Every NHS Trust in England submits an Estates Return Information Collection (ERIC) return each year. The aggregate data is published by NHS England Digital, and it contains some of the most useful benchmarking information available to estates professionals — yet most Estates Directors have never systematically compared their trust against it. This article explains what ERIC measures, what the 2024/25 data tells us, and how to use it to have an evidence-based conversation about your estates budget.
What ERIC Actually Measures
ERIC is a mandatory annual return covering all NHS trusts and ambulance trusts in England. It captures the cost of providing, maintaining, and servicing the physical NHS estate — buildings, plant, equipment, and the services that run them. The collection covers four broad areas: hard facilities management (maintenance, statutory compliance), soft facilities management (cleaning, catering, portering), utilities (energy, water), and capital investment (new build, backlog reduction).
What makes ERIC useful for benchmarking is its granularity. The site-level CSV file contains individual trust data across more than 150 fields — everything from cleaning cost per square metre to the number of single bedrooms with en-suites. The national summary tables aggregate this into percentile bands that allow you to see where your trust sits relative to the national distribution.
ERIC uses occupied floor area (OFA) — not gross internal area (GIA) — as the denominator for most cost per m² metrics. A trust with large car parks or plant rooms would have its costs artificially diluted if GIA were used instead. Always check which measure your trust is using before comparing figures.
The 2024/25 Headlines
The 2024/25 ERIC data, published in October 2025, presents a picture of an estate under severe and accelerating strain. The maintenance backlog has reached a record level, surpassing the entire annual cost of running the NHS estate for the first time. Several key metrics are worth understanding in detail.
ERIC 2024/25
ERIC 2023/24
England
The maintenance backlog — the estimated cost of bringing the estate back to a defined condition — has risen more than 15% in a single year, with high-risk backlog (repairs needed to prevent catastrophic failure) rising 28% to £3.5 billion. This is not an abstract accounting figure: it represents real risk to patient safety, staff retention, and regulatory compliance.
The Metrics That Matter for Your Trust
The ERIC data contains dozens of fields, but for an Estates Director making the case for resources, four metrics are most useful.
1. Maintenance Cost per m² (OFA)
This is the most commonly cited benchmark. It represents the total cost of maintaining the estate — planned preventive maintenance, reactive maintenance, statutory compliance work — divided by occupied floor area. The national distribution for acute trusts in 2023/24 runs from around £35/m² at the lower quartile to £95/m² at the upper quartile, with a median around £62–65/m².
A trust sitting above the upper quartile is not necessarily spending recklessly — it may have an older estate, a higher proportion of clinical space, or a large backlog generating reactive maintenance spend. But it will need to explain that position to its CFO and its ICS. A trust below the lower quartile may be under-investing, which shows up as backlog growth over time.
A trust at or near the national median (£62–65/m²) with a stable or declining backlog ratio is in a defensible position. A trust at the upper quartile should be able to attribute the premium to specific factors — estate age, clinical complexity, planned backlog reduction programme — rather than operational inefficiency.
2. Cleaning Cost per m² (OFA)
ERIC 2023/24 reports total NHS cleaning spend of £1.5 billion across approximately 25 million m² of occupied estate, implying a national average of £60/m². However, this figure includes materials, equipment, and management overhead — not just labour. Cleaning cost varies significantly by facility type: acute wards with high-frequency clinical cleaning under NatSoC 2025 FR1 and FR2 zones cost substantially more per m² than administrative or outpatient areas.
The introduction of NatSoC 2025 and its FR1–FR6 functional risk classification system has changed the benchmarking context. Cleaning specifications are now driven by risk zone rather than area category, which means trusts that have properly implemented the 2025 standard will see their compliance costs structured differently to those still operating on the 2021 Cat A/B/C framework.
