Scottish cervical screening programme statistics
Annual update to 31 March 2025

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS) provides annual cervical screening statistics. This report provides data on coverage and uptake within the target screening population by health board of residence, deprivation and age. In addition, data are presented on laboratory services and screening processes.

The term "women and anyone with a cervix" is used to describe the target screening population, the full inclusion criteria for the programme are:

• Women (biological sex female at birth) with a cervix
• Age 25-64 years
• Age 65-70 years inclusive if previous screening results have shown changes that require further investigation or follow up.

For information on the future of these statistics, please see the planned developments section within the full report. For information on historical data prior to financial year 2016/17, please see Appendix 3 - publication metadata (revisions relevant to this publication) within the full report.

Main points

For financial year 2024/25:

• The cervical cancer screening programme has target thresholds of 80% for both coverage and uptake. Coverage is the percentage of the target population eligible for screening at a given point in time who have had a cervical screening encounter within the past 3.5 or 5.5 years (depending on their age group). Uptake is the percentage of those invited for screening who have had a cervical screening encounter within six months (183 days) of their invitation or reminder letter.
• There have been changes in the frequency of cervical screening of those aged 25-49 together with effects of pausing screening during the COVID-19 pandemic that are likely to explain some of the observed reductions in coverage and uptake in 2024/25.
• The cervical cancer screening programme achieved 55.3% coverage in the financial year 2024/25 compared with a target performance threshold of 80%; this is a decrease of eight percentage points from the previous year.
• Coverage was lower in the most deprived areas at 49.6%, compared with 58.8% in the least deprived areas, a difference of more than nine percentage points. This is a similar gap to previous years. The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) ranks all geographic areas of Scotland from most to least deprived, further information on SIMD is available on the PHS website.
• Cervical screening uptake (within six months of the invite or reminder letter) was 41.9% in 2024/25, a decrease of 10 percentage points from 51.9% in 2023/24.
• Uptake decreased across all age groups between 2023/24 and 2024/25. This is attributed to the move to the five-year recall interval following the introduction of human papillomavirus (HPV) as the primary test.
• 74.8% of samples processed by the laboratory services had results reported within two weeks (14 calendar days), which is below the desired threshold of 80%.
• Virology samples were introduced when HPV testing became the primary test in March 2020. The percentage of failed HPV tests in Scotland has been less than or equal to 0.1% since they were introduced.
• 4 in 10 cervical cancers are detected through screening among women who are eligible for it. These cancers are often at an earlier, more treatable stage which is why anyone invited for cervical screening is encouraged to participate.

Line chart displaying the cervical screening coverage in Scotland between 2016/17 to 2024/25, where there is a target threshold of 80%.

Close

Cervical Screening Programme Coverage (%), Scotland, 2016/17 to 2024/25

Background

Prior to March 2020, women and anyone with a cervix were invited for a cervical smear and samples were tested using cytology and examined under a microscope for abnormal cells. On 30 March 2020, Human papillomavirus (HPV) testing replaced cervical cytology as the primary (first) cervical screening test. Cytology based tests are still used as follow-up tests but only when HPV is found or if someone has previously had cell changes.

HPV testing is more accurate and reliable as a primary test than the previous cell testing methodology (cytology). No screening test will detect all cancers but the move to HPV testing will improve detection of pre-cancer and cancers in Scotland.

Further information

The next release of this publication will be November 2026.