Official Statistics

Adult social care activity report 2024 to 2025: commentary

Published 23 October 2025

Applies to England

Introduction

This report contains statistics aggregated from client level data (CLD) to provide information about adult social care activity in councils with adult social services responsibilities (CASSRs) in England for 2024 to 2025. CASSRs will be referred to as local authorities throughout this report.

Quarterly CLD statistics have been published by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) since March 2024 as part of the Monthly statistics for adult social care (England).

This activity report was previously published as the adult social care activity and finance report by NHS England. See the Adult social care finance report, England: 2024 to 2025 published by DHSC.

How the data can be used

This report may be of interest to members of the public, policy officials and other stakeholders to make local and national comparisons, and to monitor the quality and effectiveness of services.

You can use this data to:

• consider trends in long-term support. For example, where the number of episodes has increased or decreased for a particular type of social care provision, it is also important to consider trends in activity for the same type of care for a full understanding
• understand patterns of activity for requests, short-term care and reviews and characteristics of people requesting and drawing on care and support
• increase your understanding of the approaches to the commissioning and delivery of social care, by local authority

You can also use the data quality statement published alongside this commentary to support your understanding of local variation and national time trends - some of these may be due to differences in operational or reporting practices or methodological changes, not a change in activity. The change in data source to CLD represents a significant change from the short and long term (SALT) data that was previously published covering adult social care activity in local authorities in England.

You cannot:

• use this data to attempt to identify good or bad local authority performance
• directly compare activity data to finance data. This is not possible for various reasons. For example, long term care activity data includes those receiving long-term care with a primary support reason (PSR) of social care support, whereas this PSR is not included in long-term expenditure (instead being recorded as a combined short-term or long-term spend on the PSR). The activity statistics also do not take into account the intensity or length of care provided, which factors into expenditure on social care

Contact the DHSC Activity and Finance team at asc.statistics@dhsc.gov.uk if you:

• have any questions about the data published
• need any further information about how the data used in this report can be compared

Main points

All statistics in this report relate to the adult social care activity in England taking place during the year from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025. All references to years relate to financial years running from 1 April to 31 March.

Requests for support

Statistics on requests for support in this report should not be compared to previous SALT data due to changes in data source and methodology. There are known sources of over and underestimation of requests for social care in both CLD and SALT. The data quality statement can be used to support your understanding of this.

There were 2.02 million requests for support made by people new to social care. Of these requests:

• 1.30 million requests were from people aged 65 and over
• 665,000 requests were from people aged 18 to 64

A person new to social care is defined in this activity data as not having received long-term support over the previous 3 months.

Short-term support to maximise independence (ST-Max)

This data should not be compared to previous SALT data. This is due to differences in methodology and recording practices, and some local authorities have reported that their CLD submissions are incomplete and under-report their ST-Max activity. See the accompanying data quality statement on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page for more information.

There were 244,000 episodes of ST-Max for people new to social care. Of these episodes:

• 216,000 were for people aged 65 and over
• 27,000 were for people aged 18 to 64

A person new to social care means not having received long-term support over the previous 3 months.

Long-term support

Long-term support statistics can be directly compared to the SALT data published for previous years. However, please be aware that some comparisons may be impacted by changes to the data source and methodology. The data quality statement can be used to support your understanding of this.

Across all local authorities in England:

• 672,000 people were receiving long-term care on 31 March 2025, compared with 650,000 recorded on 31 March 2024
• 889,000 people received long-term care during the year, compared to 859,000 people recorded in 2023 to 2024
• 495,000 people had received long-term care for more than 12 months on 31 March 2025, compared with 480,000 people in the previous year

Reviews of long-term care and support plans

Review statistics should not be compared to previous SALT data. The data quality statement can be used to support your understanding of this.

Of the people who had received long-term support throughout the year, 293,000 received a review of their care and support plan. This represents 59% of people who had received long-term support throughout the year.

