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Ambulance response times in England
How long an ambulance takes to arrive, from the NHS England quality indicators for May 2026. The most serious, life threatening Category 1 calls were reached in 7m 52s on average against a 7 minute target. Category 2 emergencies such as strokes and heart attacks took 29m 13s, well over the 18 minute target. This page shows how the targets are being missed, which services are fastest and slowest, and how times have moved since the crisis of 2022.
How to read this
These are NHS England Ambulance Quality Indicators. Category 1 is for life threatening emergencies, with a 7 minute mean target; Category 2 covers serious calls such as strokes and heart attacks, with an 18 minute mean target. Times are the mean across all incidents in the month. Long waits to hand patients over at hospital keep crews off the road and push response times up.
NHS England Ambulance Quality Indicators (AmbSYS), May 2026. Mean response times in minutes and seconds. England, by ambulance service.
The national picture
Category 2 calls take far longer than the target
In May 2026, life threatening Category 1 calls in England were reached in 7m 52s on average, just over the 7 minute target. Category 2 emergencies, the large group that includes strokes and heart attacks, took 29m 13s, against an 18 minute target, and the slowest one in ten waited 59m 25s. Times are far better than the December 2022 peak, when Category 2 stretched past an hour and a half, but they remain well short of target and ticked up slightly over the last year.
By ambulance service
A twofold gap between fastest and slowest
Category 2 response times vary widely between services. North East Ambulance Service was fastest at 18m 30s, close to the 18 minute target, while South Western Ambulance Service was slowest at 40m 24s, more than double the target. Much of the difference comes down to how quickly each region's hospitals take patients off the ambulances.
Mean Category 2 response time by ambulance service, May 2026. The target is 18 minutes. Source: NHS England.
The bottleneck
Stuck outside the hospital
A big part of the delay is at the hospital door. In May 2026, about 24.3 per cent of handovers took more than 30 minutes, against a 15 minute standard. Every crew waiting outside an emergency department is a crew not answering the next 999 call, which is why handover delays and slow response times move together.
Questions this raises
For emergency care
- 1.
Category 2 calls, which include strokes and heart attacks, take far longer than the 18 minute target. What is the human cost of those extra minutes?
- 2.
Response times improved sharply after the 2022 peak but have stalled short of target and edged up again. Is the recovery running out of road?
- 3.
Much of the delay is crews waiting to hand patients over at hospital. Is the ambulance problem really a hospital capacity problem?
- 4.
The fastest service is about twice as quick as the slowest. How much is genuine performance and how much is the state of the local hospitals?
Sources & method
Data provenance
- Ambulance Quality Indicators, AmbSYS (NHS England) ↗· Open Government Licence v3.0
Caveats & data notes
- Times are the mean response across all incidents in the month. The mean is pulled up by a tail of very long waits, so the typical wait is shorter than the mean for Category 2.
- Response times are strongly affected by hospital handover delays, which keep crews off the road. They are not solely a measure of ambulance service performance.
- Category definitions and the targets are set nationally. Category 1 is life threatening; Category 2 is an emergency such as a stroke or heart attack.
- Figures are for England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run separate ambulance systems with different measures.
- Source: NHS England Ambulance Quality Indicators, AmbSYS.
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Keep going
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