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 Here they are in plain English, because when an operator's data is wrong or years out of date, that's the timetable you get on every journey planner, including this one.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.

Showing the 40 most out of date of 61.

Registered services that were never published as open data

Every service here is registered with a Traffic Commissioner and in scope for the Bus Open Data Service, but its operator has published no timetable to it. Open data is what feeds journey planners, so these services are largely invisible to them — a few still appear here or elsewhere from another source, but most cannot be looked up anywhere. Counted per publisher, so a group that publishes once for several brands appears once.

The 40 largest of 139 publishers with at least one unpublished service — 784 services in total.

What this site is missing

The table above counts what operators have not published. This one counts what we have not got. Of the 5,794 registered services published to the Bus Open Data Service, this database holds 5,728 — 98.9% — and is missing 55. Most of those are school and college services.

We take the Department for Transport's own GTFS conversion of the timetables rather than the TransXChange the operators file, and that conversion leaves some services out. Where a service is missing here, it is usually because it is not in the data we are given, not because the operator failed to publish it. A further 11 services are in the data and deliberately left out of this database, because it models one representative week and those run only on bank holidays, seasonally, or from a future date — they are not counted as missing above. Great Britain only: Northern Ireland and Ireland have no equivalent register to compare against.

The 25 largest of 35 operators with at least one service we don't hold.

How closely live tracking matches the timetable

DfT compares each operator's live vehicle feed against that operator's own published timetables and scores how much of it lines up. This is the number behind the live map on this site: where it is low, buses are reporting positions that can't be tied to a scheduled journey, so live times fall back to the timetable. A low score is not always poor tracking — it also happens when an operator tracks vehicles on services it publishes elsewhere, which is common for coach operators.

The 40 lowest of 132 publishers with a scored live feed. 46 of them match their own timetables 90% of the time or better.

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 (301)

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.

How open-data publishing is changing, week by week

The DfT catalogue is a snapshot it does not keep. We have kept every weekly copy since 31 Aug 2026 — 6 weeks so far. Between 28 Sept 2026 and 5 Oct 2026, services published to BODS moved by -263 and services needing attention by -186.

Biggest movers this week

Publishers whose count of services published to BODS changed most between the last two weekly copies.

• National Express West Midlands -87 published 204 → 117 of 5 in scope
• Arriva UK Bus -56 published 540 → 484 of 522 in scope
• Rotala Group of Companies -53 published 122 → 69 of 189 in scope
• Centrebus Group -35 published 213 → 178 of 186 in scope
• Transport Made Simple +20 published 163 → 183 of 191 in scope
• Uno -17 published 24 → 7 of 6 in scope
• Red Rose Travel -14 published 46 → 32 of 40 in scope
• Richmonds Coaches -14 published 14 → 0 of 1 in scope
• Go-Ahead -9 published 927 → 918 of 1,212 in scope
• Z&S Transport +8 published 7 → 15 of 15 in scope

The whole archive, every publisher and every week: bods-quality-history.csv.

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.

Sources: BODS Timetables data API (quality scores and compliance) and the BODS data catalogue (published-vs-registered services and live-tracking match scores), both 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 →