The King hosted three state visits in 2025, including one by Donald Trump, the US President, in September. Photo / Getty Images
The King hosted three state visits in 2025, including one by Donald Trump, the US President, in September. Photo / Getty Images
The King has overtaken his younger sister to be named the hardest-working member of the royal family in 2025, despite undergoing weekly cancer treatment.
He conducted more engagements last year than the industrious Princess Royal, traversing the country, hosting three high-profile state visits and travelling to Italy, Canada, and Poland.
An analysis of engagements recorded in the Court Circular found that between them, the 10 working royals managed 23% more jobs in 2025 than in 2024, a year in which both the King and the Princess of Wales were diagnosed with cancer.
Patricia Treble, an analyst, described the King as “indefatigable” and said that as the year progressed, “it felt like the House of Windsor was making up for lost time”.
The King conducted more engagements in 2025 than his sister, the industrious Princess Royal. Photo / Getty Images
Her research found that the King conducted 533 engagements in 2025, while his sister had 478, albeit working on more days overall – 186.
Following closely behind were the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, with 313 and 235 respectively.
Next came the Queen, who kept busy with 228 engagements, and the Duke of Gloucester, who ploughed on with little fanfare, conducting 212 engagements.
The Duke, who at 81 is the second oldest working member of the royal family, outpaced the Prince of Wales, who carried out 202 engagements in 2025, up from 139 the previous year.
The Duchess of Gloucester, 79, managed 113, while the Duke of Kent, 90, conducted 77 engagements in the year he lost his wife, the Duchess of Kent, who died at 92 in September.
The official visit to Canada last May was one of three conducted by the King and Queen in 2025. Photo / Getty Images
The Princess of Wales, who revealed at the beginning of last year that she was in remission from cancer, conducted 68 public engagements.
In July, she revealed that the road to recovery was proving harder than she had expected, saying during a visit to Colchester Hospital in Essex: “You put on a sort of brave face, stoicism through treatment”.
“Treatment’s done, then it’s like, ‘I can crack on, get back to normal’, but actually, the phase afterwards is really, really difficult.
“You’re not necessarily under the clinical team any longer, but you’re not able to function normally at home as you perhaps once used to.”
The Waleses’ comparatively light workload may provoke the occasional raised eyebrow at Buckingham Palace, but they have long insisted that they wish to approach their public roles differently, with a focus on creating effects rather than simply showing their faces to cut a ribbon.
They have also made clear that they will prioritise family life while their three children are still young, ring-fencing all school holidays and conducting the daily school run.
In 2024, the King, who was forced to step back from public-facing royal duties for a few months after being diagnosed with cancer, carried out 353 engagements.
He recently announced that his cancer treatment had proved so successful that from this month he would be “significantly” reducing his weekly treatment for what Buckingham Palace described as a “precautionary phase”.
Treble’s analysis found that overall, the working royals undertook 2459 engagements in 2025, up 23% from the 2001 engagements of 2024.
All of them aside from the Duchess of Edinburgh and the Duke of Kent increased their workload by a significant margin, ranging from Princess Anne’s 10.39% to the Princess of Wales’ 423%, a figure that reflected the fact that she largely stepped back from the public eye in 2024 as she underwent chemotherapy.
Treble told the Telegraph: “If there is one takeaway from the data this year, it’s that the working royals are doing okay, for now.
“But their numbers are shrinking – now 10, compared to 16 in 2018 – and there is no avoiding the effect that getting older is having on how much work they can do, and where they can do it.
“Yet, the King is indefatigable. The 533 engagements he did in 2025 were the most he’d done since 2019, when he did 541.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.
