Key facts and figures about the NHS

What's the NHS annual budget? How many doctors and nurses are there? What's the cost of an operation? 

Our press and public affairs team, library service and policy experts deal with hundreds of enquiries every year. Below are our answers to some key questions that have frequently or recently posed been to us. If you’ve got a question, please get in touch with us.

These figures focus on the NHS in England or where England data is unavailable, health care in the United Kingdom. The most recent figures have been used where possible. Due to the time lag of some data reporting, some data is based on 2023/24.

How much...?

How much is spent on health and care?

In 2023/24, the Department for Health and Social Care spent £188.5 billion. This money is used to fund a wide range of health and care services, including GP services, ambulance, mental health, community and hospital services that are commissioned by the NHS, as well as public health services that are commissioned by local authorities. It also funds some social care services, which are mainly commissioned by local authorities. Just over 1% of the Department for Health and Social Care’s budget is spent on administration costs for the department and the health and care system, such as departmental running costs, regulatory costs and business services, eg, the NHS payroll. Spending is expected to increase by 2.8% year on year for the next three years, once adjusted for inflation. This means the NHS is expected to have spent £204.9 billion in 2024/25, and is planning to spend £246.7 billion by 2028/29.

Find out more in our nutshell on NHS budgets.

What percentage of GDP does the UK spend on health compared with other countries?

In 2023, the UK spent 10.9% of GDP on health, just above the average for comparable countries. This is higher than pre-Covid-19 pandemic levels, when 10% of GDP was spent on health in 2019, but lower than levels spent during the Covid-19 pandemic.

How much of the NHS budget is spent on the workforce?

The NHS is one of the world’s largest employers, with around 1.37 million full-time equivalent staff in England as of January 2025. Consequently, the wage bill for the NHS makes up a substantial proportion of its budget. In 2023/24, the total cost of employing the staff in the NHS was £81.7 billion – 49.2% of the NHS budget. These statistics don’t include salaries for GPs (who are not directly employed by the NHS) or employees in the Department of Health and Social Care and other national bodies, such as NHS England. GPs and GP practice staff are indirectly funded by the NHS through a complex system of contracts.

What's the cost of an operation?

The cost to the NHS of an operation depends on a range of factors, such as the complexity of the procedure and how long the patient stays in hospital. In the NHS in England, the NHS payment scheme outlines the average cost of procedures. These average costs are then adjusted to take account of local variation, such as higher staffing costs in London (this is known as the market forces factor). For example, in 2025/26 the cost of an elective hip fracture procedure varies from £2,354 to £7,648, depending on the complexity of the procedure and the condition of the patient.

What’s the cost of an using an ambulance and going to A&E?

The cost to the NHS of an individual going to A&E depends on the type of A&E – which can range from a major consultant-led department in a hospital to an urgent care centre or walk-in clinic – and the type of treatment the individual receives. For someone who attends an urgent care centre and receives the lowest level of investigation and treatment, the average cost in 2025/26 is £114. For an individual at a major A&E department who receives more complex investigation and treatment, the costs range on average from £173 to £563. In 2023/24, the estimated average cost of a patient taken to A&E by ambulance was £459. Ambulance call outs that didn’t result in a trip to A&E cost an estimated average of £327.

What’s the cost of a GP or dentist appointment?

A recent study estimated that in 2023/24 the average 10-minute face-to-face GP consultation costs the NHS £37.

Unlike most other NHS services, which are free at the point of use, most adults in England pay for NHS dentistry services. As of 2025, patients were paying between £27.40 for a check up and up to £326.70 for other services, depending on the treatment needed. For more detail, see our explainer on NHS dentistry.

What’s the cost of community health services?

A wide range of NHS services are provided in the community, all at different costs to the NHS. For example, in 2023/24 the estimated average cost of a face-to-face appointment with a district nurse was £57 and a stay at a community rehabilitation centre was £399. In 2025/26, the costs of tests at community diagnostic centres range from £5 for a simple urine dip stick test to £1,093 for an adult colonoscopy.

What does the money buy?

When it comes to health and care funding, it can be hard to make sense of the numbers discussed and what they actually mean for patients, staff and the system. Below we outline what £1 billion in health and social care spending would buy in 2024.

How many...?

How many doctors, nurses and managers are there in the NHS in England?

In January 2025, there were 147,300 doctors, 392,800 nursing staff (including midwives and health visitors) and 199,200 allied health professionals (which includes paramedics, radiographers and therapists) in the NHS out of a total workforce of 1.37 million (all figures are full-time equivalent, excluding general practice staff). Between 2010 and 2025, the largest increases have been in the number of doctors, allied health professionals and other support staff. Doctors increased by 54%, allied health professionals by 45%, other support staff by 45% and nurses by 31%. Whereas the number of managers has only increased by 6% over the same time. As of March 2025, NHS vacancy statistics estimate that there are 100,100 vacancies in the NHS (including 7,700 doctors and 25,600 nursing staff). This includes vacancies in hospitals and in the community. However, these numbers are only estimates, as there is not yet a standardised method for reporting NHS vacancies.

