How long is the wait, and where is it shorter?
Compare planned surgery waiting times at Australian public hospitals — including across state borders.
Reference period 2024–25 (1 July 2024 to 30 June 2025) · released 28 May 2026
Find the wait near you
Choose a surgery and a suburb to see the public hospitals within reach, ordered by the median wait they published — including hospitals across a state border.
Nothing you type here is kept. The comparison runs inside this page: your search is never stored on your device, never put in the address bar, and never sent anywhere. That is also why the address of this page never changes as you search, and why the tool needs JavaScript — there is nowhere else for the search to run.
JavaScript is switched off, so the search box is not available. Every figure it would show is on the static pages, which need no JavaScript at all:
- Pick a surgery, then a state, for the hospitals ranked by median wait.
- Pick a hospital for every surgery it reports, and for the nearest alternatives that published a figure.
What this site does
Public hospitals across Australia report how long people waited for planned surgery. The figures are published once a year, hospital by hospital and surgery by surgery, but not in a form that lets you compare the hospitals near you — especially across a state border. This site does that, and nothing else.
Every number here is a published government figure, shown with the period it covers and the date it was released. Nothing is estimated, crowd-sourced or sponsored, and no hospital is called best: the order is the measured number and nothing else.
Start here
- Every surgery type — 15 surgery types with national and state figures.
- Every public hospital — 293 hospitals, listed by state.
- Guides — urgency categories, referrals to another hospital, and public versus private waiting.
- Methodology — where the numbers come from and what they cannot tell you.
Commonly reported surgery
- Inguinal herniotomy/herniorrhaphy
- Haemorrhoidectomy
- Cholecystectomy (open/laparoscopic)
- Hysterectomy (abdominal/vaginal/laparoscopic)
- Cystoscopy
- Cataract extraction (with or without intra-ocular lens insertion)
What the figures cannot tell you
These are medians of surgery that has already happened, across all urgency categories together. They are not a live queue and not a prediction of your own wait. Your wait depends on the urgency category your treating specialist assigns you after you are seen in a clinic, and on the wait to be seen in that clinic in the first place — which is not in this data.
Public hospitals only. Private hospitals do not report to this collection, so their waiting times cannot be compared here.