Or choose your ICB
What the rule means
NICE guidance recommends that female same-sex couples who have not conceived after artificial insemination should be offered NHS fertility treatment. In practice most ICBs in England first expect you to pay privately for 6, 10 or 12 cycles of artificial insemination (usually intrauterine insemination, IUI, at roughly £900 to £1,250 a cycle plus donor sperm) to "prove" infertility, something heterosexual couples demonstrate by two years of trying for free. The 2022 Women's Health Strategy for England said this requirement would be removed. As the table shows, in most areas it has not been.
A few ICBs now fund the insemination cycles themselves (the data marks these as NHS-funded). Others are "under review", which is worth asking about directly because policies change part-way through a year.
What you can do
- Get the actual policy. Every ICB publishes its fertility commissioning policy as a PDF. Search "[your ICB name] fertility policy". The GOV.UK summary this tool uses is a snapshot; the PDF is what a clinic applies.
- Ask your GP to refer you anyway and ask the fertility clinic what evidence they will accept. Some accept fewer cycles, or cycles done abroad or at home with a licensed clinic's involvement, and some count cycles you have already had.
- Individual funding request. If your circumstances are exceptional, your GP or clinic can submit one to the ICB. They rarely succeed on the same-sex rule alone, but they create a record.
- Complain and escalate. The ICB complaints team, then the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. Write to your MP; this is a live political issue with a Parliament petition and repeated ministerial commitments.
- Support and campaigning: LGBT Mummies, Stonewall on the IVF postcode lottery, and Fertility Network UK.
Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and trans people
This tool's postcode lookup covers England, where policy is set by 42 ICBs. The other nations each set one national policy. As summarised by Stonewall's IVF for All campaign, checked September 2026:
- Scotland: female same-sex couples who meet the general criteria can get up to 6 cycles of NHS-funded donor insemination followed by 1 to 3 cycles of IVF depending on age. No self-funded cycles are required. Criteria in place since April 2017. NHS inform.
- Wales: six cycles of artificial insemination are required to demonstrate infertility before NHS IVF, and IUI is not funded by the Welsh Health Specialised Services Committee, so whether you pay depends on your health board. A policy review was due in 2025; check WHSSC for the current position.
- Northern Ireland: the published criteria are the same for all couples, but in practice same-sex couples without a diagnosed fertility condition are expected to have had unsuccessful insemination cycles first. One publicly funded round is offered. Regional Fertility Centre eligibility.
Before you conceive, check who the law will treat as your child's parents: whether your partner is a legal parent depends on marriage or civil partnership at conception, whether a UK licensed clinic is used, and which forms are signed first. Legal Parent Check walks through it in five questions.
If you are trans or non-binary and want to store eggs or sperm before hormones or surgery, that is fertility preservation, commissioned separately from IVF and usually by NHS England rather than your ICB. Ask your gender clinic or GP for a referral before starting treatment; storage is time-sensitive.
Source and limits
Data is taken directly from the Department of Health and Social Care's page NHS-funded IVF in England, which summarises each ICB's policy.
This is a signpost, not advice. Policies change; the ICB's own document and your clinic's interpretation are what count. No cookies, no accounts, no tracking. Open source on GitHub; corrections welcome.