📋 Which bus operators publish reliable data?

Operators of local bus services in England are legally required to publish their timetables to the Bus Open Data Service (and most Scottish and Welsh operators publish there too). The DfT rates how good that data is — and the ratings are public, but buried in an API. Here they are in plain English, because when an operator's data is wrong or years out of date, that's the timetable you get on every journey planner, including this one.

Timetables that haven't been updated in over a year

This is the most useful column on the page, because it's an objective fact rather than a rating: the date the operator last touched its dataset. A years-old timetable still shows up as today's departures on every app that reads it.

Operators the DfT has rated

DfT's rating combines timetable accuracy, stop referencing and how well the data matches what actually runs. Note that its red/amber/green bands are strict — a “red” dataset can still score in the high 80s, so read the score alongside the colour.

Operators the DfT has not rated (296)

No quality score has been published for these operators' datasets. That is not a mark against them — it means DfT has not assessed the data, so we show no score at all.

Where these figures come from

The DfT's Bus Open Data Service publishes a catalogue of every operator dataset, including a quality score, a red/amber/green rating, whether the dataset meets the BODS standard, and the date it was last modified. We import that catalogue weekly and present it unchanged — we don't compute or adjust any score. If you're an operator and something here looks wrong, the fix is to update your BODS dataset; this page will follow within a week.

Source: BODS Timetables data API, Open Government Licence v3.0. Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland operators don't publish to BODS and so don't appear here. See also: which buses actually run on time →