Hospitals: Waiting Lists
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Answer of 29 April 2026 to Question 82312 on Hospitals: Waiting Lists, what were the monthly figures for October 2025 to April 2026.
Answered by Karin Smyth
Over 85% of removals from the Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting list are recorded as completed pathways. This includes patients starting their first definitive treatment, starting a period of active monitoring, a clinical decision not to treat, or a patient declining a treatment.
The remaining 15% are known as unreported removals, capturing data not submitted in completed pathways. They can reflect issues with timing (such as activity happening at the very end of the month), reporting, and data quality, as well as certain instances where patients are removed from the waiting list through validation because they no longer need to be treated.
It is the record levels of elective activity being delivered by National Health Service staff that is now getting the waiting list down. Completed pathways were 5.9% higher in the 21 months from July 2024 to March 2025 (around 1.54 million per month) than in the previous 21 months from October 2022 to June 2024 (around 1.45 million per month).
Across the same periods, and in all recent years, unreported removals have remained relatively constant proportions of all removals and are now lower (14.4% on average since July 2024) than before the pandemic (approximately 17%).
The requested data has been provided in the table below, taken from the monthly Referral to Treatment (RTT) Waiting Times publication.
Year | Month | Completed Pathways | Unreported Removals | Total Removals | Unreported removals as a percentage of total clock stops |
2024 | July | 1,598,491 | 255,257 | 1,853,748 | 13.8% |
2024 | August | 1,404,465 | 223,086 | 1,627,551 | 13.7% |
2024 | September | 1,516,823 | 260,758 | 1,777,581 | 14.7% |
2024 | October | 1,660,478 | 268,754 | 1,929,232 | 13.9% |
2024 | November | 1,557,283 | 247,609 | 1,804,892 | 13.7% |
2024 | December | 1,335,075 | 231,009 | 1,566,084 | 14.8% |
2025 | January | 1,591,510 | 266,553 | 1,858,063 | 14.3% |
2025 | February | 1,458,339 | 256,589 | 1,714,928 | 15.0% |
2025 | March | 1,535,984 | 245,442 | 1,781,426 | 13.8% |
2025 | April | 1,450,094 | 286,883 | 1,736,977 | 16.5% |
2025 | May | 1,500,695 | 289,637 | 1,790,332 | 16.2% |
2025 | June | 1,558,632 | 257,791 | 1,816,423 | 14.2% |
2025 | July | 1,648,945 | 271,150 | 1,920,094 | 14.1% |
2025 | August | 1,404,088 | 209,442 | 1,613,530 | 13.0% |
2025 | September | 1,617,383 | 243,722 | 1,861,105 | 13.1% |
2025 | October | 1,677,869 | 245,037 | 1,922,905 | 12.7% |
2025 | November | 1,536,543 | 260,299 | 1,796,842 | 14.5% |
2025 | December | 1,426,850 | 234,643 | 1,661,493 | 14.1% |
2026 | January | 1,569,063 | 268,283 | 1,837,346 | 14.6% |
2026 | February | 1,516,631 | 261,553 | 1,778,184 | 14.7% |
2026 | March | 1,711,408 | 351,835 | 2,063,243 | 17.1% |
Total | 32,276,648 | 5,435,332 | 37,711,980 | 14.4% | |
Full data for completed pathways is available at the following link, with data for April 2026 becoming available from 11 June 2026:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/rtt-waiting-times/
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