Accommodation status of long-term support recipients

Of the 889,000 people who received long-term care during the year:

• 590,000 (67% of people with a known accommodation status) were living at home or with family
• 288,000 (33% of people with a known accommodation status) people were not living at home or with family

This should not be compared to previous SALT data. See the accompanying data quality statement on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page for more information.

Employment status of long-term learning disability support recipients

There were 137,000 recipients of long-term learning disability support, who were aged 18 to 64 during the year. Of these people:

• 6,365 (6%) were in paid employment
• 106,000 (94%) were not in paid employment

This should not be compared to previous SALT data. See the accompanying data quality statement on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page for more information.

Data source

These activity statistics are sourced from the CLD return, an event-level data set created using records in local authorities’ administrative systems. This is a change from previous versions of the activity and finance report, which used the SALT collection. This has led to changes in how the measures are produced which affect the comparability of this report with previous years. Each section gives details on how data should be interpreted.

The data is provided by each local authority and processed by DHSC into national, regional and local authority level, which can be found in the associated data tables. The CSV files contain more detailed breakdowns for the measures.

Further details about the collection, including the data specification and guidance, can be found on the AGEM CLD information pages for local authorities.

The accompanying data quality statement on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page describes the quality of the data and impacts on statistics in this report.

The accompanying methodology on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page details the processes used to create the statistics in this report, developed with input from local authorities.

Adult social care activity provided or arranged by local authorities covers a wide range of services including long-term and short-term care. Clients may take a variety of different pathways through the system, according to their needs.

This publication looks at adult social care activity that is provided or arranged by local authorities. It does not cover adult social care activity that is provided or funded elsewhere, for example, if the care is arranged and wholly funded by an individual without any involvement from the local authority.

How the data is presented

Activity data in the data tables and CSV files published alongside this report are rounded to the nearest 5. In the commentary, counts below 10,000 and rates are rounded to the nearest 5. Counts larger than 1 million are rounded to the nearest 10,000 and counts larger than 10,000 (but lower than 1 million) are rounded to the nearest 1,000. Percentages are rounded to the nearest whole number.

1. Requests for support

This section shows the number of requests for support received by local authorities from new clients (a new client request is defined in this activity data as not having received long-term support over the last 3 months) and the outcome of those requests. This data includes requests for support in relation to the provision of adult social care services, including contacts from adults with care or support needs, their representative, or someone acting on their behalf.

Statistics on requests should not be directly compared to those published in previous iterations of the activity and finance report due to changes in the data collection and statistical methodology in this report.

Previously, local authorities assembled their SALT returns using a range of sources - some of which are outside of the scope of CLD. The methodological differences arise from DHSC applying standardised calculations to the administrative data within CLD.

See more information in the accompanying data quality statement on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page.

Detailed findings on requests for support

Between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025, there were 2.02 million requests for support from new clients received by local authorities. Of these requests:

• 1.30 million (66% of people with a recorded age) came from people aged 65 and over
• 665,000 (34%) came from people aged 18 to 64

An individual can make several requests for support in a year and could therefore be counted more than once if their requests were made while they were considered a new client.

Removing these duplicates, the number of people who made requests for support as new clients was 1.39 million in 2024 to 2025. Among these were:

• 868,000 people (64% of people with a recorded age) aged 65 and over
• 490,000 people (36%) aged 18 to 64

Tables 1 and 2 below show the regional variance in requests for support per 100,000 adults by age group. Further data can be found in table 12 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page.

