The Datum Report

Occupation 6214 · Caring, leisure and other service occupations

Rail travel assistants

Half of full-time rail travel assistants in the UK earn more than £46,062 a year, and half earn less.

Rail travel assistants issue, collect and inspect travel tickets, provide information and assistance to railway passengers, operate train doors, and perform a variety of duties on station platforms in connection with the arrival and departure of trains and the movement of goods and passengers, and on trains to ensure the safety and comfort of passengers.

How people enter it

There are no formal academic entry requirements, although entrants are required to take a medical examination and have normal colour vision. Training is provided Off and on-the-job. NVQs/SVQs in Rail Services are available at level 2.

What the work involves

• examines and collects tickets at the ticket barrier of a railway station
• helps with passenger enquiries and makes announcements over a public address system at stations
• loads and unloads mail, goods and luggage, operates lifts and hoists and drives small trucks
• assists passengers with special needs to board and leave trains
• attends to the safety, welfare and comfort of passengers on trains and manages train crew
• checks control panel operation before start of journey, operates train door controls and signals to driver to start or stop train
• inspects and issues tickets on trains, deals with passenger enquiries, and takes charge of goods being transported on train

Also called

Conductor (railways) · Station assistant (underground railway) · Station supervisor · Ticket inspector (railways) · Train conductor · Train manager

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for rail travel assistants, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 7 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions

Classified alongside this

Air travel assistants · Leisure and travel service occupations n.e.c. · Sports and leisure assistants · Travel agents