Maternity Care Survey 2025: national report

Introduction

This report presents the results of the Maternity Care Survey 2025. The survey was conducted between September 2025 and January 2026 and was sent to all eligible women who gave birth in Scotland between 1 February 2025 and 31 March 2025, who were aged 17 or over at the time of giving birth, who were resident in Scotland and who lived at the same address as the baby. It asked women about their experience of maternity services, from antenatal care through to postnatal care at home.

Over 6,000 women were invited to complete the survey and 1,775 responded. The response rate for the survey was approximately 28.5%, broadly in line with other recent government surveys.

Throughout this report the survey results are presented as weighted average percentages. Weighting provides results which are more representative of the people using the services. Percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number.

Survey results will be subject to a margin of error. Confidence intervals at the 95% level are reported in the accompanying Excel tables.

The Maternity Care Survey was last conducted in 2018. Over half of the questions have changed since the last iteration of the survey. This was to both improve questionnaire clarity and better capture aspects of the maternity journey that now have associated targets for improvement.

Where possible we have compared 2025 results to those from 2018. Any reported increases or decreases are statistically significant at the 5% level. We use the terms ‘same’, ‘similar’ and ‘consistent with’ where there is no difference or the difference is not statistically significant at the 5% level.

For more information on the survey methodology and changes from previous iterations of the survey, please see the Maternity Care Survey 2025 Technical Report.

All results are referred to as 2025 results although some antenatal care will have taken place in 2024 and some respondents filled in the survey in early 2026.