Find out how your business compares to other industry organisations
The NSAR Rail Workforce Survey is an annual comprehensive survey of rail industry professionals.
Each year, railway organisations across the industry contribute by submitting their workforce data on demographics, job roles and work locations.
NSAR collates this information, in addition to data from the Sentinel database and from the Office of Rail and Road, to produce a workforce profile providing approximately 95% coverage across the sector including the supply chain.
Why is it important?
The survey enables NSAR to build the most complete and accurate representation of the UK rail workforce. This helps the industry understand current and future workforce gaps and develop strategic workforce plans to ensure a pipeline of skilled employees is available.
Rail Workforce Survey 2024
Key insights from the 2024 survey:
- The workforce in rail has decreased over the last year by 9.4% to 220,500, predominantly in the supply chain.
- The workforce is slightly younger this year than last (the average age of the workforce has decreased from 45 years old in 2023 to 44.1 years old currently).
- The proportion of workers aged 25 and under has increased from 4.7% in 2023 to 6.3% in 2024. This represents an increase of 20.2% year on year.
- The proportion of workers aged between 31 and 49 has decreased from 50% in 2023 to 43.8% in 2024. This represents a decrease of 20.6% year on year.
- A third of our workforce aged 50 years old or over.
- We are facing a critical loss of experience and knowledge in the next seven years (the number of people leaving through retirement and other forms of attrition could be 90,000 workers by 2030).
- We remain a male-dominated industry (although gender diversity has increased to 17.4% in 2024, up from 16% in 2023).
- The proportion of workers in UK rail who are from an Ethnic Minority Group (EMG) has risen from 12.3% to 14.4%, representing an increase of 17.2% year on year.Â