About A&E Wait Time

When you or someone you love needs A&E, the last thing you want to do is hunt across NHS Trust websites trying to work out which department is busiest tonight. A&E Wait Time gathers the wait time at every NHS A&E we can find, labels how fresh each number is, and presents it in one place — on a page that loads in under a second on a mobile network.

That is the entire scope. We are a signposting tool, not a triage tool. If you are unsure whether you need A&E, call NHS 111. If your situation is life-threatening, call 999.

A&E Wait Time was started after spending what felt like hours, late one evening, hunting for the current waiting time at a local NHS A&E. Some trusts publish live dashboards. Some publish monthly figures. Others publish nothing at all. The information existed — it was just scattered across dozens of places, in dozens of formats, with no consistent way to compare it.

Our goal was simple: collect everything that is already public, normalise it, label exactly how recent each number is, and put it on a page that anyone can read on a phone in the back of a taxi. We do not generate, model, or invent data. We just make the data the NHS already publishes easier to find.

We are independently funded by the founder. To protect the trust readers place in this site, we have a few hard rules.

• No paid placements. We do not accept payment from NHS Trusts, hospitals, ICBs, health boards or anyone else in exchange for inclusion, ranking or favourable copy. The directory is curated on data merit alone.
• No advertorial. If we ever publish sponsored content, it will be clearly labelled at the top of the page and excluded from the live waiting-time directory. We have no sponsored content today.
• No NHS funding. We receive no funding from NHS England, NHS Scotland, NHS Wales, HSC Northern Ireland or any individual NHS Trust. We have no commercial relationship with any of them.
• No data resale. We do not sell, license or share user-level data with third parties. See our privacy policy for the full data-handling specifics.

See our full editorial policy for the complete list of rules and conflict-of-interest disclosures.

• Show the source on every number. Every wait time on the site is traceable to a publicly available NHS Trust web page, with a link out to the original.

• Label freshness honestly. Every wait number carries the trust’s own publication timestamp — not our re-fetch time. If the trust’s own page is stale, the figure on our page looks stale too.

• Correct, never silently edit. Material corrections are dated and listed in the methodology change log. We will not retroactively edit a wait number without a public record of the change.

• Always signpost 999 and NHS 111. Every page that shows a wait time also shows the 999 and NHS 111 numbers. We will not let A&E Wait Time become a reason anyone delays emergency care.

A&E Wait Time is run by a small editorial team responsible for source selection, fact-checking, corrections and the editorial standards on this site. We are not clinicians and we do not write medical content.

• Methodology

  Source-by-source disclosure, freshness taxonomy and limitations.

• Editorial policy

  Sourcing, fact-checking, corrections, AI use and conflicts of interest.

• Data sources

  Every NHS publication and trust dashboard we ingest from.

• Contact us

  Corrections, feedback, partnership enquiries and press.