MethodologyWhere the numbers come from.
All figures are drawn from the UK Health Security Agency’s 2024 STI surveillance data, published in June and December 2025. Regional boundaries are from the ONS European Electoral Regions file, which matches UKHSA’s nine-region groupings.
Rates are per 100,000 population and use residence data – patients are counted in the region they live in, not the one they were tested in. New STI diagnoses include chlamydia, gonorrhoea, syphilis (primary, secondary and early latent), genital herpes (first episode), genital warts (first episode), trichomoniasis, scabies, molluscum, mycoplasma genitalium and a small residual “other” group.
A few things to know before quoting these numbers. The 2020 and 2021 figures reflect reduced clinic access during COVID, not lower transmission. Gender and sexual-orientation fields are self-reported at the clinic and completeness improved sharply from 2020 onwards. Rates for smaller demographic groups (e.g. WSW) carry wide confidence intervals; read percentage changes with care at low counts. Scabies is technically a mite infestation, not a sexually transmitted infection, but it’s reported here because sexual health clinics see a high volume of it.
Source tables used: UKHSA Table 1 (new STI diagnoses by gender), Table 2 (diagnoses and rates by gender, orientation, age and region), Table 9 (diagnoses by number of sex partners). Dataset version: 3 June 2025, updated 1 December 2025.