Busiest London bus routes

667 London bus routes carried 1.83 billion passenger journeys in 2024/25, over 459 million kilometres operated. Transport for London is the only transport authority in Great Britain that publishes this route by route.

The 30 busiest routes in 2024/25

Biggest changes since 2010/11

Routes carrying over half a million journeys in 2010/11, ranked by the change to 2024/25. Routes are renumbered, extended and split over fifteen years, so a large move can be a change to the route as much as to its ridership — the route's own page shows every year.

What these numbers are, and are not

A passenger journey is one boarding of one bus. Someone who takes the same route to work and back five days a week makes ten passenger journeys in that week, so these are not counts of people, and a journey involving two buses counts twice. TfL builds the figures from contactless and Oyster tap-ins (including Freedom Passes), cash ticket issues, and drivers recording passengers who do not tap, such as children under 11.

School-day-only services and occasional 900-series routes are excluded because their data is not reliable enough to publish. Night services on 24-hour routes are counted separately under their N number. TfL changed its estimation method in 2017 and restated 2016/17 on the new basis, so figures before and after that point are not exactly comparable. Some years ran 53 weeks rather than 52 and sit about 2% high as a result. Route totals carry no network-level adjustment and so do not sum to the ridership figures in TfL's annual report.

Why London only? Because London is the only place in Great Britain where anyone publishes this. Bus operators outside London hold their own patronage data and are commercial companies, so it is not subject to freedom of information; the Department for Transport publishes national and local-authority totals, but nothing per route. For everywhere else, our own measurements of punctuality and disruption are the closest comparable picture.

Source: Transport for London, Bus service usage: passengers and kilometres operated by route. Powered by TfL Open Data.