8,933 Launches and Counting: The RNLI Across the UK and Ireland in 2025

At Everycast Labs, we built Dottie Boards because we're fascinated by the work the RNLI does. Our RNLI Lifeboat Tracker is an LED display that lights up in real time as lifeboat stations launch across the UK and Ireland — and the Unofficial RNLI Stats dashboard is powered by the same data infrastructure, giving anyone free access to explore the numbers behind those launches.

The 2025 data is in, and it paints a pretty clear picture of just how spread out the RNLI's work really is.

8,933 launches in a single year

Across more than 230 active lifeboat stations, the RNLI launched 8,933 times in 2025. That works out at roughly 24 launches every day.

What stands out is how geographically spread those launches are. They're not concentrated around a handful of busy ports. They're happening on the Shetland Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, in the Bristol Channel, up the Thames, around the Scottish locks and Irish loughs, and everywhere in between.

Summer surges, but never a quiet month

If you look at the monthly breakdown, the seasonal pattern is clear. August was the busiest month with 1,506 launches (nearly 17% of the entire year), followed by July at 1,340 and June at 1,194. The summer months from May to August alone accounted for over 5,000 launches — more than half the annual total.

That makes sense: more people on the water, more visitors to the coast, more recreational activity. But even in the quieter months, the numbers don't exactly drop off a cliff. January and February still saw over 300 launches each. December brought 377.

Days that broke 100 launches

The monthly totals tell one story, but the individual days are something else. During August 2025, there were days when the RNLI launched over 100 times in a single 24-hour period. On 12th August alone, there were 120 launches — five an hour, spread across stations from Shetland to the Scilly Isles. At one point during the day, it felt like our Dottie Boards were going off every five minutes — station after station lighting up across the map in quick succession. It's one thing to see the numbers in a spreadsheet afterwards; it's another thing entirely to watch it happen in real time on the board sitting on your desk.

It's also worth saying that these numbers only tell part of the story. The data we collect through Dottie Boards tracks launch pagers — the call that goes out when a lifeboat is asked to launch immediately. What it doesn't capture are the many other types of alert, such as immediate readiness pagers, where crews are called to the station and standing by, ready to launch at a moment's notice. We also don't know about cancelled launches - so our numbers are always going to be a little out. The Thames stations show us that not every station is even on the pager system; some of our data only exists because dedicated crew members found creative ways to share it with us. The numbers you see on our dashboard or on a Dottie Board represent a floor, not a ceiling.

From the Thames to the Aran Islands

One of the things we enjoy about watching the data come in is the sheer variety of locations.

The busiest station in 2025 was Tower on the Thames in central London, with 139 launches — and that comes with a big caveat. Tower, along with Chiswick (105 launches) and Gravesend (113), aren't on the standard pager system that feeds our data. We only started receiving their launch information halfway through the year, thanks to the ingenuity of amazing crew members at those stations who found ways to get us their data. Tower topped the entire table with barely six months of figures. With a full year, it would likely be the busiest station by a comfortable margin.

Add in Teddington (72 launches) and the Thames stations collectively represent a huge share of RNLI activity. The Thames is one of the busiest stretches of water in the country, and these crews are out there constantly.

Down on the south coast, Bembridge and Plymouth both recorded 128 launches, while Eastbourne and Torbay each hit 125. On the Welsh coast, Tenby logged 119 and Porthcawl 93. Over in Scotland, Broughty Ferry near Dundee reached 102, and Kinghorn on the Firth of Forth managed 91.

The reach extends right across Ireland too: Howth near Dublin recorded 65 launches, Dun Laoghaire hit 61, the Aran Islands out in the Atlantic managed 62, and Arranmore off Donegal's coast clocked 57. Even inland, Lough Ree in the Irish midlands saw 22 launches — the RNLI operates on lakes and loughs as well as the open ocean.

Further north, stations like Oban (61), Stornoway (28), Portree on Skye (33), and Lerwick in Shetland (21) show just how far the RNLI's coverage extends. Over on the Isle of Man, stations at Port Erin, Peel, Douglas, and Ramsey between them responded to dozens of calls. And in the Channel Islands, St Helier, St Peter Port, and Alderney all contributed their share too.

Busting the "taxi service" myth

There's a persistent idea that the RNLI primarily operates as a taxi service for migrants crossing the English Channel. The data doesn't support that.

