Undisputed leader of the pack

Usually King Charles vies with sister Anne for the title of hardest working royal. Not this year.

Whenever I mention how hard King Charles III is working this year, I invariably get a surprised / curious reaction along the lines of “Wow, that’s unusual, right?” So I thought I’d delve into the data to illustrate why this year is so extraordinary for the monarch.

One number stands out: The monarch has done one quarter of all royal engagements from the start of 2025 until the end of May (24 percent, to be precise). What makes this year’s effort all the more impressive is that King Charles III is 76 years old and has been undergoing weekly cancer treatments for more than a year.

His outsized share of engagements means he’s comfortably in the No. 1 position among all working royals, having completed nearly 260 engagements out of a grand total of 1,100 to May 31, 2025.

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Before you ask, the current crop of 10 working royals is doing fewer engagements than before the pandemic. In part, that’s because there are fewer working royals. The busiest January to May in recent years was 2018, when a total of 16 royals did 1,566 engagements. That’s six more working royals than are doing duties this year.

In 2018, a then-69-year-old Prince Charles did fewer engagements between January and May than he did during the same five months in 2025 (seven engagements, to be specific) .