Someone I work with tells me his train is always late. He says it flatly every time, like he's given up on anyone believing him. The first time he said it I did the annoying thing and went off to check. I came back with an official on time running figure in the high eighties. He laughed at me and he was right to. He was describing something that happens to him four afternoons out of five. I'd gone and looked up how often a train reaches its final stop within five minutes of the timetable. So we were answering completely different questions and neither of us noticed. He isn't wrong and neither is the official figure. That's most of the answer to why my train is always late in Sydney while the line it runs on keeps posting a respectable number.
The official measure, in plain terms
What does Sydney Trains on time running measure?
Transport for NSW publishes the definition on its performance reports page and it's worth a proper read. A service is punctual when it arrives at its final destination within five minutes of the timetable. Intercity services are given six. Any service that skips stops, starts or terminates short, gets diverted or is cancelled is counted as not punctual. The figures aren't adjusted afterwards for force majeure incidents either. Those last two rules are stricter than most people assume and I reckon they deserve some credit!
The headline is a peak measure. Peak hour means services arriving in the Sydney CBD between 6am and 10am and services departing the CBD between 3pm and 7pm, Monday to Friday. In the morning the destination being measured is Central. In the afternoon it's the last passenger stop on that particular run. The target is for at least 92 per cent of those peak services to make it inside the tolerance.
Which lines count towards the Sydney Trains figure?
Only the suburban lines that run through Central, so T1, T2, T3, T4 and T8. Lines that don't serve the CBD are left out of the calculation altogether, which is why T5 Cumberland and T7 Olympic Park don't appear in it. If that's your line, the headline figure was never describing your trip in the first place.
Why is my train always late when my line looks fine on paper?
There are four separate gaps between the measure and your afternoon. They stack up on each other.
Does on time running measure my station or the last stop?
The last stop. This is the big one. Your train can pull into your platform three and a half minutes down every single afternoon. If the driver claws that back over the rest of the run, the service is filed as punctual. Timetables carry a bit of recovery time for exactly that purpose, which is sensible operations and a big part of why the number and the feeling disagree. The measurement point is one station out of the twenty or so on your line and it's almost certainly not yours.
What counts as late on a Sydney train?
Anything past five minutes at that final stop. Anything under it is simply on time, with no record kept of how close it came. It's a pass or a fail and nothing in between. So the number can tell you how often it happens. It's got no way of telling you how bad it was. A line that quietly drifts two or three minutes behind all week reads as close to perfect and feels like nothing of the sort.
Does a cancelled train count as late?
Yes. So does a train that skips your station to catch up. That's the right call and it's been the rule for years now. What it can't do is weigh the damage. A cancellation on a line running every four minutes is a four minute problem. The same tick against a line running every half hour has just cost somebody their evening and the table has no way of saying so.
Is it my line or just my train?
Quite possibly just your train. The published figure averages every service across those lines and the whole peak, including the comfortable ones. Individual runs aren't equal. A service that follows straight behind a heavily loaded one absorbs more of the network's bad luck than the run in front of it. So does one that has to cross a junction where two lines merge. A single reliably poor departure can sit inside a line that averages beautifully and nothing in the headline number would ever surface it.
The measure that sits closer to your own afternoon
Transport for NSW clearly knows about this gap, because it now publishes a second indicator alongside the first. Customer On-Time is the percentage of customers who arrive at their destination within five minutes of their planned arrival time. Their destination, not the train's. I reckon it's the one that describes your afternoon!
It's modelled rather than counted, drawn from the timetable, train location data and Opal reporting. On a normal day you get allocated to the service you planned to catch and your delay is the difference between when that train reached your stop and when it was meant to. When the day falls apart, the model puts you on whichever service you'd realistically have ended up on and compares that arrival against your original plan. So a cancellation turns up as however many extra minutes it genuinely cost you rather than one tick in a column.
It covers the same peak trips as the punctuality measure, so it's still a CBD peak view rather than a whole network one. Inside that limit it's much closer to the thing you're complaining about.
The numbers themselves
What do the Sydney Trains punctuality stats say for 2024-25?
Sydney Trains reports its monthly punctuality in the annual report. The 2024-25 volume gives a 24 hour figure of 87.5 per cent for suburban services and 75.0 per cent for intercity, against a target of at least 92 per cent for both. Inside that year the monthly suburban results ran from 93.4 per cent in October 2024 down to 81.3 per cent in January 2025.
So a year averaging 87.5 per cent still has a January sitting inside it where close to one service in five missed the mark. A yearly average hides months and a monthly average hides weeks. The other thing to know is that the 24 hour figure covers every service rather than the peak subset, so it's a different slice of the railway from the 92 per cent peak number that usually gets quoted.
Which is the worst Sydney train line?
The split that gets published plainly isn't line against line. It's suburban against intercity and it isn't close. In 2024-25 intercity services came in at 75.0 per cent while suburban managed 87.5. If your commute comes down from the Blue Mountains, up from the South Coast or in from the Central Coast, your scepticism has more official backing behind it than anybody else's.
Line by line is harder to pin down and it moves around. Sydney Trains publishes one combined suburban punctuality figure for the lines through Central rather than a monthly ranking, so the league tables you see in the news are usually assembled from a data release covering one particular stretch of time. Whichever line looked worst last winter may not be worst now. If yours is the T4 I've written separately about what causes T4 line delays and where to find out about them on the day.
Where to look the figures up yourself
Three places carry the official figures and every one of them is public!
- The performance reports page at Transport for NSW, which holds the definitions, the target and a genuinely interesting list of what knocks trains off schedule.
- The Customer On-Time page, which carries daily tables for the AM and PM peak, month to date and the previous six months.
- The Sydney Trains annual report, where the month by month punctuality table sits in the operations and performance section.
If you want the outside view as well, the NSW Audit Office went through this measure back in 2017. Its report on passenger rail punctuality found the agencies were measuring punctuality reasonably well and recommended they start publishing a customer delay result too, which is the one you can now read as Customer On-Time.
Bookmark the Customer On-Time tables if you only keep one. Then go straight past the percentage and find the average delay for the customers who weren't on time, because that figure is the piece a punctuality percentage can never carry. It's the difference between a line that's a bit untidy and a line that's properly wrecking people's evenings. Watch it for a month and you'll have a proper feel for your own line.
Mostly though, trust your own count. You're not imagining it and you're not being unfair to Sydney Trains either. Their number is answering a question about the whole railway across a whole peak. What you've been asking about is one platform on one afternoon. Once you know which one you're holding, the whole argument gets a lot calmer. I hope your run home this week is a boring one!