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Millions of rail passengers are entitled to compensation for delayed journeys each year, but most never claim it. That leaves an estimated £80–180 million a year unclaimed, reducing the financial incentive for train companies to improve reliability.
Most passengers don't claim
Train companies paid out £150.6 million in Delay Repay compensation in the year to March 2025, covering 8.3 million claims.
However, only 45% of passengers entitled to compensation actually made a claim. For delays of 15 to 29 minutes, that figure fell to 34%.
The value of the ticket also makes a difference. Just 32% of passengers with fares under £10 claimed compensation, compared with 55% of those who paid £50 or more.
This means a significant amount of compensation goes unclaimed each year. Much of it is made up of relatively small refunds owed to individual passengers.
Why passengers don't claim
For many passengers, the time and effort involved simply isn't worth the refund.
Making a claim can mean finding the correct train company's website, creating an account, locating a ticket, entering journey details and providing payment information.
If that takes 20 minutes to recover £1.10, it works out at just £3.30 an hour. It's understandable why so many passengers decide not to bother.
The result is a system in which smaller claims are much less likely to be submitted. While the amounts may seem insignificant individually, they add up to tens of millions of pounds in unclaimed compensation each year.
Making Delay Repay easier with Railhop
Railhop is designed to make claiming compensation simpler, particularly for the smaller delays and refunds that passengers might otherwise ignore.
The app identifies potentially eligible delays using your saved tickets, phone location and contactless journey information. It then helps complete the relevant train company's Delay Repay form.
Passengers review the details, confirm their eligibility and submit the claim themselves.
Railhop only prepares claims for journeys passengers have actually made. The aim is to reduce the time spent on paperwork so that claiming even £1 in compensation becomes worthwhile.
Why claiming matters
Delay Repay is intended to compensate passengers when train services fall short of the expected standard. It also creates a financial consequence for poor performance.
When eligible passengers don't claim, train companies avoid some of the compensation costs associated with delays. Increasing the proportion of passengers who claim could strengthen the financial incentive to improve reliability.
Ultimately, passengers would rather have a reliable service than receive compensation for a delayed one.
Switzerland offers an example of what is possible. In 2025, 94.1% of Swiss trains arrived within three minutes of their scheduled time. While the two rail networks operate under different conditions, it demonstrates the level of punctuality a well-performing railway can achieve.
Railhop won't solve Britain's rail reliability problems. But it can help ensure passengers receive the compensation they're entitled to, while making the financial cost of delays more accurately reflect their impact.
The aim is simple: make Delay Repay easier to claim and encourage a more reliable railway.
Were you on a late train in the last 28 days?
Check a DelayHow we work this out
We start with every train that ran late enough to claim, or was cancelled, since 1 January, from the national train running data. For each one we estimate how many passengers were on board, what they paid and what the train company's Delay Repay bands would pay them for that delay. We then take away the share that ORR's research says passengers claim, which leaves the compensation owed but never claimed. It's an estimate, not a count: the counter spreads the yearly figure across the year, a little faster at rush hour and slower at night and at weekends.
Sources: ORR, delay compensation claims statistics (2024–25) and passenger research on claim rates (2025); SBB, punctuality figures and swissinfo.ch (2025).