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 2025
 Key insights from the 2025 survey:
- The industry continues to trust NSAR with it’s workforce data – we have more this year than ever before.
- The workforce in rail has stabilised over the last year to 221,788 – an increase of 0.6% over last year.
- We have a workforce that is slightly younger this year than last (the average age of the workforce has decreased from 44.1 years old in 2024 to 43.5 years old currently).
- The proportion of those workers aged 25 and under has increased from 6.3% in 2024 to 6.8% in 2025. This represents an increase of 7.9% year on year.
- We continue to have over 30% of our workforce aged 50 years old or over, which remains a big concern.
- 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 up to 70,000 workers by 2030).
- We remain a male-dominated industry (gender diversity has increased from 17.4% in 2024 to 18.9% in 2025 – the highest level since NSAR first reported this in 2016).
- The proportion of workers in UK rail who are from an Ethnic Minority Group (EMG) has risen from 14.4% to 15.2%, representing an increase of 5.6% year on year. The UK national average for EMG proportion in the working population is 19.3% according to the ONS.