Choose a fertility clinic

Before your start your search, it’s important to make sure you understand what our Choose a Fertility Clinic tool has to offer and what to be looking for in a prospective clinic. Please take your time to read through the below information.

• How should I choose a clinic?
• What data does the HFEA publish?
• Why are there different success rates?
• Why is comparing success rates difficult?
• What are reliability ranges?

How should I choose a clinic?

If you’re paying for treatment yourself you’ll want to make sure you’re choosing the right clinic, but with so many to choose from deciding which one best meets your needs can feel a bit overwhelming.

It may be tempting to rely solely on success rates but the reality is that most clinics are broadly all as good as each other – small differences in rates are usually down to the different types of patients treated.

Finding out how other patients and our inspectors rate the clinic, the clinic’s opening hours and location and whether they have a female doctor could all be equally important factors to consider.

Find out more about what to look for in a clinic

Read more about our latest decisions on clinics

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What data does the HFEA publish?

We collect data from fertility clinics and publish much of it on our website, including individual clinic success rates. You will see full data on treatments, pregnancies and births from January 2022 to December 2024.

Individual clinic rates can’t tell you how likely you are to have a baby. Look instead at the national rate on Choose a Fertility Clinic or visit our research and data page for the latest statistics.

Using the data on our website you can view the success rates for different clinics safe in the knowledge that they’ve been calculated in exactly the same way. Please note, we don’t publish figures for clinics performing very small numbers of cycles as the results can be misleading.

If you’re looking for clinic data, head to the top of this page to search for a clinic and view: how inspectors rate the clinic; how patients rate the clinic; pregnancy and birth rates from different fertility treatments, multiple birth rates and waiting times for donated eggs, sperm or embryos.

We look after data from clinics about patients and treatments very carefully.

How we manage your data

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Why are there different success rates?

There are different ways of presenting success, we use births per egg collection procedure and births per embryo transferred. You can find these two measures, along with multiple birth rate, for each licensed clinic on the Choose a Fertility Clinic section of our website.

Both these measures have their pros and cons, and your clinic might use either or both of them. We show births per embryo transferred and births per egg collection procedure against some key indicators for each clinic because we believe they provide the appropriate measure of a clinic’s practices and success.

For greater detail on the overall clinic performance in the various age groups you can click through to the detailed statistics page to see both pregnancy and birth rates per cycle of treatment and per embryo transferred.

Remember, whichever measure you focus on it can’t tell you your individual measure of success (only your doctor can do that); but each measure does give you a fair overall view of the clinic’s performance.

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Why is comparing success rates difficult?

It’s extremely difficult to compare clinic success rates fairly. This is because success rates depend on the patients being treated and the reason for their infertility.

In addition, some clinics specialise in treating people with certain types of infertility or older women who are less likely to be successful, which will impact on their rate. That’s why we recommend you consider all the issues that matter to you – from opening hours to counselling provision – when choosing a clinic and not rely solely on the data.

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What are reliability ranges?

When we present a clinic’s success rates, we also present what we call a ‘reliability range.’ The reliability range is designed to show how confident we are that a clinic will repeat their success rates in the future – generally the larger the clinic, the more confident we can be and the narrower the range is. This is because if a clinic has performed a large number of cycles then chance events won’t have a big impact on their overall success rate. However, the success rates of small clinics could change dramatically if they had just 10 more successes or failures. We therefore use the reliability range to show you the range of possible success rates a clinic might have in the future.

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