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Submitting IAPT data

All organisations that provide NHS funded IAPT services in England must submit data. This page explains the data you need to submit and how.

New name for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT)

Following an extensive engagement process, NHS England national mental health team has recently announced a new name for Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) services: NHS Talking Therapies, accompanied by the following tagline: for anxiety and depression.

For further information about the name change, please visit the NHS England pages What’s in a name? NHS Talking Therapies, for anxiety and depression the new name for IAPT services.

The data set will continue to be referred to as ‘IAPT’ until the next uplift of the data set has received DAPB approval.

How to submit data to the SDCS Cloud

For information and guidance on the SDCS Cloud, including how to register for a user account and guidance on submitting data, please see the Strategic Data Collection Service (SDCS) Cloud web page.


Data quality and submission tool

When you submit data to SDCS Cloud, the system generates a report describing the data quality errors and warnings present in your submission. 

In July 2020, we ran a webinar which explored data quality issues and provided guidance on how to improve data quality in your submissions.

We have provided some additional guidance about the IAPT summary reports and submission updates 

 


Intermediate Database (IDB) Guidance

The intermediate database (IDB) is available to download for IAPT v2.1 submissions from April 2022 data onwards.  

The database can only be accessed and downloaded from the NHS Digital Technology Reference Data Update Distribution (TRUD) pages.  Previously the IDB was available to users via the NHS Digital Contact Centre, however this is no longer applicable.

For full, detailed guidance on using the the IDB including how to create a TRUD account, please visit the guidance pages below. 

 

Change to submission windows

To provide more timely statistics in the NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics Including Employment Advisors publication series, revised submission windows will be introduced to support a move to reporting data in the month following activity starting with October 2023 activity data.


Activity data related to October, will be captured in November, and reported upon in the December 2023 publication.  Statistics presented in the NHS Talking Therapies Monthly Statistics Including Employment Advisors publication series will therefore be derived from data captured in the current provisional window (formerly called the primary window).

Going forward this single window and the publication will be termed the performance window and the performance publication respectively, reflecting that it will be employed to assess performance.

As with the current situation, a second window will remain in place and providers will have the ability to re-submit data in the month following the new performance window. This has historically been termed the refresh (or performance) submission window and will now be referred to as the final window.

Any data submitted in the final window will feed into rolling measures within future publications and the publication of annual statistics at the end of the financial year (there will not be a second monthly publication directly following the final window). 


Submission dates

Dates for submissions for April 2025 to April 2026 performance data are shown in the table below.

Final month Performance month Submission window opens at 00.01am Submission window closes at 11.59pm
March 2025 April 2025 1 May 2025 27 May 2025
April 2025 May 2025 1 June 2025 25 June 2025
May 2025 June 2025 1 July 2025 28 July 2025
June 2025 July 2025 1 August 2025 28 August 2025
July 2025 August 2025 1 September 2025 24 September 2025
August 2025 September 2025 1 October 2025 27 October 2025
September 2025 October 2025 1 November 2025 26 November 2025
October 2025 November 2025 1 December 2025 23 December 2025
November 2025 December 2025 1 January 2026 27 January 2026
December 2025 January 2026 1 February 2026 25 February 2026
January 2026 February 2026 1 March 2026 25 March 2026
February 2026 March 2026 1 April 2026 29 April 2026
March 2026 April 2026 1 May 2026 28 May 2026

Contact us

If you have a general enquiry about the data set, contact us at [email protected]  or telephone us on 0300 303 5678.

Last edited: 16 May 2025 4:27 pm