Find out how you can continue to take part in UK Biobank as well as how your contributions have been shared in our recent sleep data release.

Online health questionnaires

Currently, we have five questionnaires open:

Pain 2
Mental wellbeing
Sleep
Social interactions and focus
Visualisation and memory

Our online health questionnaires are a great way for you to give us valuable information from the comfort of your own home!

You can log into the Participant Area of the UK Biobank website and fill in questionnaires at any time. You can save your answers and come back later if you don’t want to complete the whole questionnaire in one go.

We work with expert researchers from around the world to write our questionnaires. We use questions that have been proven to get reliable and meaningful answers.

Different participants respond to different questionnaires, but we have had more than 2.3 million responses in total! We are truly grateful.

Researchers combine your questionnaire responses with other data you have given us to understand what influences health. See our research story on how researchers are using UK Biobank questionnaire data to match people with depression to the right treatments.

Rest assured – your sleep data is now available to researchers

A huge thank you to the 180,000 participants who have completed our sleep questionnaire. It includes a whopping 138 questions about sleep quality, impact on work and family history of sleep. The information you have provided so far was released to researchers in March 2025.

You may be interested to know…

44,481 consider yourself to be definitely a morning-type

On a typical night, many of you are waking up several times in the night:

A graph showing how many times participants who completed the sleep survey wake up on an average night - 1-2 is the highest bar by a significant margin, followed by just over a third 3-4, a small amount 10+ and 5-6, and a smaller amount 0, 5-6 and 9-10

14,689 consider yourself to be definitely an evening-type

But most of you are fairly good sleepers. You said your sleep quality on a typical night was:

A bar chart showing quality of sleep for participants who completed the sleep survey. The highest bar by quite a way is 'fairly good' at around 105,000 people, second is 'very good' at nearly 40,000, third is 'fairly bad' at around 35,000 and 'very bad' and 'not sure' are both low at around 2000.
News
UK Biobank releases world’s largest sleep survey data

The answers from an in-depth survey on sleep behaviour, quality and disorders are now available to UK Biobank approved researchers. 

Research Story
What the world’s largest sleep survey could reveal about health and disease

Almost 180,000 UK Biobank participants answered over 160 questions about their sleeping habits. The results could revolutionise treatments for sleep disorders and reveal how sleep keeps us healthy.

Get involved

Meet the Participant Advisory Group

Members of the Participant Advisory Group

You, our participants, are at the heart of UK Biobank and in many cases you know best how we can get things right.

Our Participant Advisory Group (PAG) plays a central role in ensuring we hear and act upon the views and opinions of our participants. The 18 members bring an inspiring range of life experiences to help guide our work.

The PAG provides advice on a wide range of activities including:

  • communication with participants and the public
  • resolving issues relating to collecting, storing and sharing participant data
  • designing UK Biobank studies.

In 2024, the PAG helped to develop a new strategy for involving participants in our work, advised us on the new UK Biobank website, and gave their views on requests from researchers to access UK Biobank data.

Get in touch

We are always looking for participants who are willing to get involved and provide their views on UK Biobank’s work. You do not need to have any prior knowledge of health research.

Please email [email protected] to express your interest and we will be in touch. We would love to hear from you.

Participant opportunities

UK Biobank is a long-term study. As a participant, find out about the extra activities you can take part in that will add extra layers of detail to your health data.

Your feedback

Thank you to the 33,000 of you who completed our 2024 survey and told us about your communication preferences!

The vast majority of you always read the newsletter, whether you get it by email or post

Most of you have a device of some kind, like a computer or a smart phone

Some of you use Facebook but most don’t use social media channels

There is interest in a UK Biobank app where you could answer questions about your health and keep in touch

We are using your feedback to improve how we communicate with you. It has already helped us create this brand new website, and we plan to send more regular email newsletters in future.