Find out more in our nutshells on the NHS workforce and staff shortages.

How many groups commission care?

Since July 2022, integrated care systems (ICSs) have been responsible for planning most primary, community and hospital care services in their local areas, including urgent and emergency care. Currently, 42 ICSs operate across England, though there are plans to reduce the number of ICSs in the future. As well as commissioning, ICSs also focus on integrating health and care services, improving population health and reducing health inequalities.

Find out more in our integrated care systems explainer.

How many NHS hospitals are there in England?

All NHS hospitals are managed by acute, mental health, specialist or community trusts, and as of mid 2025 there were 202 trusts, including 10 ambulance trusts. However, the number of NHS trusts does not correlate to the number of hospitals as many trusts run more than one hospital – for example, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust runs 10 acute and specialist hospitals.

The number of local GP practices is constantly changing, but as of mid-2025, there were 6,200 practices active in England.

How many available beds are there in the NHS? Is the number of beds decreasing or increasing?

As of March 2025, there were 145,700 consultant-led beds available in the NHS (includes general and acute, learning disability, maternity, mental illness and short stay beds). The total number of beds in the NHS will be higher, as this number doesn’t include critical care beds or those where the patient is under the care of a nurse rather than a consultant.

The graph below shows that the number of available consultant-led beds in England has halved over the past 30 years. Medical advances that mean patients don’t have to stay in hospital for as long and a shift in policy towards providing treatment and care outside hospital have contributed to the reduction in bed numbers. However, fewer beds can lead to bed occupancy levels higher than the recommended level, and the UK has fewer hospital beds than many comparable countries. Recently there has been a move towards delivering more patient care in ‘virtual beds’ and as of April 2025 there were 12,700 virtual beds in operation.

Find out more about NHS bed numbers in our nutshell.

What...?

What has been the long-term trend in demand for health care?

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, demand for health care had been rising across all services and sectors. During the pandemic, demand for services fell, but demand has now reached, or in some areas surpassed, pre-pandemic levels of demand.

For example, in emergency care, there were 2.8 million more attendances and 1.3 million more admissions at major (type 1) A&E departments in 2024/25 than there were in 2010/11 (when the current 4 hour A&E target was introduced). Demand for A&E services has returned to pre-pandemic levels, with a total of 16.8 million attendances and 4.8 million admissions in 2024/25.

The number of outpatient appointments has more than doubled between 2003/04 and 2023/24. The number of appointments briefly fell during the Covid-19 pandemic, but then hit a record high of 104.6 million appointments in 2023/24.

This growth in demand is also reflected in general practice. Routine reporting on the number of GP appointments has only been available since March 2018, and estimates that there were 370 million GP appointments available in 2024/25, up 20% since 2018/19. While we can’t show equivalent historical trends prior to 2018, a research study using a sample of GP data estimated that between 2010/11 and 2014/15 the total number of face-to-face and telephone consultations increased by 15.4%.

Data on community care services is still in development, but experimental statistics suggest that the number of referrals for community care is now higher than pre-pandemic – from 1.1 million in January 2019 to 1.9 million in January 2025.

What do patients, the public and staff think of the NHS?

Large-scale national surveys can give some insight into what people think of the NHS. The British Social Attitudes survey measures public satisfaction with how the NHS runs. In 2024, 21% of survey respondents were very or quite satisfied, the lowest level of satisfaction since the survey began in 1983. The NHS also runs a range of patient surveys. In 2024, the GP Patient Survey found that 74% of patients had a good overall experience of a GP practice, and the Urgent and Emergency Care Survey found that 38% of major A&E patients had a very good overall experience. The NHS Staff Survey asks staff a range of questions about their experiences working in the NHS. For example, NHS staff are asked if they would recommend their organisation as a place to work, and in 2024, 61% of staff agreed they would recommend their organisation.

What was the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the NHS?

The Covid-19 pandemic completely changed the activity profile for the NHS. Hospitals cancelled routine procedures to ensure Covid-19 patients could be treated; this meant that the backlog of patients waiting for treatment grew by 45% between March 2020 and March 2022. Infection prevention controls, such as separating Covid-19 positive patients from negative patients, also limited hospital activity levels. Many services had to change the way they operated. Pre-pandemic, GPs were conducting around 3 million telephone appointments a month, but during the pandemic it is estimated that the number peaked at 11 million (March 2021). As of March 2025, this had fallen to 7.3 million GP appointments taking place over the telephone.

What does an average day in the NHS look like?

There is no ‘average day’ for the NHS. Each day varies depending on the day of the week, the environment (eg, the season), social and cultural events (eg, bank holidays) and disaster events (eg, global pandemics). But if there were an average day for the NHS in England in 2024 it might look like this.