What does the pledge mean?

The 2024 Labour manifesto committed the government to cutting NHS waiting times, in part by funding special out-of-hours shifts, which it hoped would add an extra 40,000 hospital appointments a week, amounting to about two million a year. (This is another pledge we’re tracking.)

Although there are many types of “waiting time”, and many ways to measure them, the manifesto made a specific promise before the election to “return to meeting NHS performance standards”.

It said: “That means patients should expect to wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral for consultant-led treatment of non-urgent health conditions. This standard was achieved with the last Labour government and will be again under the next.”

In its “Plan for Change” published on 5 December 2024, the government made the pledge clearer, saying: “This Parliament, our health milestone is to end hospital backlogs by delivering our ambitious milestone of meeting the NHS standard that 92% of patients should wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral to start consultant-led treatment of non-urgent health conditions.” This restates an existing requirement in the NHS Constitution. A footnote links to NHS England’s referral-to-treatment (RTT) waiting times, where the data is published.

Technically, this data actually records the proportion of “incomplete pathways” (i.e. ongoing cases) that involve waits of 18 weeks or more, not the proportion of individual patients who have this experience. The number of patients and the number of cases are always different, because some patients are awaiting treatment for more than one thing. We’ve written about this confusion many times before.

In reality, as the chart below shows, NHS England has not reached this level of performance for many years, and it is still far away from doing so.

The target only refers to the NHS in England, which is the part of the health service that the UK government directly controls, with the rest devolved to the governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

In its Elective Reform Plan, published on 6 January 2025, NHS England gave more detail on the timeframe for this pledge, saying: “We will meet the 18-week standard by March 2029. By March 2026 the percentage of patients waiting less than 18 weeks for elective treatment will be 65% nationally. Every trust will need to deliver a minimum 5 percentage point improvement by March 2026. We then expect sufficient increases annually (exact figures to be confirmed in the planning guidance) to reach 92% in 2029.”

A subsequent document, the Medium Term Planning Framework, published in October 2025, specified a new set of interim targets for 2026/27, including: “Every trust delivering a minimum 7% improvement in 18-week performance or a minimum of 65%, whichever is greater (to deliver national performance target of 70%)”.

What progress has been made?

There is still a long way to go before this pledge is met, but we’re currently rating it “In progress” because the relevant measure has begun to move in the right direction.

According to the latest figures, there were about 6.2 million people awaiting treatment, in about 7.3 million cases, at the end of June 2026. About 65.8% of those cases involved waits of less than 18 weeks so far.

NHS England did meet its interim national target of 65% of patients being treated within 18 weeks by the end of March 2026, thanks to a sudden improvement in the figure that month—reportedly with the help of £120 million in “sprint funding”. Not every individual trust met its target, however.

The government must raise this figure to 92% by March 2029 in order to deliver its commitment. In May 2026, the health think tank, the King’s Fund, welcomed the achievement of the latest interim target, with caveats. Its statement said: “Ministers can celebrate today’s milestone, but they cannot sprint their way to a lasting solution.”