Table 1: number of requests for support per 100,000 adults aged 18 to 64, by region, 2024 to 2025

Region name	Requests per 100,000 of the 18 to 64 population	18 to 64 total requests	18 to 64 population
England	1,875	665,000	35,456,000
North East	2,020	33,000	1,642,000
North West	2,360	110,000	4,654,000
Yorkshire and the Humber	1,765	60,000	3,396,000
East Midlands	1,855	56,000	3,025,000
West Midlands	1,825	67,000	3,668,000
East of England	1,800	70,000	3,870,000
London	1,800	109,000	6,058,000
South East	1,805	103,000	5,708,000
South West	1,675	57,000	3,434,000

Table 2: number of requests for support per 100,000 adults aged 65 and over, by region, 2024 to 2025

Region name	Requests per 100,000 of the 65 and over population	65 and over total requests	65 and over population
England	11,855	1,302,000	10,981,000
North East	12,215	70,000	576,000
North West	13,310	194,000	1,456,000
Yorkshire and the Humber	11,385	125,000	1,096,000
East Midlands	12,140	122,000	1,006,000
West Midlands	12,915	151,000	1,168,000
East of England	12,000	158,000	1,313,000
London	12,800	143,000	1,115,000
South East	10,970	210,000	1,911,000
South West	9,710	130,000	1,341,000

Among people aged 18 to 64, the North West was the region with the largest number of requests from new clients proportionally, with 2,360 per 100,000 population in 2024 to 2025. The North West is also the region with the largest number of requests proportionally to the population of people aged 65 and over, with 13,310 per 100,000 population. Regional comparison may be affected by variation in recording and reporting requests.

Route of access

The majority of requests made for new clients originated from the community (79%, 1.60 million). The next highest category was discharge from hospital, where 17% (335,000) of these requests originated from.

As seen in figure 1 below, the route of access for new clients differs by age group with a higher proportion (22%) of clients aged 65 and over requesting support at the point of discharge from hospital. Among requests for support from new clients aged 18 to 64, 7% were from hospital discharge.

Figure 1: proportion of requests for support, by route of access and age, 2024 to 2025

This data can be found in table 8 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page, and in the requests for support (STS001) CSV file.

Outcomes to requests for support

Outcomes to these requests have been determined based on the events that take place in the 3 months following each request. A single outcome is determined for each request, and a hierarchy is used to identify this where multiple actions are taken following a request.

This differs slightly from previous iterations of the activity and finance report, which did not have a time limit on outcomes but relied more on local authority context and judgement to determine relevant categorisation. As CLD is event level, many data lines have been processed to determine sequels - the accompanying methodology on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page describes how categories are defined. As such, these statistics should not be directly compared to SALT-based data from previous years. Particular care should be taken around the ongoing low support sequel, further information on this is in the data quality statement.

Of all requests by new clients in 2024 to 2025, 71% (1.44 million) resulted in no further action. This primarily includes cases where no services were provided by the local authority, or where people were given information and advice or signposted to other services outside of adult social care.

Other prevalent outcomes to requests include:

• short-term support, which was the outcome of 19% (390,000) of requests
• long-term support, which was the outcome of 6% (130,000) of requests

These outcomes of requests for support can sometimes be difficult to interpret and should not necessarily be seen as reflecting on the performance of a local authority and may be impacted by the circumstances around the requests being made.

Figure 2 shows that the outcomes of requests are different when comparing between age groups. A higher proportion of requests made for people aged 65 and over resulted in the provision of services (short-term care 23%, long-term care 8%) compared to requests for people aged 18 to 64 (short-term care 8%, long-term care 4%).

Figure 2: proportion of outcomes to requests by age group, 2024 to 2025

This data can be found in table 9 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page, and in the requests for support (STS001) CSV file.

2. Short-term support to maximise independence

Short-term support is care that is provided to people on a temporary basis (that is, with an expected end point). There are various situations which lead to the provision of short-term support, but it is defined by the expectation that it will end on a fixed date. When short-term support ends, the person receiving it may go on to:

• receive other social care support
• receive services outside of social care
• receive no further support

This report is focused on short-term support to maximise independence (ST-Max), which is also known as reablement. This support is typically delivered by a team of mainly care and support professionals, often provided after a hospital stay, and is intended to help people live independently in their own home and reduce their need for ongoing support from the local authority.

