Late is late — but how late? Average delay severity across UK trains
Published
Peter · Founder, Railly
Peter built Railly after one too many commutes spent guessing platforms and chasing Delay Repay claims. He verifies every guide against live timetable data, operator portals, and National Rail station records.
In short: LNER and Lumo are the worst-rated operators on delay severity at 11.0 minutes average for late services. The "good" operators (Merseyrail 2.2 min, Heathrow Express 2.1 min, London Overground 1.8 min) keep their lateness small when they slip. The on-time percentage hides this — a 90%-on-time operator with 35-minute average late delays is in a different world from a 90%-on-time operator with 5-minute average late delays.
Late is late — but how late?
Our mainline reliability ranking ranks operators by on-time percentage. Our cancellation ranking ranks them by the share of services that didn't run at all. This article ranks them by a third metric: how late the late services are, when they slip.
The hidden tail
On-time percentage is a binary: a service arrives within 15 minutes, or it doesn't. A 14-minute-late service is on time. A 16-minute-late service is delayed. They both count the same in the binary — but the 16-minute service is much less painful than the 60-minute service, and a 90-minute service is in a different league entirely.
Delay severity is the average delay for the services that breached the 15-minute threshold. It's a measure of the tail of the delay distribution. An operator with 88% on-time and 12-minute average severity for the late 12% is having a very different month from an operator with 88% on-time and 35-minute average severity. The first is reliably late by a few minutes; the second is rarely late but catastrophically so when it is.
This matters more than most people realise, because the Delay Repay scheme thresholds — 15 / 30 / 60 minutes — create three discrete compensation tiers. A 16-minute delay is 25% of single fare on DR15 schemes; a 35-minute delay is 50%; a 65-minute delay is 100%. The severity distribution determines how often each tier triggers. Two operators with the same on-time percentage can produce wildly different claim experiences.
Delay severity by operator
The chart above ranks 27 UK operators by average delay for services that were late, over the last 30 days. A few clusters stand out:
Long-distance bad. LNER (11.0 min), Lumo (11.0 min), Avanti West Coast (10.5 min), CrossCountry (10.3 min), and c2c (10.3 min) are at the top of the chart. These operators run long routes — Edinburgh to King's Cross, Plymouth to Newcastle, Euston to Manchester, the Southend-to-Fenchurch Street commuter line. When they slip, they slip big, because there's a lot of network between the origin delay and the destination. A signal failure at Hitchin cascades for the next 90 minutes on the East Coast Main Line.
Commuter moderate. TransPennine Express (5.4 min), LNR & WMR (4.8 min), Southern (4.6 min), GWR (4.3 min), East Midlands Railway (4.2 min), Thameslink (4.1 min) form a middle band of 4–6 minute average severity. These operators run commuter services with shorter routes, so when something fails, the damage is contained. A 4-minute average severity means the typical late service is just barely outside the 15-minute threshold.
Commuter excellent. Merseyrail (2.2 min), Heathrow Express (2.1 min), London Overground (1.8 min), Elizabeth Line (3.3 min), ScotRail (3.2 min), Chiltern (2.9 min), Greater Anglia (2.9 min) are at the bottom of the chart. These operators either run self-contained networks (Merseyrail, ScotRail), use segregated infrastructure (Heathrow Express's dedicated tunnel), or have working service recovery (Elizabeth Line's modern stock). When they slip, they recover fast.
What this means for delay repay
The compensation tier you land in is determined by your arrival delay, not the operator's on-time percentage. The severity distribution tells you how often each tier triggers in practice.
For DR15 operators (most TOCs): the 15-minute threshold means any late service triggers some compensation. If your operator's severity is 12 minutes, your typical late service is right at the boundary — about half will be over 15 minutes, half won't. If the severity is 35 minutes, your typical late service is well into the 30–59 minute band (50% compensation) and frequently crosses into 60+ minutes (100% compensation). Same on-time percentage, very different claim experience.
