4 Hour A&E Performance - 2025/26 Year Review

March 2026 saw a National Performance of 75.1% across Acute Trusts, which was raised to 77.1% with additional Type 3 Mapping.

This completed the data for the 2025/26 FY, giving an opportunity to examine this year's performance against previous years. Doing so, shows that 10/12 Months achieved a performance improvement over the previous year, a great step in the right direction.

Looking specifically at March data, there was a 2.5% YoY improvement (unmapped), much larger than the 0.5% YoY improvement in March 2025.

But it is hard not to acknowledge that the mapped performance fell short of the March 2026 78% target, and the unmapped performance fell short of the March 2024 76% target.

Monthly Acute Trust Performance

March 2026 saw the highest performance across the past 3 years, reaching 75.1%.

Quarterly Acute Trust Performance

2025/26 saw every Quarter perform higher than the previous year. With the performance across the year being 1.2% higher than 2024/25.

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Performance By Type

Breaking the March 2026 performance down into Types we see:

Type	Attendances	4 Hour Performance
Type 1	1,478,125	64.1%
Type 2	55,393	96.3%
Type 3	682,824	97.1%
Type 3 (Mapped)	215,911	98.2%

*Mapped Type 3 activity comes from Non Acute Trusts such as UTCs.

To give scale to how many attendances are Type 1, the graph below shows March attendances by Type across the past three years.

Summary

A&E Performance has hit the headlines a lot over the past year and often not for good reasons. Not least because of what has been described as one of the toughest winters on record for the NHS.

That being said, there were only 2 Months that underperformed when compared to 2024/25. This, along with the 2.5% YoY improvement in March shows progress is being made.

But with an 82% target already set for March 2027, it is very clear that the focus should be on Type 1 departments.

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