An Unexpected Royal Just Overtook Princess Anne’s Title of ‘Hardest Working Member’ After Charles’ ‘Overwhelming’ Cancer Update
For years, Princess Anne—King Charles’ younger sister—has widely been regarded as the hardest-working royal. This isn’t just an impression due to how much time Anne has put into her working royal duties; this is backed up by numbers. And yet, now that the numbers are in for 2025, a new member of the family has taken her place. That’s right, King Charles was officially the member of the royal family with more official engagements in 2025, despite facing weekly cancer treatments.
Princess Anne had been consistently the member of the family with the most royal engagements. In 2024, she outnumbered every other working royal with 473. That was more than King Charles, who came in second place with 372. A distant third was Prince Edward with 293.
Related: Here’s what each royal inherited from Queen Elizabeth
In 2025, however, the King’s health seems to have improved enough to take back the first place. The King officially conducted 533 engagements, the most he’d done since 2019, when he had 541. These engagements included three state visits to Italy, Canada and Poland.
What about Princess Anne? Well, she wasn’t that far behind with 478 royal engagements. And she had more working days overall with a total of 186, according to The Independent.
Analyst Patricia Treble described the king as “indefatigable,” telling the Telegraph that “it felt like the House of Windsor was making up for lost time.”
But overall, it seems like the royals just stepped it up in 2025. The family had a total of 2,459 engagements, according to an analysis documented in the Court Circular. The ten working royals completed 23% more engagements than in 2024, which makes sense as both the King and the Princess of Wales were taking time off due to cancer that year.
Prince Edward was third on the list with 313 royal engagements. The Duchess of Edinburgh had 235, while Queen Camilla had 228 engagements, and the Duke of Gloucester had 212.
Prince William and Kate Middleton weren’t near the top, but the Prince of Wales had 202 engagements in 2025, which was 139 more than the year before. Middleton had 68. The change for William and even Kate makes sense. With Middleton in remission, William has been able to spend more time away and take on more engagements. Middleton, meanwhile, has eased into working royal life and has expressed before how difficult the transition has been.
The Princess of Wales spoke about her cancer recovery with patients and staff members of the NHS last year, saying, “You put on a sort of brave face, stoicism through treatment,” and then explaining, “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,” she explained. “And actually, someone to help talk you through that, show you, and guide you through that sort of phase that comes after treatment, I think is really valuable.”
King Charles appeared in Channel 4’s Stand Up to Cancer broadcast on December 12, and discussed his “overwhelming” cancer diagnosis and what the future looked like “Today I am able to share with you the good news that thanks to early diagnosis, effective intervention and adherence to ‘doctors’ orders,’ my own schedule of cancer treatment can be reduced in the New Year,” the King said.
With everyone’s health looking better, we can probably expect to see more of all the working royals in 2026.