For DR30 operators (LNER, CrossCountry, ScotRail): the 30-minute threshold means a 25-minute-late service is not claimable. For LNER with 11-minute severity, the typical late service is well below the 30-minute threshold — most LNER delays are below the DR30 line. For CrossCountry with 10.3-minute severity, the same holds. The DR30 operators are better on severity than their on-time percentages suggest, because their lateness is concentrated in the sub-30-minute band.
For DR60 (Irish Rail): the 60-minute threshold means most late services are not claimable. Severity of any magnitude below 60 is invisible to Delay Repay.
Three examples to make this concrete:
- Avanti West Coast (74.8% on-time, 10.5 min severity, DR15): of the 25.2% of services that ran late, most crossed the 30-minute threshold (50% compensation tier), and a meaningful fraction crossed 60 minutes (100% compensation). A typical Avanti delay triggers a 50% claim.
- Merseyrail (95.6% on-time, 2.2 min severity, DR15): of the 4.4% of services that ran late, almost none crossed the 30-minute threshold. A typical Merseyrail delay triggers a 25% claim. Some don't trigger any.
- LNER (72.8% on-time, 11.0 min severity, DR30): of the 27.2% that ran late, most stayed below the 30-minute threshold and triggered no compensation at all. The 100% tier is hit on cancellations rather than lateness.
If you have flexibility between operators and you're claiming on every delay, the severity number matters as much as the on-time number. Choose by both: a 90%-on-time operator with 8-minute severity is more generous than an 88%-on-time operator with 35-minute severity.
For a worked example of how to claim, see our how-to-claim guide. For DR30 specifics, see CrossCountry Delay Repay and LNER Delay Repay.
Severity at route level
The chart above is operator-level. Route-level severity tells a different story — some routes are bad across all operators (the East Coast Main Line between King's Cross and Grantham, the West Coast Main Line north of Crewe, the Great Western Main Line through the Severn Tunnel), and some are good regardless of who runs them.
For a per-route view, the live boards on Railly carry per-hour reliability chips that include severity: a "92% on time · typically +3 min" chip tells you both the on-time percentage and the typical severity for that route at that hour.
The most delayed individual stations are covered separately in the UK's most delayed stations — King's Cross and Euston lead both origin and destination delay.
How to read the two rankings together
When you see two operators with similar on-time percentages, the severity chart is the tiebreaker. When you see two operators with different on-time percentages, the cancellation chart ranks one of them.
Three patterns to watch for:
- High on-time, low severity, low cancellation. Best case. ScotRail, Merseyrail, Elizabeth Line.
- Low on-time, high severity, low cancellation. Operational issues, but services run. CrossCountry, Avanti, LNER. The compensation tier matters more here because the typical late service is well into the claimable band.
- Moderate on-time, low severity, high cancellation. London Overground, Gatwick Express, Greater Anglia. The risk isn't that the service is late — it's that the service doesn't run. Compensation is dominated by cancellation rather than delay.
The ranking that matters for your journey is the one that matches your specific route. A CrossCountry journey from Birmingham to Stansted is in the second bucket — high severity, low cancellation. A London Overground journey from Gospel Oak to Highbury & Islington is in the third — high cancellation, low severity. Same on-time percentage, very different commute experience.
Methodology
The figures above are 30-day rolling averages of the per-day average delay across each operator, joined from the same data sources as our mainline ranking. Only services that breached the 15-minute Delay Repay threshold contribute to the average; on-time and cancelled services are excluded.
- Window: rolling 30 days, ending yesterday.
- Severity measure: average delay in minutes, calculated only on services where the destination arrival was 15+ minutes late.
- Sample size threshold: at least 1,000 services in the window. Smaller operators (Lumo, Hull Trains, Grand Central) are excluded.
- Filter: passenger services only. Freight, empty stock, and charters excluded.
The colour bands in the chart above are a five-step gradient (green → red) by severity. Operators near 2 minutes are green; operators near 11 minutes are red.
Last verified: September 2026. Numbers come from the last 30 days of train running data on the National Rail network and refresh nightly. If you spot something that looks wrong, drop us a note.