Which State Has The Longest Emergency Room Visit Time?

Emergency room wait times vary significantly across the United States depending on factors such as hospital resources, patient volume, and staffing levels, with some states facing delays that can stretch for more than three hours.

Long stays in the emergency department often point to issues like understaffing or overcrowding, leading to delays in treatment, and often times, worse patient health outcomes.

This map, via Visual Capitalist’s Kayla Zhu, visualizes the average time patients spend in the emergency department before leaving, by U.S. state and territory.

Data comes from the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and is updated as of Oct. 30, 2024.

This data reflects the average time patients spend at the emergency department, from the time they arrive to the time they leave, and excludes those who died in the emergency department, left without the approval of a licensed provider, or lacked documented discharge destinations.

Which State Has the Longest Emergency Room Visit Time?

Below, we show the average time patients spent in the emergency room before leaving, by state.

The median emergency room visit time in 2024 in the U.S. was 2 hours and 42 minutes. Twenty states had average emergency room visit times higher than the national average.

Washington, D.C. residents had the longest average emergency department visit times at 5 hours and 14 minutes, followed by Puerto Rico at 4 hours and 41 minutes.

These extended wait times in D.C. and Puerto Rico are likely due to a combination of high population density, limited healthcare resources, and potentially higher rates of uninsured patients seeking emergency care.

Rural and less populated states like North Dakota (1 hour 50 minutes), South Dakota (1 hour 53 minutes), and Nebraska (1 hour 54 minutes) had the shortest emergency room times, suggesting that lower patient loads and less crowded facilities contribute to faster processing.

Long emergency department waits worsen patient health, raise healthcare costs, and strain hospital resources, increasing risks of mortality and compromised care.

A University of South Caroline study found that prolonging the wait of a patient who arrives with a serious condition by 10 minutes will increase the hospital’s cost to care for the patient by an average of 6%.

To learn more about the health care landscape in the U.S., check out this graphic that visualizes the largest health insurance company in each U.S. state.