How this is worked out, and what could make it wrong
How it's worked out
- The Office of Rail and Road publishes, for 2025-26, both the 67.7 billion passenger kilometres travelled on the Great Britain network and the 543.6 million train kilometres run to carry them.
- Dividing one by the other gives the average number of people on a train: 125. Because it is a ratio, assumptions about seats per coach, train length and how full trains get all cancel out, and none are needed.
- We count the passenger trains moving on the map right now (about 1,850) and multiply. The national average is then tilted for the hour of day using the measured loading curve further down this page, and shown as a range, because a single annual average cannot describe both a packed commuter service and an empty late-night one.
Does it check out?
- Independently, some operators publish a real loading percentage for every coach through the live feed. Across 160,597 such readings from 1,345 trains on 5 August 2026, mean occupancy was 21.6% of capacity, peaking at 34.9% at 17:00 and falling to 4.7% at 04:00.
- The regulator's vehicle kilometres put the average train at 6.1 coaches, so the national figures imply about 20 people per coach as an all-hours average, roughly a quarter to a third of the seats. The two cannot be set against each other exactly: the loading percentage is of a capacity each operator defines for itself, seats or seats and standing room, and the operators publishing it are mostly busy London routes. Twenty people in a coach and a fifth of a coach's capacity are the same order of magnitude, which is the reason to trust the size of the figure rather than its last digit.
What would make it wrong
- The train count is a floor. A train the map cannot place does not appear, so the real number of services running is somewhat higher.
- Only of trains report their length, and coverage is wildly uneven by operator. But train length does not enter the calculation, precisely to avoid depending on it.
- The regulator's train kilometres include empty stock movements, and its most recent year is provisional.
A hundred and fifty years of journeys
The regulator's series starts in 1872, when the railways of Great Britain carried 407 million journeys. It climbed for fifty years to a peak of 2.19 billion in 1920, a figure no year since has matched, then fell for sixty: the car, the bus, and the closures of the 1960s took it down to 630 million in 1982, the low point of the peacetime series. From the mid-1990s it more than doubled, to 1.75 billion in 2018-19, before the pandemic year of 2020-21 recorded 388 million, fewer journeys than in 1872. The recovery has been fast: 1.83 billion in 2025-26 is the most since 1920.
The gaps are the two world wars, for which no figures were published. The spike straight after the first is the 1919 and 1920 peak: demobilisation, the railways still under wartime government control, and no motor bus or car yet to compete with, followed by forty years of both arriving. The sharp V at the right-hand end is the pandemic year and the four-year climb out of it. The series switches from calendar years to financial years in 1984, and it counts the national network only: the Underground, the trams and Eurostar are excluded.
How far people travel
Passenger kilometres, everybody's journeys added end to end, have grown faster than journeys have: 30.6 billion in 1938, 27.2 billion in 1982, and 67.7 billion in 2025-26, level with the pre-pandemic record. Divided by the journeys, the average trip is 37 kilometres, about 23 miles, and it is getting shorter: the network's growth is in London, where an Elizabeth line journey averages ten kilometres.
What a journey costs
This is fare revenue divided by journeys, so it takes in season tickets, railcards and advance fares as well as the walk-up price, which is why it is lower than the fares people remember paying. In 1986-87 the average journey cost £1.96, which is £6.11 in today's money. It reached £7.60 in today's money just before the pandemic and has since fallen back to £6.64, not because fares fell but because the journeys being made are shorter. Per kilometre the story is different: 14.6p in 1986-87 in today's money against 18.3p now, a rise of about a quarter in real terms.
Who travels, and on what ticket
Seven journeys in ten are made on the London and South East operators, but a third of the distance is travelled with the long-distance ones. The open access operators (Hull Trains, Grand Central, Lumo and Heathrow Express) are half a percent of journeys.
| Sector | Journeys | Distance | Average journey |
|---|---|---|---|
| London and South East | 1,277.7m (70%) | 29.6bn km (44%) | 23 km |
| Regional | 387.6m (21%) | 13.9bn km (21%) | 36 km |
| Long distance | 154.8m (8%) | 22.6bn km (33%) | 146 km |
| Open access | 9.4m (0.5%) | 1.6bn km (2%) | 170 km |
The season ticket has not come back
Before the pandemic a third of all journeys were made on season tickets: 588 million of them in 2019-20. In 2025-26 it was 234 million, one journey in eight. Every other kind of ticket has recovered past its 2019 level; the five-day commute is the one thing that has not. Advance tickets, sold for a specific train, have gone the other way, from 86 million journeys in 2019-20 to 149 million.
