Transport for London has released figures showing an increase in the number of passengers caught and fined for using public transport without having the right ticket or paying the correct fare.
The figures say that during the financial year 2025/26, 69,001 penalty fares were issued, representing a nine per cent increase on the previous twelve months.
These arose from 6.9 million checks being conducted on contactless payment cards, an increase of just over 50 per cent compared with the previous year. This included 3.3 million bus passengers, up by 400,000. A total of £5.4 million was brought in from people who weren’t traveling on a valid card, up by 142 per cent.
Fare evasion also led to 14,406 criminal convictions in the year to March 2026, up by 955 compared with 2024/25. Around £1.9 million in revenue is lost through fare evasion, TfL says.
Another statistic highlighted by TfL is a rise in the number of “irregularity reports” submitted to its appeals and prosecution department by its fare enforcement teams. It is then decided whether a criminal prosecution of the fare evader should be pursued on top of the penalty fare. The number of reports submitted has gone up by 18.7 per cent to 21,533, TfL says.
Separately, TfL says its enforcement officers reported 4,428 individuals for “possible prosecution” in 2025/26, for what it calls “blatant fare evasion, such as gate-pushing” where no attempt is made to pay.
In its press release, the transport body says the “current evasion rate in London is 3.5 per cent, down from 3.9 per cent in 2022/23”. However, a written answer from City Hall to a question by London Assembly member Keith Prince, asked last September, said the rate for 2024/25 “was calculated at 3.5 per cent” – the same as for the latest annual figure.
There has therefore been a 0.4 per cent fall in the evasion rate since 2022/23, though the decline levelled off in 2025/26, according to TfL’s calculations. The rate between April and December 2024 was once put by TfL at a slightly lower 3.4 per cent. In the same City Hall answer, the rate in 2023/24 was put 3.8 per cent.
Fare evasion and attempts to reduce it have been a feature of London’s public transport system for decades. In 2011, the then-Mayor Boris Johnson launched an initiative against what he called a “parasitic scourge” and TfL announced a “crackdown” involving plain clothes ticket inspectors.
In the 1980s, TfL’s predecessor organisation, London Transport, ran an advertising campaign against fare evasion, which said that more than 10,000 people had been prosecuted for it over a two-year period relating to buses alone. The campaign highlighted violence by passengers against bus conductors, who were responsible for collecting fares on board.
Transport for London launched a fare evasion strategy in April 2025 with the aim of reducing the evasion rate to 1.5 per cent or less by 2030/31. Detailed TfL data for 2025/26 are in the TfL table below.
Siwan Hayward, TfL’s Director of security, policing and enforcement, said: “The overwhelming majority of customers pay the correct fare, and it’s unfair that a minority avoid paying. That’s why we are strengthening our capability to detect and deter fare evasion, as shown by the significant increases in enforcement activity across our network – from more customer ticket checks to more officers on the ground and higher levels of revenue recovered.”
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