Background Communication Auditing Reporting Tool (CART) is a prospectively maintained database utilised by general surgery units of the Southern Adelaide Local Health Network (SALHN) in South Australia. This study analysed the CART database to understand length of hospital stay (LOS) in general surgery patients. Methods Data were extracted from CART, including general surgery admissions at two hospitals over five years from January 2017 to March 2023. Data were cleaned and outliers removed, before descriptive analysis. Results From a cleaned dataset of 38,118 patients, 14,448 (38.0%) experienced a LOS of 1 day, 7,217 (18.9%) 2 days, 4,386 (11.5%) 3 days, 2,804 (7.4%) 4 days, 1,944 (5.1%) 5 days, and the remainder experienced 6 days or longer. Mean LOS was 4.05 days for emergency admissions, versus 3.35 for non-emergency. Mean LOS was 3.78 days for females versus 3.99 days for males. There was progressive increase in mean LOS for each successive 10-year age bracket between 0–10 to 91–100 years old, but decrease from 91–100 versus >100 years. Mean LOS was 7.92 days for patients who experienced a postoperative complication versus 2.79 for those who had none. Increased mean LOS was observed for higher non-fatal complication grades. Mean LOS was 9.4 days for patients who experienced in-hospital mortality, versus 3.83 days for those who survived. Conclusions For general surgery patients, there are trends in LOS that are only apparent when prospectively maintained data are evaluated at scale. LOS variation aligns with admission urgency, patient age, postoperative complications and mortality.