Waiting List Minimum Data Set (WLMDS)
Published by NHS England · Official source
Update schedule
- Weekly figures; NHS England republishes the collated series roughly monthly.
Level of detail
- England national (with demographic breakdowns)
What we show
- The total number of people waiting to start NHS consultant-led treatment in England, each week since September 2021
- The split by waiting-time band: within 18 weeks, 18–52 weeks, and over 52 weeks
- A breakdown by age group and sex
Caveats
- WLMDS is a WEEKLY management submission from providers — a weekly-granular national series, measured slightly differently from the monthly Referral to Treatment (RTT) figures shown on hospital and trust pages. The two will not match exactly: RTT is the official monthly count (with estimates for non-submitting providers); WLMDS is the raw weekly submission. We show WLMDS only as the national picture, never mixed into per-hospital figures.
- National figures here are the sum across the age breakdown, which covers the whole list.
- We publish only the national totals and the age/sex/band splits; the source also carries provider, specialty, ethnicity and deprivation cuts we do not currently surface (deprivation shows no meaningful gradient in long waits).
- The most recent week is provisional and is revised in later releases.
Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.