NHS waiting times explained
Reviewed 27 July 2026 · HospitalCheck editorial
Most of the waiting-time figures on this site come from Referral to Treatment (RTT)statistics — the NHS's main measure of how long people wait for planned hospital care. Here is what the terms mean.
The waiting-time clock
Your RTT “clock” starts when a hospital receives your referral (usually from a GP) and stops when your treatment begins — or when it's agreed you don't need treatment. The time in between is your waiting time. People who are still waiting are counted on incomplete pathways, which is the basis for the headline figures shown here.
The 18-week standard
The NHS constitution says at least 92% of patientsshould wait no more than 18 weeks from referral to the start of treatment. When a hospital profile shows “68% within 18 weeks”, it means just over two-thirds of people on that trust's waiting list had been waiting 18 weeks or less. Almost no trust currently meets the 92% standard.
Median wait
The medianis the midpoint: half of waiting patients have waited less than it, half longer. It's a better guide to a “typical” wait than an average, which a few very long waits can distort. We calculate it from the weekly waiting bands exactly as NHS England does.
52-week (year-long) waits
The count of people waiting more than 52 weeks — a full year — is a key pressure signal. These waits had almost disappeared before the pandemic and rose sharply afterwards. We also track 65- and 78-week waits.
Two things to keep in mind
- Figures are per trust, not per building.NHS England publishes waiting times for the whole trust, so every hospital run by a trust shows the same numbers — we always label these “Trust-wide”.
- Waits vary a lot by specialty.A trust's overall figure hides big differences between, say, orthopaedics and dermatology — check the by-specialty table on the trust page.
See any hospital profile or the league tables for the latest figures, or the RTT methodology for exactly how we calculate them.
Figures are from NHS England's Referral to Treatment statistics, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. HospitalCheck is independent and not affiliated with the NHS.