3. Backlog as a Percentage of Estate Replacement Cost
The backlog figure in isolation is less useful than the backlog ratio — the backlog expressed as a percentage of the gross replacement cost of the estate. NHS Premises Assurance Model (PAM) guidance suggests a backlog ratio above 25% represents a significant compliance risk. Many trusts are now well above this threshold.
| Backlog Band | Risk Level | PAM Implication | Typical Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| <5% of GRC | Low | PAM Domain 4 green | Normal planned maintenance cycle |
| 5–15% of GRC | Moderate | PAM Domain 4 amber | 3–5 year backlog reduction programme |
| 15–25% of GRC | Significant | PAM Domain 4 red | Board-level risk acceptance + capital bid |
| >25% of GRC | High/Critical | Material compliance risk | Prioritised critical infrastructure programme |
4. Energy Cost per m²
NHS trusts collectively consumed approximately 11.1 billion kWh in 2023/24. Energy costs have become the fastest-growing component of the estates budget for many trusts, driven by utility price volatility since 2022. The ERIC energy metrics allow trusts to benchmark their consumption intensity (kWh/m²) against peer facilities, which is the starting point for any meaningful energy reduction programme.
How to Read Your Trust's Position
The ERIC dataset is publicly available at NHS England Digital. The site-level CSV file allows you to filter by trust type, region, and individual organisation. To benchmark your trust, the process is straightforward: download the current year's site-level data, filter to your peer group (acute trusts of similar size and clinical complexity), and calculate where your key metrics sit in the distribution.
Comparing your trust's ERIC maintenance cost per m² against the national average without adjusting for facility type, estate age, and clinical mix produces misleading conclusions. A 1960s DGH with a high proportion of acute wards is structurally more expensive to maintain than a purpose-built community hospital built in 2010. The comparison group matters more than the headline figure.
The three questions to answer from ERIC data are: Where do we sit in the national distribution for our peer group? Is our position stable, improving, or deteriorating year-on-year? Can we explain any outlier positions with reference to specific estate characteristics rather than operational inefficiency?
The PAM 2026-27 Connection
The NHS Premises Assurance Model 2026-27 has shifted from a self-assurance framework to a compliance evidence framework. The language of "assurance" has been largely replaced by "compliance" — meaning trusts need to demonstrate, with documentary evidence, that they are meeting PAM requirements, not simply assert it.
ERIC data is directly cited in PAM assessments. Your trust's maintenance cost position, backlog ratio, and compliance with statutory maintenance requirements all appear in PAM Domain 4 (Safety). A trust that cannot explain its ERIC position in the context of its estate strategy is at risk in any PAM assessment — whether that is a self-assessment submission or an external review.
What This Means in Practice
The most useful thing an Estates Director can do with ERIC data is build a simple one-page benchmark dashboard for the Board. This should show your trust's position on five or six key metrics relative to the national peer group distribution, with a year-on-year trend line. When the CFO asks why the estates budget needs to increase, this dashboard is the evidence base — not an assertion that the estate is under-funded, but a demonstration of where the trust sits relative to trusts of comparable size and complexity.
At Sustain International, we use ERIC data as the starting point for every NHS FM engagement — whether that is a full workforce study, a backlog prioritisation exercise, or a benchmarking programme ahead of a TFM procurement. The data is public. The interpretation is the professional value.
Run your trust against the ERIC benchmarks
Our NHS FM Workforce Estimator gives you an instant labour cost index benchmarked against ERIC 2023/24 national data. Request a full ERIC Benchmarking Report for a structured analysis of your trust's position across 15 metrics.
Use the FM Estimator →Sources: NHS England Digital, ERIC 2023/24 Provisional Summary Figures (published December 2024); NHS England Digital, ERIC 2024/25 Summary (published October 2025); NHS England, Delivering Productivity Through the NHS Estate (2023); Health Foundation, The NHS Maintenance Backlog: Rising Costs and Falling Investment (December 2024); NHS Premises Assurance Model 2026-27, NHS England.