Rail passenger transport volumes
- Eurostat dataset
- rail_pa_total
- Reference period
- 2025
- Unit of measure
- thousand passengers
Key estimates
- Highest value: Spain at 695 385 thousand passengers; lowest: North Macedonia at 178.0 thousand passengers.
- Cross-country mean 130 721 thousand passengers, standard deviation 194 831, coefficient of variation 149.0% across 13 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2014→2025: +21.5% on a constant panel of 12 countries.
Where is rail actually carrying Europe's passengers? Eurostat dataset rail_pa_total reports rail passenger transport volumes for 13 reporting countries, with 2025 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. Rail volumes measure realised modal shift rather than declared intentions.
The five highest values in 2025 are recorded by Spain (695 385), Netherlands (388 675), Sweden (243 308), Norway (84 144), Slovakia (74 238), all expressed in thousand passengers. At the opposite end of the distribution sit North Macedonia (178.0), Lithuania (5 398), Slovenia (19 865), Bulgaria (20 979), Latvia (21 399). The ratio between the highest and the lowest observation is 3906.66, while the median country reports 55 039 thousand passengers against a mean of 130 721 thousand passengers.
Dispersion is wide: the standard deviation across countries is 194 831 thousand passengers, giving a coefficient of variation of 149.0%. The mean sits above the median, which indicates that the distribution is pulled by the upper tail rather than being symmetric. Any European average quoted for this indicator therefore describes a synthetic country that few Member States resemble.
Between 2014 and 2025 the summed value across the 12 countries reporting in both periods moved by +21.5%. The largest relative increases are observed in Slovakia (+51.2%), Ireland (+42.9%), Slovenia (+37.6%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in North Macedonia (-77.8%), Bulgaria (-14.8%), Romania (-0.6%). Because the panel is held constant, this change is not an artefact of countries entering or leaving the sample.
Higher values are the policy-preferred direction for this indicator, so the countries listed at the bottom of the distribution mark the effective size of the European gap: closing it to the level of the fifth-ranked country would require the lowest performer to move by 74 060 thousand passengers. The estimates above are reproducible: the dataset identifier, filter dimensions and reference period are stated in the methodological note, and the series can be re-downloaded from the Eurostat dissemination API at any time.
Methodological note
Source: Eurostat, dataset rail_pa_total ('Passengers transported'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-07-21. Filter dimensions: unit=THS_PAS. Unit of measure: thousand passengers. Reference period: 2025. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (13 countries with a non-missing observation); European and euro-area aggregates are excluded from the cross-country statistics and reported separately. Descriptive statistics (mean, median, population standard deviation, coefficient of variation) are computed unweighted over reporting countries. Change over time is computed on a constant panel: only countries with a non-missing observation in both the base and the reference period enter the calculation, which removes composition effects but may differ from the officially published aggregate. No imputation, seasonal adjustment or re-scaling has been applied beyond what Eurostat performs at source. Flagged provisional and estimated observations are retained as published.
Source data
The underlying series can be inspected and re-downloaded from the Eurostat data browser.