the mean of provider medians— a third basis, kept for chart continuity. (3) The national “9 in 10 within” figure is patient-weighted — we sum the weekly bands across all providers (how that works). Unifying all three on the patient-weighted basis is future work; until then, small differences between them are expected and are not errors.
• CQC ratings and Friends & Family Test scores are coming in V1.1.
• 27 of 538 providers in the dataset have no postcode in ODS. We leave them out of distance-based search.
• The Independent Sector flag uses a rough ods_code prefix rule. About 40 may be labelled wrong. We plan to use the proper ODS role data in V1.1.

The data on this site is usually 6 to 8 weeks behind real time. That is how the NHS publication schedule works.

Your own wait may be very different from the median we show. It can change with how urgent your case is, how busy the hospital is, and other factors.

Yes. Our data pipeline is written in Python and lives in a private GitHub repo.

We plan to open-source the code after launch. If you want access now to research or check the numbers, please contact Mustafa.