Acute hospital activity and NHS beds information (annual)
Year ending 31 March 2026

About this release

This annual release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides an update on a range of statistics on various aspects of acute hospital care, sourced from hospital administration systems across Scotland. These include information on outpatient, inpatient and day case activity trends, numbers of medical diagnoses, operations, emergency admissions and beds statistics. Data presented for 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026 are provisional and subject to change in future publications as submissions may be updated to reflect a more accurate and complete set of data from NHS Boards.

Main points

Hospital admissions

This is an image which shows admissions into Scottish hospitals for the financial year 2025/26, excluding admissions to maternity wards and mental health hospitals. Around one in eight Scottish residents were admitted to hospital in 2025/26. Of these, 69% had one hospital admission, 18% had two admissions and 13% had three or more admissions. There were just under 1.2 million hospital admissions in 2025/26, 48% were emergency inpatient admissions, 10% were elective inpatient admissions and 41% were day case admissions.

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Number of people admitted to Scottish hospitals, 2025/26 (provisional)

• Around 0.7 million Scottish residents (one in eight of the population) were admitted to hospital in 2025/26. Nearly one third of these patients (31%) experienced more than one hospital admission during the year.
• There were just under 1.2 million admissions into hospital in 2025/26 – a 2% increase compared to the previous year (2024/25). Of these, 48% were emergency inpatient admissions, 10% elective (planned) inpatient admissions, and 41% day cases.
• In 2025/26, the average length of stay for inpatients was 6.5 days compared to 6.8 days in the previous year (2024/25). Patients admitted as emergency inpatients generally stay longer than elective inpatient admissions. In 2025/26, the average length of stay was 3.0 days for elective inpatients and 7.1 days for emergency inpatients.
• In 2025/26, there were just over 1.3 million total procedures performed. Of these, 81% (just over 1 million) were carried out as a main procedure – a 0.4% increase on the previous year (2024/25). The National Treatment Centres (NTCs) carried out 45,798 procedures in 2025/26, nearly double compared to the previous year (2024/25), reflecting expanded capacity and a broader range of specialties.

Beds

• In 2025/26, the average number of available staffed beds per day for acute specialties was 13,586 – a 0.6% decrease on the previous year (2024/25). An available staffed bed is a bed which is resourced for inpatient or day case care. Of these, 9,636 (71%) were for medical specialties and 3,950 (29%) were for surgical specialties.
• The percentage occupancy for acute specialties decreased from 88.9% in 2024/25 to 88.5% in 2025/26. The percentage occupancy is the percentage of available staffed beds that were occupied on average by inpatients during the period.

Outpatients

• Over 1 million Scottish residents (one in five of the population) visited an outpatient department in 2025/26 as a new outpatient. Of these, nearly a quarter of patients had more than one new outpatient attendance.
• There were just over 4.1 million total outpatient attendances (around 1.4 million new and 2.8 million returns) in 2025/26 – a 1% increase on the previous year (2024/25).
• During the same period, 8.1% (363,134) of all outpatient appointments were not kept without prior notification by the patient (‘Did Not Attends’). This rate of non-attendance is lower than the figure of 8.3% for the previous year (2024/25).

Background

Definitions of activity are available within the Glossary section of the full report. Further details are also available in the PHS Data Dictionary. There are known issues with the quality of data presented, such as the inpatient and day case completeness. For more information, please see the data issues and completeness document that accompanies this publication.

Observed trends may be influenced by data submission completeness, small numbers, seasonal variation, and wider contextual factors, including the lasting effects of the COVID 19 pandemic on the volume and pattern of acute hospital activity.

At present, it is not possible to accurately differentiate in national data returns between NTC activity and the rest of the activity at NHS Golden Jubilee or NHS Forth Valley. Therefore, management information data submissions are received from the NHS Boards. It should be noted that these submissions are not subject to the same data quality and validation processes as national returns, and the methodology and figures in this report may change. Consequently, this data should be considered as Official Statistics in Development.

Further information

Disclosure control methods have been applied to the data in order to protect patient confidentiality: therefore, some figures on total counts may not be additive.

Data from this publication are also available on the Scottish Health and Social Care Open platform. Quarterly data are available from the quarterly publication page on our website. Background information on acute hospital care can be found in the Hospital Care topic area.

The next release of this publication will be in September 2027.