England's 18-week waiting performance has held near 65% since March

In August, 65.2% of patients on England's NHS waiting list had waited up to 18 weeks, 4.2 points better than a year earlier.¹ Most of that gain came in a single month, and the share has barely moved since.

Noodle News data desk · reading time ~2 min

65.2%

of waiting pathways were within 18 weeks in August 2026, against a 92% standard

2.7points

rise in a single month, from February to March 2026, to 65.3%

113,339

pathways had waited more than 52 weeks at the end of August

What the data shows

A step in March, then a plateau

NHS England published its August referral-to-treatment figures on 8 October. Of about 7.4 million waiting pathways, 65.2% had been waiting up to 18 weeks.¹ The standard is 92%. Reaching it would put roughly two million more of those pathways inside 18 weeks.

The year-on-year gain is real, but its shape matters. Between April 2025 and February 2026 the share crept up by 2.9 points, from 59.7% to 62.6%. It then jumped to 65.3% in March 2026 and has stayed between 65.0% and 65.8% in each of the six months since.¹ Over those six months it is down 0.1 of a point. A year earlier, March to August added 1.2 points.¹

Exhibit 01

The share within 18 weeks, month by month

Source: NHS England, RTT statistical press notice, Table 2, March 2025 to August 2026. England, incomplete pathways, adjusted to include estimates for trusts that did not report.¹

Key finding. The year-on-year improvement is mostly one step, in March 2026. Since then the figure has moved less than a point in either direction.

In context

Still well below where the standard was last met

In the March snapshots in the same table, the share was above 92% in each year from 2012 to 2015, ending at 92.9% in March 2015. It was 86.3% in March 2019, fell to 64.4% in March 2021 and reached a low of 57.2% in March 2024.¹ The figure for March 2026 is the highest March figure since 2020, but is still about 21 points below March 2019. The table publishes only March values for these years, so months in between are not shown.

Exhibit 02

March snapshots since 2009, against the 92% standard

Source: NHS England, RTT statistical press notice, Table 2. March of each year, 2009 to 2026.¹

Where the waits are

Oral surgery and ear, nose and throat trail the rest

Performance varies by specialty. In August, 53.8% of oral surgery pathways and 56.8% of ear, nose and throat pathways were within 18 weeks, against 72.2% in ophthalmology.¹ Trauma and orthopaedics, the largest list at 843,419 pathways, stood at 61.1%.¹

Exhibit 03

Share within 18 weeks, 14 large specialties

Source: NHS England, RTT statistical press notice, Table 1, August 2026. Excludes the four trusts that did not report and the specialties not shown. The all-specialty line is the published 65.2%, which includes estimates for missing trusts.¹

Waits for those still waiting

Typical waits are shorter even as the share stalls

The median wait of those still waiting was 12.2 weeks in August, down from 13.5 weeks a year earlier. The 92nd-percentile wait was 38.8 weeks, down from 42.2.¹ The list itself is almost unchanged: it was 0.5% (33,512 pathways) smaller than in August 2025.¹ The long waits remain: 10,782 pathways had waited more than 65 weeks, 1,637 more than 78 weeks and 222 more than 104 weeks.¹ The desk covered the size of the list over a longer run in an earlier piece.

What we don't know

The figures say nothing about why the share jumped in March. It coincided with the end of the financial year, and one reading is that effort was concentrated before that date; the data cannot confirm this. Six months is a short run, so a plateau is a description, not a forecast: the share could resume rising. Four trusts submitted no August data, and their numbers are estimated from earlier returns, one of them from June 2025.¹ The median and 92nd-percentile waits exclude those estimates.

Caveat. The 18-week share counts only patients still waiting. It can rise if long waiters are removed from the list or treated first, and it can fall if the list is cleared of short waits. A flat share is also compatible with more patients being treated. NHS England notes that the effect of non-reporting trusts on the percentage is usually small but can be material when a large trust with an unusual figure is missing.¹

Method. All figures are transcribed from NHS England's RTT statistical press notice for August 2026, published 8 October 2026, and relate to England. Percentages within 18 weeks are for incomplete pathways and include NHS England's estimates for non-reporting trusts; specialty figures (Exhibit 3) and the median and 92nd-percentile waits do not. Derived figures (the 4.2-point annual gain, 2.7-point monthly step, 26.8-point gap to the standard, roughly two million pathways at 7.4 million, and six-month change) were computed in code and checked against the published 4.2-point annual change. The 14 specialty lines shown are all those with more than 200,000 incomplete pathways in August 2026. No projections are used. NHS England is the sole publisher of RTT data, so no independent second source exists for these series.

Sources.

T1NHS England, Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting times statistical press notice, August 2026, published 8 October 2026; retrieved 13 October 2026.

Production. Researched, written and checked by an AI system working to the Noodle News standards; edited and published by the Noodle News editor.

Corrections. v1.1 (20 Oct 2026): on phone screens the dashed reference line in Exhibit 3 ran through the chart’s value labels; the labels now sit on top of it. No figures changed.

Figures to 13 Oct 2026. Noodle News · v1.1 · nhs-18-week-plateau.