The operators
Journeys say who carries the most people; distance says who carries them furthest; and dividing the regulator's passenger kilometres by its train kilometres says how many people are on a typical train, which is the figure nobody publishes directly. Govia Thameslink Railway carries the most journeys. The Elizabeth line has the fullest trains of the big operators, with about 210 people aboard on average, and LNER the fullest of all at around 250 on eight- and nine-coach trains. At the other end, a Northern or Transport for Wales train has about 50 people on it, on trains of three coaches.
| Operator | Journeys | Average journey | People per train | Coaches | Electric |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Govia Thameslink Railway | 316.0m | 27 km | 141 | 8.1 | 97% |
| Elizabeth line | 257.4m | 10 km | 213 | 9.0 | 100% |
| London Overground | 189.8m | 7 km | 113 | 4.7 | 100% |
| South Western Railway | 171.9m | 29 km | 142 | 7.5 | 83% |
| Southeastern | 143.4m | 27 km | 119 | 7.7 | 100% |
| Northern Trains | 99.6m | 29 km | 54 | 2.9 | 22% |
| Great Western Railway | 93.7m | 68 km | 135 | 5.9 | 36% |
| ScotRail | 90.8m | 31 km | 61 | 4.3 | 53% |
| Greater Anglia | 88.0m | 43 km | 133 | 7.7 | 83% |
| West Midlands Trains | 72.8m | 41 km | 118 | 5.8 | 74% |
| CrossCountry | 40.2m | 87 km | 133 | 5.1 | 0% |
| c2c | 39.6m | 23 km | 129 | 6.9 | 100% |
| Avanti West Coast | 36.3m | 185 km | 204 | 9.5 | 97% |
| TfW Rail | 34.5m | 38 km | 50 | 3.3 | 9% |
| East Midlands Railway | 32.9m | 79 km | 103 | 4.5 | 12% |
| Merseyrail | 31.5m | 19 km | 92 | 4.4 | 100% |
| London North Eastern Railway | 28.7m | 223 km | 248 | 8.6 | 96% |
| TransPennine Express | 28.5m | 77 km | 108 | 4.7 | 41% |
| Chiltern Railways | 24.1m | 54 km | 131 | 4.1 | 0% |
| Heathrow Express | 4.6m | – | – | 7.6 | 100% |
| Grand Central | 1.8m | 278 km | 179 | 4.9 | 0% |
| Hull Trains | 1.6m | – | – | 6.5 | 80% |
| Lumo (East Coast) | 1.5m | 400 km | 273 | 5.0 | 100% |
| Caledonian Sleeper | 0.3m | – | – | 12.4 | 64% |
Year to March 2026. People per train is passenger kilometres divided by train kilometres, coaches is vehicle kilometres divided by train kilometres, and electric is the share of train kilometres under electric traction; all three include empty stock movements. Where an operator's passenger kilometres are published too coarsely to divide, the figure is left out rather than guessed. ORR tables 1223, 1233, 1243 and 1253.
Through the day
The number of trains running barely changes between seven in the morning and seven at night. What changes is how full they are. Some operators publish a real loading percentage for every coach through the live feed, and that curve, applied to the trains we see running each hour and the national average above, is the best picture we have of when Britain is on a train.
Quarter by quarter
The railway's year is flatter than most people would guess: across the last two years the gap between the busiest quarter and the quietest is under 5%, because the summer's leisure travel and the winter's commuting roughly trade places. January to March is usually the quietest.
Frequently asked questions
How many people travel by train in the UK each year?
1.83 billion journeys in the year to March 2026, about 5 million a day and the most since 1920. That is the national network only, without the Underground, the trams or Eurostar.
How many passengers are on a train on average?
About 125, averaged over every kilometre a passenger train runs in a year. Around 250 on an LNER train, 210 on the Elizabeth line, and 50 on a Northern or Transport for Wales train.
How many people are on trains right now?
Around 220,000 at a typical daytime moment and close to 380,000 in the evening peak, estimated from the trains actually running on the live map. The figure at the top of this page is updated every 15 seconds and the working is set out beneath it.
What is the average train fare in the UK?
£6.64 a journey, or 18.3p a kilometre, across the franchised operators, taking in season tickets and railcard discounts as well as full fares.
Which train company carries the most passengers?
Govia Thameslink Railway, with 316 million journeys a year, then the Elizabeth line, London Overground, South Western Railway and Southeastern.
How far is the average train journey?
About 37 kilometres, 23 miles. Ten kilometres on the Elizabeth line, 223 on LNER.
How full are UK trains?
About 20 people per coach as an all-day average. On the routes that publish loading figures, occupancy runs from under 10% of capacity in the small hours to more than 30% in the evening peak.
Where the data comes from
The journeys, distances, fares, sector, ticket and operator figures are the Office of Rail and Road's passenger rail usage statistics (tables 1210 to 1253), published under the Open Government Licence and refreshed here within a week of each quarterly release. The journey counts before 1938 reach ORR from the National Infrastructure Commission, which took them from B. R. Mitchell's British Historical Statistics. The live estimate counts the trains on the map, which come from National Rail's Darwin feed, and the loading curve comes from the carriage-loading messages some operators publish through the same feed. Full sources and licences are on the data and credits page.