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British commuters are abandoning pricey season train tickets as flexible working disrupts traditional commuting patterns and fares continue to rise.
Passenger numbers on the UK’s rail network have recovered since the pandemic, but the growth of working from home has permanently altered travel patterns.
Sales of annual or monthly season tickets, which allow unlimited travel between two stations and offer a small discount compared with buying tickets every weekday, have collapsed in the last five years.
Before the pandemic, season tickets were the most popular type of fare on sale, accounting for 34 per cent of all passengers. But in the year to March 2025, season ticket holders had fallen to just 13 per cent of all passengers.
For many commuters, a monthly or annual season ticket will only save them money if they travel into the office at least four days a week, resulting in a shift to anytime and off-peak tickets, and putting a dent in train operators’ finances.
An annual season ticket from the Surrey commuter town of Guildford to London costs £5,852. For someone who now has the option to commute only three days a week, buying peak tickets on the day would save them over £1,000 per year.
Commuters into London are also delaying their journeys to catch cheaper off-peak trains. On a typical autumn day, almost 60,000 fewer people arrive in London between 7am and 10am compared with before the pandemic, with more arriving at all other times of day.
Off-peak tickets, which allow travel outside of the morning and evening peaks, now account for 46 per cent of all journeys, up from 34 per cent in 2019.
Average train ticket prices rose by 5.1 per cent in March 2025, outpacing the economy-wide inflation rate of 3.4 per cent.
Fares for around 45 per cent of ticket sales, including season and anytime tickets, were subject to a price increase cap of 4.6 per cent set by the government in the Autumn Budget.
Overall fares rose by more than the cap, thanks to 5.5 per cent growth in the price of advance, first-class and some off-peak tickets, which train operators can set independently.
For the last two years, the cap has been set at 1 percentage point above the retail price index, an outdated measure of inflation that tends to outpace the headline consumer price index, and having the effect of driving train prices higher still in real terms.
“Rising rail fares are putting people off using the railways” said the Campaign for Better Transport, an advocacy group. Price is the biggest barrier to people travelling by rail, beating out convenience, punctuality and service levels, according to polling published by the group in January.
Rail prices are 45 per cent higher in real terms than in 1995, based on FT calculations using CPI instead of RPI, which the industry regulator the Office of Rail and Road uses. Fares briefly dropped in real terms during the pandemic, but have been rising faster than inflation since 2023.
Yet despite the inflation-busting fare hikes, the rail industry is far more reliant on government subsidy than before the pandemic.
The Labour government is proceeding with widespread rail nationalisation, but has stated that passengers should not expect price cuts.
Six of the 12 train franchisees in England are now run by the Department of Transport, with the remainder expected to be brought under state control by 2031.
The level of government subsidy varies widely between train operators, with Avanti West Coast and East Anglia requiring no state subsidy last year, while Northern trains relied on the Treasury for more than half of its revenue.
Eventually, the government plans to bring all train operators under the umbrella of Great British Railways, a new government body that will both own the tracks and run the operations.
Last month, the Department of Transport launched a pilot project coordinating fares between publicly owned operators in the north of England, in an attempt to streamline the byzantine advance fares system.
While advanced fares can be significantly cheaper, they only allow travel on a specific train at a specific time, limiting passengers options. Last year, state-run LNER abolished their popular “Super Off-Peak Fare” between London and Edinburgh, replacing it with a more restrictive “Advance 70 minute fare”, set by dynamic pricing.
Paul Kelly, founder of ticket comparison website BR Fares, says that the removal of some off-peak tickets and the rise of advanced tickets has led to a “loss of flexibility” and can “amount to a backdoor price increase.”
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