Local authorities can provide or commission reablement services as part of their duties to prevent, reduce or delay care needs under the Care Act 2014. If they do, the regulations require that these services are free of charge for up to 6 weeks.

Due to several factors affecting data coverage and quality, these statistics are not comparable to those published in previous years. See the accompanying data quality statement on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page for more information.

There are differences in how information on short-term care is collected between the adult social care finance return (ASC-FR) and the activity statistics presented here.

Detailed findings on ST-Max

In 2024 to 2025 there were 244,000 episodes of ST-Max for new clients (where a new client request is defined in this activity data as not having received long-term support over the last 3 months). The majority of those with a known primary support reason (91%) were for physical support where an individual requires help because they find physical tasks difficult to do by themselves, for example, following a fall or fracture.

There were also 34,000 episodes of ST-Max for existing clients (defined in this activity data as those who had received long-term support in the previous 3 months).

People can receive multiple episodes of ST-Max in a year. Across both new and existing clients, there were 278,000 episodes of ST-Max which were received by 245,000 people.

Of all of ST-Max for new clients:

• 216,000 were for people aged 65 and over
• 27,000 were for people aged 18 to 64

Figure 3 shows that physical support is the reason for providing support in the majority of cases for both age groups.

Figure 3: proportion of ST-Max for new clients, by primary support reason and age, 2024 to 2025

This data can be found in table 23 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page, and in the ST-Max (STS002) CSV file.

Outcomes following an episode of ST-Max for new clients

This section will discuss only the outcomes for new clients (where a new client request is defined in this activity data as not having received long-term support over the last 3 months). Outcomes are determined by the events that take place during and in the 7 calendar days following the ending of the ST-Max episode. This time limit has been used to prevent unrelated actions being attributed to the ST-Max episode, but it does mean that the metric is focused on the short-term outcomes of the ST-Max episodes. Longer-term outcomes may not be included in these statistics. In the SALT collection, there was no time limit imposed on outcome events and local authorities had access to additional information to determine outcomes. Therefore, statistics on the outcomes are not directly comparable to the SALT data from previous years.

A primary aim of ST-Max is to provide short-term rehabilitative support allowing a client to avoid ongoing long-term support needs.

As figure 4 below shows, ‘no further action’ was the most frequent outcome for both those aged 18 to 64 and aged 65 over. After this, for both age groups, the second most frequent outcome is the provision of long-term support: community.

Figure 4: proportion of episode for ST-Max for new clients, by what happened next and age band, 2024 to 2025

This data can be found in table 21 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page, and in the ST-Max (STS002) CSV file.

3. Long-term support

Long-term support is care provided or arranged by local authorities for individuals whose needs are expected to be ongoing, without a set end point. This includes support delivered in the community, residential care, nursing care and in prisons.

These statistics on long-term support are produced using a relatively simple methodology and using data which has relatively strong data quality. Therefore, these statistics closely match those created in previous years using SALT and can be compared directly to them. A time series of long-term support can be found in table 60 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page.

Detailed findings on long-term support

There were 672,000 people receiving long-term support at the end of the year (31 March 2025). Of these people, 59% (396,000) were aged 65 and over and 276,000 were aged 18 to 64.

There were 889,000 people who received long-term support at any time between 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025. Of those people, 495,000 people received long-term support throughout the entire 12-month period.

Figure 5 shows that people in long-term support are most commonly situated in community settings across both age groups. Among people aged 18 to 64, 86% (238,000) were in community settings. There were 61% (242,000) of people aged 65 and over in community settings. Residential and nursing settings are more prevalent for people aged 65 and over compared to people aged 18 to 64. Of the people receiving long-term support in nursing care settings, 88% were aged 65 and over. There were 77% of people receiving long-term support in residential care settings aged 65 and over.

Figure 5: number of people in long-term support at the end of the year (31 March 2025), by age group and support setting

This data can be found in table 38 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page, and in the long-term support (LTS001) CSV file.