Of the major English Channel stations — Dover, Ramsgate, Margate, Walmer, and Dungeness — only Ramsgate barely scrapes into the top 20 busiest stations, at 18th place with 93 launches. Dover sits just outside with 89. Margate managed 49, Dungeness 41, and Walmer 39. Combined, all five Channel stations account for just 311 launches — roughly 3.5% of the RNLI's total activity for the year. Meanwhile, stations like Broughty Ferry on the Tay, Blackpool on the Irish Sea coast, Tenby in Pembrokeshire, and Porthcawl in South Wales are all busier.

It's also worth noting that our data only tells you that a launch pager went off, not why. We track pager activations — we have no information about the reason behind any individual launch. Only the RNLI themselves hold that data, and they publish their own detailed statistics later in the year. What we can say from the numbers is that the vast majority of RNLI activity happens well away from the English Channel — lifeboats launching from hundreds of stations right across the UK and Ireland, responding to people in trouble on the water.

The top 20 tells a story of its own

Looking at the top 20 busiest stations, they span a huge geographic range: from Tower and Gravesend on the Thames, to Blackpool on the Irish Sea coast, to Broughty Ferry in eastern Scotland, to Falmouth in Cornwall. No single region dominates. The RNLI's workload is national and cross-border, covering both the UK and the Republic of Ireland.

The load is also surprisingly evenly distributed. The busiest station (Tower, 139 launches — and that's with only half a year of data) accounts for just 1.6% of all launches. The top 20 combined only represent about 23% of the total. The remaining 77% is spread across more than 200 other stations — many of them in smaller coastal communities where the lifeboat crew are volunteers who drop everything when the pager goes off.

Why we built Dottie Boards around this data

We created the Unofficial RNLI Stats dashboard and our physical Dottie Boards because we think this data deserves to be seen. The same processing pipeline powers both: the LED board on your wall and the stats you can explore online are drawing from exactly the same source, updating simultaneously.

The Dottie Board itself is an LED map of the UK and Ireland. When a lifeboat launches, the corresponding station lights up. It tracks daily, weekly, and annual launch counts, and gives you that ambient awareness of the RNLI's work that you just don't get from occasional news stories. You can personalise yours via the Dottie Board settings — choose which counters to show (day, week, month, year), set your board name, and adjust colours for the map and stations.

It's officially licensed by the RNLI, and 5% of profits go directly to supporting their work.

Every launch is a crew who responded — and a whole team that made it possible

Behind those 8,933 launches are not just the lifeboat crews who head out to sea, but entire station teams of volunteers who drop everything when the call comes. 97% of RNLI frontline lifesavers are volunteers — ordinary people from all walks of life who give their time freely.

For them, a pager alert might interrupt a family dinner, pause a birthday celebration, pull someone from work, or wake them in the dead of night — with no way of knowing if they'll be back in an hour or many hours later.

It's never just the crew on the boat: at each station, volunteers handle launch and recovery (shore crew who prepare the boat, drive tractors, or operate slipways), act as launch authorities to authorise the shout, maintain engines and equipment, manage operations day-to-day, handle press and communications, and much more. These roles — along with thousands of community fundraisers who organise events, collections, and awareness efforts nationwide — are all unpaid and powered by people in coastal and inland communities.

While a small number of specialist roles (such as some full-time coxswains, engineers, and the shift-based crews on the Thames) are paid to ensure constant readiness where needed, the RNLI's lifesaving work rests overwhelmingly on this volunteer backbone. The data we collect and display through Dottie Boards and our stats dashboard is our way of making that widespread, selfless commitment more visible — turning every flashing light on the map into a reminder of the families, jobs, and lives paused so others can be safe on the water.

You can explore the full 2025 data yourself at unofficial-rnli-stats.dottieboards.com, and if you'd like to bring that data to life on your wall, you can find our RNLI Lifeboat Tracker Dottie Board at dottieboards.com.

By Dan Jenkins

Dottie Boards and the Unofficial RNLI Stats dashboard are products of Everycast Labs. The RNLI Lifeboat Tracker is officially licensed by the RNLI, and 5% of profits from RNLI Dottie Boards go directly to the charity. The statistics presented are unofficial and based on publicly available data.