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Monthly Data on Deaths Registered in Scotland

Last Updated: 14 March 2013

This page contains monthly data on deaths registered in Scotland.

Table 1 presents the numbers of deaths registered in Scotland, and each National Health Service (NHS) Board area, for every month since 1990. Please note that there may be some minor discrepancies between the figures which are given here and those that are appear in the Quarterly and Preliminary Annual tables, because the tables may have been extracted at different times, and a few 'late' records may have been added to the statistical database in the intervening period.

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Table 1

Deaths in Scotland by month of registration and NHS Board area, 1990-2012
(Excel PDF)

Notes (15 Kb PDF file)

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. For all enquiries on data availability please contact our Statistics Customer Services.

Time taken to register deaths

In Scotland there is a legal requirement to register deaths within 8 days. The overwhelming majority of deaths are registered within these limits. The chart below shows the number of days taken to register deaths in 2006. For deaths the mean interval was 2.3 days and the median interval was 1 day.

The file below has been made available as an Excel spreadsheet and can be viewed in Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF).

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Chart 2

Time taken to register a death in Scotland, 2006
(Excel PDF)