Weekly Data on Births and Deaths Registered in Scotland

Deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19) in Scotland - Weekly data on the number of deaths registered where coronavirus (COVID-19) is mentioned on the death certificate.  Also includes the weekly number of total deaths. Data covers deaths registered up until 3 days prior to publication date.  Includes breakdowns by age, sex and health board of residence.

This page contains summary weekly data on births and deaths registered in Scotland. Our aim is to provide monthly updates that will enable any emerging trends to be monitored.

In addition, from mid-August 2009 to mid-March 2010, because of concern about H1N1/swine flu, the National Records of Scotland (NRS) published each week provisional weekly totals for death registrations, and the numbers of these for which the cause of death was a respiratory disease. This information was available from the following page of our website:
Weekly Death Registrations - In Total and Caused by Respiratory Diseases.

Tables 1 and 2 list the weekly total numbers of births and deaths registered since 1974. Please note that there may be some minor discrepancies between the figures which are given here and those that appear in the Quarterly and Preliminary Annual tables. There are two reasons for this: first, the tables may have been extracted at different times, and a small number of records may have been added to the statistical database in the intervening period; second, a year does not contain a whole number of weeks, so weeks 1 and 52 (or 53) in a particular year may straddle more than one year. 

These tables have been amended to cover data back to 1974 (previously they started in 2004) due to increased interest in weekly death statistics.  The current method of allocating births and deaths to week numbers is ISO8601.  This was applied in 2016.  Until now, these tables had an inconsistency whereby years prior to 2016 used a different method for allocating weeks.  This has now been made consistent throughout the full time series and all week numbers are now based on the ISO8601 standard.  Figures may therefore differ slightly from those previously published.

The tables below has been made available as an Excel spreadsheet and can be viewed as Comma Separated Value (CSV) files from a Zipped folder and in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF).

When opening the spreadsheet files your browser, depending on how it's been configured, will prompt to either open the file or save it to disk.
Maximum file size is 41 KB.

Notes (77 KB PDF file)

Correction to Table 1 - 26 April 2018
We regret that an issue was discovered with the birth and death counts for the end of 2015 in table 1. Counts for week commencing 28/12/2015 were missing. This occurred because of the change in methodology for assigning weeks which occurred from the beginning of 2016 but which meant that the data for the final few days of 2015 were not being counted. These have now been reinstated to the table.

Date of registration versus date of occurrence

All routine vital events information we publish is based on the date of registration, not the date on which the event occurred. Inevitably, of course, there are delays between the occurrence of an event and its registration. From the information held on NRS databases it is possible to derive data relating to the actual date of the event. For detailed studies of short time periods we recommend that users consider using such data. Please contact our Statistics Customer Services if you need any further information.
E-mail: statisticscustomerservices@nrscotland.gov.uk

Time taken to register deaths

Statistics of the numbers of days between the dates on which events occurred and were registered are available from a separate section of our website:  Births and Deaths: Days until Registration