The NHS delivered more elective care in 2025 than any year on record, helping reduce the waiting list to its lowest level since February 2023. Staff completed a record 18.4 million treatments and operations in 2025, up from 18.0 million in 2024, and the overall waiting list has fallen to 7.29 million.
December alone saw 1.43 million treatments — 91,775 more than the same month last year — despite five days of industrial action by junior doctors. NHS teams maintained around 95% of normal activity during the strikes.
The share of patients waiting over 18 weeks edged down to 61.5%, while those waiting longer than 52 weeks fell to just 1.9%, the lowest level since June 2020. The Elective Reform Plan has focused on cutting the longest waits and speeding access to care.
Improvements have come from expanding community diagnostic centres and surgical hubs, adding evening and weekend clinics, and sending patients ‘straight to test’ to reduce repeat clinic visits. Surgical productivity gains came from innovations such as high-intensity theatre (HIT) lists across elective hubs and wider use of robotic-assisted surgery to treat more patients, shorten operations and speed recoveries.
Demand on urgent and emergency care remains very high, and the NHS is on track for its busiest winter yet. A&E departments recorded a January peak of 2,320,266 attendances, up 4.6% on January 2025, and ambulance services logged record incident numbers across December and January. Despite this pressure, staff managed 206,800 more admissions, transfers or discharges within four hours in Type 1 A&E departments over the winter (3.4 million in Oct 2025–Jan 2026 vs 3.2 million in Oct 2024–Jan 2025).
Four-hour A&E performance averaged 73.5% over the winter period so far, an improvement on 72.1% last year and well above the levels seen two years ago. Ambulance response times also improved compared with last winter: January 2026 Category 1 median response was 8 minutes 8 seconds (vs 8:16 in Jan 2025) and Category 2 was 35:04 (vs 35:39 in Jan 2025).
Hospitals are still treating seasonal infections: last week there was an average of 1,119 inpatients with flu and 929 with norovirus each day.
On cancer care, the government’s recently launched National Cancer Plan sets a target for the NHS to meet all cancer waiting time standards by 2029 and to treat hundreds of thousands more patients within 62 days. In December, staff carried out 2.37 million tests and checks, and 77.4% of people received either the all-clear or a cancer diagnosis within four weeks of an urgent suspected cancer referral — the highest proportion in nine months (compared with 76.7% in April 2025).
Duncan Burton, Chief Nursing Officer for England, said the record elective activity is a major achievement driven by staff innovation and planning, which also helped shorten ambulance waits and improve A&E performance this winter. He cautioned that further work is needed to improve patient flow and reduce the longest emergency department waits, and urged the public to use services appropriately — calling 999 for life-threatening emergencies and using 111 online, local pharmacists or GPs for other needs.
Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting highlighted that waiting lists have fallen by more than 330,000 and credited investment, modernisation and staff dedication for this progress, pointing to new diagnostic centres, surgical hubs and equipment as key to rebuilding services.
The UK Health Security Agency has issued yellow cold health alerts covering Friday 13 to Monday 16 February, with temperatures expected to drop below freezing. The NHS warned this could add pressure on hospitals, especially affecting vulnerable people, and reiterated that the public should seek appropriate care when needed.