PSSRU unit costs and choosing the right estimate for analysis
Find PSSRU unit costs in Kent's official manual, choose the right service and cost unit, and check price years before using estimates in an analysis.
PSSRU unit costs of health and social care are estimates in Unit Costs of Health and Social Care for professional time, appointments and care services. The latest manual on Kent's programme page, checked on 2 November 2026, is the 2025 Manual. That page identifies the former PSSRU as COReC, the Care and Outcomes Research Centre, and describes collaboration with York's Centre for Health Economics (CHE) since 2022.
Which PSSRU unit costs edition should you use?
Open the Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2025 Manual. Its repository citation is Jones and colleagues (2026), and the listed publishers are PSSRU at the University of Kent and CHE at the University of York. But 2026 is the citation year, not the edition title.
Keep the edition title, citation year and price year apart. Read the price year in the selected estimate's notes. The cover year does not prove every figure uses that year's prices. For an older analysis, stay with the edition it cited until you have checked the assumptions.
What does a unit cost measure?
Kent's 2021 introduction says unit costs are the total expenditure incurred to produce one unit of output. Examples include an hour of nurse or GP time, a face-to-face appointment, a week in residential or nursing care, and a day-care attendance.
The method is bottom-up, so you can replace component data with your own. It also counts time that care staff spend away from clients. A working hour is not a patient-contact hour.
Wages are not the full professional rate. The introduction discusses qualifications and buildings. That does not mean every table includes them. Read the notes. These points come from the publisher's 2021 introduction, not the 2025 tables.
How to apply the PSSRU unit costs formula
This checklist is practical advice based on Kent's costing methodology. It is not an official mandatory protocol.
- Match the service, setting and provider type.
- Record the edition and the estimate's price year separately.
- Match the unit: working hour, patient-contact hour, appointment, attendance, day, week or package.
- Read the component notes and pick the matching cost variant.
- Calculate total cost = resource quantity × matching unit cost. Pair working hours with a working-hour rate, patient-contact hours with a patient-contact-hour rate, and appointments with an appointment rate.
- Don't add a component already in the rate. Note any substitution and any justified price-year change.
Don't assume the rate includes overheads, travel, tests or medicines. If the notes are silent, that question stays open.
Kent's Unit Costs Adjuster can select elements, time units and settings. Its page says it is linked to the 2024 manual, and access requires a licensing process. Don't treat it as a calculator for the 2025 manual.
Finding PSSRU 2012 and 2014 estimates
Older years are in Kent's 2003 to 2021 archive. Use that archive for the year you need, not a PDF copy hosted elsewhere. Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2012 and Unit Costs of Health and Social Care 2014 were compiled by Lesley Curtis. Both citations name the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent, Canterbury.
Use them to reproduce an old analysis, not as current rates. Uprate only with the original price year and a suitable index. Both pages ask you to acknowledge Unit Costs of Health and Social Care as the source. Record the edition and the table or page so another analyst can find the same figure.
NHS England costs and Norway's database
NHS England's National Cost Collection gives average unit costs for defined NHS services in England, plus patient-level costs. It is a different source from the PSSRU and CHE manual. Kent's 2021 introduction says its hospital-service averages drew on NHS reference costs.
RegAffairs AI also explains what PSSRU unit costs are.
Norway's DMP enhetskostnadsdatabase is separate, and its prices are in NOK. DMP says to check whether a cost represents the assessment, and to explain departures with public sources. Currency conversion alone does not make a UK estimate fit a Norwegian analysis.