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Introduction: Patients undergoing emergency abdominal surgery for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) are a complex cohort who are relatively poorly represented in published literature. This is partly due to the lack of consensus of the definition of the term emergency in IBD surgery. There is ongoing and recent work defining clinical urgency for unplanned surgical procedures and categorizing the high‐risk surgical patient. This paper aims to report the difference in patient metrics and risks as recorded by the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA). Methods: Complete patient data, including histology, were available in the NELA database between 2013 and 2016. Urgency categories recorded by NELA are <2 h, 2–6 h, 6–18 h, and >18 h. Patient characteristics, physiology, biochemistry, and outcomes are reported according to these urgency categories with regression analysis used to compare differences between them. Results: Mortality in Crohn's disease (CD) ranged from 1.4% in the >18 h urgency to 14.6% in the most urgent. In ulcerative colitis (UC), this range was from 3.1% to 14.8%. In both CD and UC, there were significant trends in hemodynamic instability, serum white cell count, serum electrolytes and creatinine, and outcome measures length of stay and unplanned return to theater. Conclusions: Patients having emergency surgery for IBD are not a single cohort when considering physiology, blood biochemistry, or most importantly, outcomes. Risk counseling and management should reflect this. Hemodynamic changes are subtle and may be missed in this cohort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]