First & last buses

The single most expensive mistake in bus travel is misreading the last bus time. Here's how to get it right.

The trap: “last bus” times are for the first stop

When a route page says the last bus is at 23:15, that's when it leaves the start of the route. If you board halfway along, your last bus passes later than that — but if you're travelling to the end of the route, the last bus that gets you all the way home may be an earlier journey, because some late journeys terminate short.

Always check the full timetable column for the journey you plan to catch, and confirm it reaches your stop.

How to check on this site

• Every stop page shows the first and last departure from that exact stop, today.
• Every route page has the full timetable with every journey and every stop.
• Sunday and bank-holiday service is usually sparser — check the Sunday tab, not just weekdays.
• Every park and ride site page shows the last bus back from town to the car park — the time that matters if you left the car there.

Night buses

Most towns' networks wind down between 23:00 and midnight, but night service is less rare than it looks: around 1,000 routes across the UK and Ireland run between 01:00 and 04:29, and only about four in ten of those are in London. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Oxford all have real night networks — see night buses by town.

Two things catch people out. First, the route number tells you nothing: most of London's night service runs on ordinary numbers, and some "N" routes elsewhere are daytime rural buses. Second, check which nights — outside the big cities a large share of night routes run on Friday and Saturday nights only. A journey that runs just after midnight shows as 00:30 at the end of that evening’s timetable: it belongs to that night, not to the next morning.

Bank holidays

Most operators run a Sunday service on bank holidays and reduced or no service on Christmas Day and New Year's Day — but this varies by operator. Where a route runs something different on Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year or a bank holiday, its route page has a Christmas & bank holidays section listing those dates, including “no buses”. Operators often publish festive timetables only a few weeks ahead, so check again nearer the date.