a seriesHFEA fertility treatment results

What every licensed fertility clinic in the United Kingdom did, and what came of it. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has collected data on all IVF and donor insemination treatments in the UK since 1 August 1991 under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, and publishes it two ways: an annual report, and a clinic-by-clinic comparison tool. The latest report, Fertility treatment 2024, was published on 16 June 2026 from a register snapshot taken on 6 May 2026.

The scale first. In 2024, 64,000 patients underwent over 100,000 treatment and freezing cycles at HFEA-licensed clinics; the register handles roughly a hundred thousand cycles a year and, in the Authority's own words, "is believed to be the longest running database of fertility treatment in the world". The average IVF birth rate per embryo transferred was 30% in 2024 — 38% for patients aged 18 to 34 and 8% for those aged 43 to 44. Birth outcomes for 2024 are marked preliminary, because outcomes arrive after the cycles do.

The regulator publishes the clinic table and then argues against reading it the way people read it: "Use success rates as a rough guide and not a prediction", because "differences of just one or two percentage points are often down to chance rather than being a reflection of a clinic's abilities: a clinic that's performing particularly well one year may have lower success rates the following year and vice versa". A published comparison and a warning not to compare, in the same place, by the same body.

The boundary is what makes this series matter to a directory about travel. Everyone treated in a licensed UK clinic is in the Register "regardless of a person's residence", and regions are assigned "based on the location of the clinic rather than patient's residency". So a woman who flies into London is counted, and the same woman flying out to Alicante, Prague or Kyrenia is not, because those clinics are "not regulated by the HFEA".

Inference — that asymmetry runs one way for every patient leaving a regulated market. On the British side of a decision there is a named clinic, a dated birth rate, a licence and a complaints route; on the other side, for most destinations in this directory, no register of the same grain was found when this record was written. The comparison a traveller wants to make cannot be made from one side of it.