Cancelled operations

Background

Cancelled elective operations are an indicator of hospital capacity, as operations may be cancelled because of a lack of ward beds, equipment (e.g. anaesthetics), or staff. When resources are constrained, people who are admitted to hospital in an emergency are prioritised, so more elective operations are cancelled.

The cancelled elective operations standard is a pledge in the Handbook to the NHS Constitution which states, “all patients who have operations cancelled, on or after the day of admission (including the day of surgery), for non-clinical reasons to be offered another binding date within 28 days, or the patient’s treatment to be funded at the time and hospital of the patient’s choice”. 

The collection and publication of cancelled elective operations statistics was paused at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, to free up capacity in the NHS. NHS England resumed the publishing of cancelled elective operations data from Q3 2021/22. For that reason, no data is available between Q4 2019/20 and Q2 2021/22.

Cancelled elective operations

The cancelled elective operations dataset records the number of last-minute cancelled operations. A cancellation is considered last-minute if the patient is told about the cancellation on the day of surgery. The NHS standard is that, in the event of a last-minute cancellation, a patient should receive their treatment within 28 days of cancellation. 

The number of cancelled operations fluctuates a lot within a given year. They are usually higher in Q3 and Q4, which cover the winter months. The chart above shows a moving average of the number of cancelled operations across four quarters. So, for example, the value for Q4 2016/17 is an average number of cancelled operations for Q1 2016/17, Q2 2016/17, Q3 2016/17 and Q4 2016/17.

After a decline between 2001 and 2007, the number of cancelled operations increased to 21,591 in Q3 2019/20, reaching levels similar to the peak observed in 2001, although the number of elective operations also increased over this period. This is in line with growing waiting times seen in both elective care treatments and in diagnostics.

Since Q3 2021/22, the number of cancelled operations has remained below 20,000; latest figures show that it was 21,456 in Q3 2025/26.

The number of patients who did not receive their operation within 28 days of cancellation declined between 2001/02 before increasing again from 2013/14 onwards. This gradual rise accelerated significantly following the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. In March 2020, NHS trusts were asked to postpone all non-urgent elective operations to free up capacity; while hospitals began restarting planned procedures in May 2020, prioritising those with the most urgent clinical need, a further wave of Covid-19 in winter 2020/21 led to additional postponements. As a result, the number of patients not receiving their operation within 28 days of cancellation more than doubled compared with the pre-pandemic period (2,138 in Q3 2019/20), with around 4,000 or more patients affected in the immediate post-pandemic period. Planned care has been further impacted by a series of intermittent NHS strike actions since 2023, which have had a broader impact on elective care capacity. However, it is worth noting that NHS trusts pre-emptively manage this disruption by not scheduling elective slots during anticipated strike periods, meaning the true impact on cancellations may be understated. In Q3 2025/26, 4,821 patients did not receive their operation within 28 days of cancellation, representing 22.5% of all cancelled operations.