Top 30 causes of death since 2019 in England, Scotland and Wales

Release date:
6 August 2021

FOI/2021/2671​

You asked

Please supply a list of the top 30 causes of death and numbers for each cause for each month since December 2019 in England, Scotland and Wales.

We said

Thank you for your enquiry.

National Records Scotland (NRS) are responsible for statistics pertaining to Scotland. Should you wish to obtain this data for Scotland NRS contacted at foi@nrscotland.gov.uk.

Unfortunately, we would do not hold analysis showing the top 30 causes of deaths by month and constituent country. In order to fulfil this request, we would need to create bespoke analysis. Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, Public Authorities are not obligated to create information in order to respond to requests. We therefore consider this to be information not held.

We can supply the following links to information which may be of use:

Leading causes of death, UK: 2001 to 2018 which provides registered leading causes of death by age, sex and country. This is the latest data available.

Deaths by leading causes groupings by month of occurrence, England, 2015 to 2019

Provisional number of deaths due to the twenty-six most common leading causes of death in England, deaths registered in June 2021

The top 20 leading causes of death in England and Wales, for the period 2018 to 2020, are available to download via NOMIS. This is an interactive web service that provides mortality statistics for England and Wales, broken down by calendar year of registration, age, sex and area of usual residence. To create your own bespoke mortality data within NOMIS, please follow these instructions:

  • Select the geography (England and Wales, regional or by local authority).
  • Select Age - All ages or 5-year age bands.
  • Select Gender - Total or Male/Female
  • Select rates - All deaths, rates or percentage of population for example.
  • Select cause of death (ICD10 code search is available). A full cause of death (ICD-10) breakdown is available for selection, as well as a list of the 47 leading causes of mortality.
  • Select format (Excel or CSV for example)

For 2020 and 2021 the top 10 leading causes of death in England and Wales are published as part of our Monthly Mortality Analysis release.

The information you have requested may be available to commission as bespoke analysis. Such services would be subject to legal frameworks, disclosure controls, resources and agreement of costs. If you would like to request this bespoke dataset, please contact health.data@ons.gov.uk to discuss your enquiry further. Please note, there may be a charge for this work which would be subject to our charging policy.

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