£6.5 Million NHS Breast Removal Bill Rose 52 Per Cent in Two Years
November 1, 2026 · Frisian News
NHS data show 1,115 breast-removal operations on gender-dysphoria patients in 2024-25, up 52 per cent from two years earlier, costing an estimated £6.5 million as wider NHS spending faces scrutiny.
The NHS carried out 1,115 breast-removal operations on adults assigned female at birth who identify as male in 2024-25, up 52 per cent from 734 two years earlier. At an estimated £5,800 per procedure, Freedom of Information data obtained by The Telegraph put the annual bill at £6.5 million.
More than 900 such operations have already taken place in the current financial year. The NHS says the procedures are available only to adults referred by a specialist at an NHS England-commissioned gender identity clinic after assessment for gender dysphoria, a process that typically takes years from first appointment to surgery.
The mastectomy figure is one line in a much larger account. Daily Mail data secured under FOI show the NHS spent £250 million on surgical and non-surgical transgender treatments in the five years to early 2025. In the first ten months of 2024-25 alone the figure reached £88 million, up a fifth on the previous full year. Spending is now estimated at more than £100 million annually.
That sum exceeds the NHS annual spend on standard anti-depressants (£91.5 million), penicillin (£83 million) and beta-blockers (£73 million), according to the same Daily Mail data. The same data show the NHS declined to fund Enhertu, a drug that gives women with advanced breast cancer an extra six months of life, because its cost of around £118,000 per patient was judged too expensive.
The Daily Mail report noted that NHS England's total budget in 2024-25 stood at £187 billion. On that base, the £6.5 million mastectomy bill amounts to 0.003 per cent. The NHS estimates all gender reassignment surgery costs around £21 million a year, or 0.01 per cent of the budget.
The NHS says an updated service specification for adult surgical gender care is in development and will be subject to public consultation. Meanwhile, more than 900 operations have already taken place in the current financial year.
Helen Joyce, director of advocacy at Sex Matters, told The Telegraph: "These operations destroy healthy function and create a host of miserable complications, including a high likelihood of chronic pain, repeated infection and incontinence as well as sterility." She said it was "only a matter of time before these surgeries are looked back on with the same sort of horror as lobotomies."
One case reported in the Daily Mail concerns Sinead Watson, who underwent a double mastectomy two years after her first gender clinic appointment and later detransitioned. She told the paper she was "devastated" and "too ashamed to ever take my shirt off in public," adding that she looked like "a woman who had taken testosterone and had a double mastectomy." Multiple studies, including research published by the British Psychological Society, put the detransition rate below 1 per cent, though some UK studies place it at up to 7 per cent, according to the Daily Mail.
Published November 1, 2026 · Frisian News