King overtakes Princess Anne as hardest-working member of Royal family

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, including traversing the country, hosting three high-profile state visits and travelling to Italy, Canada and Poland.

King Charles was able to continue royal engagements while receiving treatment.Credit: AP

An analysis of engagements recorded in the Court Circular found that between them, the 10 working royals managed 23 per cent more jobs in 2025 than in 2024, a year in which both the King and the Princess of Wales were diagnosed with cancer.

Analyst Patricia Treble 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”.

Her research found that the King had conducted 533 engagements in 2025, while his sister conducted 478, although she worked on more days overall – 186.

Following closely behind were the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh (Prince Edward and wife Sophie), who had 313 and 235 engagements respectively.

Next came Queen Camilla, who kept busy with 228 engagements, and the Duke of Gloucester (Prince Richard, cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth II), 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 William, Prince of Wales, who carried out 202 engagements in 2025, up from 139 the previous year.

Birgitte, the Duchess of Gloucester, 79, held 113, while the Duke of Kent (another Prince Edward, a cousin of the late queen), 90, conducted 77 engagements in the year he lost his wife, the Duchess of Kent, who died at 92 in September.

Catherine, the Princess of Wales, who revealed at the beginning of the year that she was in remission from cancer, conducted 68 public engagements.

‘You put on a brave face’

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 olive-green Victoria Beckham suit Catherine chose for the Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design became one of her standout looks of the year.Credit: AP

The Waleses’ comparatively light workload may provoke the occasional raised eyebrow at Buckingham Palace, but they have long said 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 per cent 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 per cent to the Princess of Wales’s 423 per cent, a figure that reflected the fact that she largely stepped back from the public eye in 2024 as she underwent chemotherapy.

Treble told the London Telegraph: “If there is one takeaway from the data this year, it’s that the working royals are doing OK, 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.”

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