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Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Free to use, including commercial use, with attribution.
Headline numbers
Source: NHS England RTT Statistics, Jan 2026. Last updated 2026-04-08.
Ready-to-use story angles
1. The longest NHS wait in 2026
Across 15 common procedures tracked, the longest median NHS England wait is for tonsillectomy at 16 weeks. Going private costs around £3,800.
See the tonsillectomy data →2. Where NHS waits are still fast
Not every procedure has a record-breaking wait — the median wait for colonoscopy is just 12 weeks nationally. Compare this to the £1,300+ private cost.
See the colonoscopy data →3. The knee replacement postcode lottery
The shortest median NHS wait for trauma & orthopaedic care is in Liverpool at 10 weeks. The longest is in Leicester at 29 weeks — a difference of 20 weeks for the same procedure depending on where you live.
See knee replacement waits across all cities →4. The cost of going private
For the 15 common procedures tracked, private treatment ranges from a £250 (echocardiogram) to £17,500 (knee replacement surgery). The full range and median figures are in the dataset.
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Methodology in one paragraph
Treatcompare ingests NHS England's monthly RTT Provider Extract Excel file, filters it to 30 English cities and 9 medical specialties, and joins each row with typical UK private price ranges from major hospital groups (Spire, Nuffield, Circle, BMI, HCA). The pipeline runs automatically on the 15th of every month. Coverage is currently NHS England only. NHS data is published at the specialty level (Treatment Function code), not per-procedure, so “knee replacement waiting time” reflects the broader Trauma & Orthopaedics specialty wait. Full methodology at /methodology#nhs-data.
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