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 hospital + specialty pair shows up once.

We currently show data up to March 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. They do not publish the median, so we work it out.

For each hospital + 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.

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.

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.

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.

• National-average trend lineon hospital × specialty pages shows the average of each hospital's median (a rough stand-in). The true national median, weighted by patient count, needs us to add up weekly bands across all hospitals. We plan this for V1.1.
• 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.