Ethnicity of people receiving long-term support

On 31 March 2025, 546,000 people whose ethnicity was described as White in CLD were receiving long-term support. This was the largest ethnic group, representing 86% of the people who were receiving long-term support where ethnicity is known. This compares to 83% of the population of England, aged 18 and above, based on the 2021 census.

Figure 6 shows that the breakdowns of people receiving long-term support was different across support settings. In nursing (92%) and residential (94%) settings, there was a larger proportion of people whose ethnicity was described as White compared with people supported in community settings (82%).

Figure 6: proportion of people in long-term support at the end of the year (31 March 2025), by ethnicity and support setting, compared to the adult population

This data can be found in table 41 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page, and in the long-term support (LTS001) CSV file.

Gender of people receiving long-term support

On 31 March 2025, there were 378,000 females receiving long-term support, which represented 56% of those with a known gender in CLD. There were 294,000 (44%) males receiving long-term support at the same time and 395 people with a gender other than male or female.

CLD is based on administrative data from local authority case management systems, which are primarily designed for service delivery. As such, while the data collection is intended to collect gender, and has a gender field defined in the CLD guidance as ‘the gender the individual considers themselves to be’ which gives male, female and other options, recording practices for sex and gender can vary across councils.

Accommodation status of people receiving long-term support

Of the 889,000 people that received long-term support during 2024 to 2025:

• 590,000 (67% of people with a known accommodation status) people were living at home or with family
• 288,000 (33% of people with a known accommodation status) people were not living at home or with family

All people living in nursing homes, residential care homes and prison are categorised as not living at home or with family, in addition to some people receiving community support outside of their own or a family home.

Employment status of people receiving long-term learning disability support, aged 18 to 64

There were 137,000 recipients of long-term learning disability support during 2024 to 2025 who were aged 18 to 64. Of these recipients, 25,000 (18%) did not have a recorded employment status. Of those with a known employment status, 6,365 (6%) were in paid employment and 106,000 (94%) were not in paid employment.

Of those not in paid employment, 15,000 people were seeking work, 5,985 people were involved in voluntary work and 85,000 were not actively seeking work or were retired.

4. Reviews of long-term care and support plans

Local authorities have a legal responsibility to review the care and support plans of people receiving long-term support. These reviews may result in changes in a person’s care plan to make sure that their needs continue to be met and they can achieve their desired outcomes. It is the expectation that local authorities should conduct a review of the plan no later than every 12 months. People receiving care also have the right to request a review of their care and support plan at any time.

Recording of reviews in CLD is affected by several data quality issues which impact the CLD-based statistics in this report as well as the data in SALT from previous years. Local authorities have had difficulties in classifying whether reviews are planned or unplanned. In some cases in CLD, reviews are carried out alongside reassessments and are categorised as assessments or are recorded in local systems using labels outside of the scope of CLD. The statistics presented here include long-term assessment records for people receiving long-term support.

Detailed findings on reviews

Of clients who had been receiving long-term support for more than a year, 59% received a review between 2024 and 2025, that is, 293,000 people reviewed out of 495,000 people in long-term support for more than a year.

Figure 7 shows the proportion of clients being reviewed varied by region. The North East had the highest proportion of people receiving a review (76%), while the East of England had the lowest proportion of people receiving a review (51%).

Figure 7: proportion of clients accessing long-term support for more than 12 months at the end of the year, that were reviewed in the year, by region, 2024 to 2025

This data can be found in table 50 of the accompanying data tables on the Adult social care activity report, England: 2024 to 2025 page, and in the reviews (LTS002) CSV file.

People can receive multiple reviews in a year. Of the people receiving long-term support for over a year:

• 229,000 received a planned review
• 93,000 received an unplanned review
• 26,000 received a review of unrecorded type

Of all people receiving long-term support during the year, 498,000 (56%) received a review. In total, there were 715,000 reviews recorded of long-term care and support plans.