NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics Including Employment Advisors, Performance December 2025 and Quarter 3 2025/26 data

NHS Talking Therapies for anxiety and depression is a programme in England that offers interventions approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)¹.

The NHS Talking Therapies programme is supported by a regular return of data generated by providers of NHS Talking Therapies services in the course of delivering those services to patients. These data are received by NHS England and published in monthly reports.

This report summarises activity in the NHS Talking Therapies programme for December 2025². It shows key information about activity, patient outcomes, and waiting times.

A monthly time series of the key NHS Talking Therapies measures is also available in the Interactive dashboard for this publication.

Information about the NHS Talking Therapies programme is based broadly on three areas:

• Activity: such as how many referrals were received, had accessed services, or ended in the month, or how many appointments took place;
• Waiting times: how long referrals waited to be seen or treated by providers of NHS Talking Therapies services;
• Outcomes: whether referrals measurably improved as a result of a course of NHS Talking Therapies therapy.

Activity

• 128,415 new referrals were received in December 2025.

• 87,030 referrals had accessed NHS Talking Therapies in the month.

• 140,267 referrals ended (for any reason) in the month.
   

Waiting times

• Of the 50,951 referrals that finished a course of treatment in December 2025, 88.6% waited less than 6 weeks and 98.0% waited less than 18 weeks to access NHS Talking Therapies services.

Outcomes

• 48,570 referrals finished a course of treatment in December 2025 having started at caseness³, of which 22,262 (45.8%) reliably recovered.

• 50,951 referrals finished a course of treatment in December 2025, of which 33,897 (66.5%) showed reliable improvement.

¹ https://www.nice.org.uk/

² All historical NHS Talking Therapies publications can be found at NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics Including Employment Advisors - NHS Digital.

³ ‘Caseness’ is the term used in NHS Talking Therapies to define a clinical case of anxiety or depression. See the ‘IAPT v2.1 guidance document' published at NHS Talking Therapies data set reports for details.