Poland's Office of Rail Transport (Urząd Transportu Kolejowego, UTK) published its second-quarter punctuality figures on 10 August. Passenger trains reached 89.3% — four percentage points below the same quarter of 2025, when the figure was 93.3%. In plain terms: across April, May and June, roughly one train in nine failed to keep to its timetable.
A quarter that got worse month by month
The quarterly average hides the more interesting part. Punctuality declined steadily through the quarter, and June was clearly the weakest month.
| Month | 2026 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| April | 92.2% | 93.8% | −1.6 pts |
| May | 89.6% | 94.0% | −4.4 pts |
| June | 86.0% | 91.7% | −5.7 pts |
For context, punctuality in the first quarter of 2026 was 87.7%, and UTK noted that January and February were the weakest months since at least 2019. That winter dip was blamed on frost and snow. The spring and summer explanation turned out to be the opposite one.
What actually counts as "on time"
That is not a criticism of the methodology, but it is worth knowing when reading the headline number. The share of journeys where something actually went wrong is higher than 10.7%.
Who runs on time, and who does not
The spread between operators is enormous — from almost perfect to barely two thirds.
| Operator | Punctuality, Q2 2026 |
|---|---|
| WKD | 99.8% |
| PKP SKM Tricity | 97.2% |
| Koleje Małopolskie | 95.2% |
| Łódź Agglomeration Railway | 93.7% |
| SKM Warsaw | 93.0% |
| RegioJet | 70.9% |
| PKP Intercity | 68.2% |
| Leo Express | 68.1% |
This ranking is not only about operator quality. The companies at the bottom run long-distance and international services — the longer the route, the more opportunities to accumulate delay along the way. At the top are suburban operators running short distances, often on their own infrastructure. WKD, at 99.8%, operates a line barely a dozen kilometres long with no freight traffic underneath it.
The practical takeaway for a visitor: if you are travelling long distance with PKP Intercity — which operates most services between major Polish cities — statistically one journey in three does not arrive on time.
Cancellations up by more than a third
Operators cancelled 5,400 trains in the quarter, against 4,000 a year earlier. June alone accounts for 2,600 of them.
Set that against volume: 578,900 passenger trains were run, 5.5% more than a year earlier, of which 516,700 arrived on time. Traffic is growing faster than the network's capacity to absorb it, and that is the backdrop to everything else in the data.
Why the trains were late
UTK splits causes two ways: how often something happens, and how many minutes of delay it generates in total. The distinction matters.
| Cause | % of events | % of delay minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Extended journey time | 14.4% | 6.2% |
| Passengers boarding and alighting | 10.7% | 2.9% |
| Rolling stock faults and repairs | 9.0% | 13.1% |
| High temperatures | 5.8% | 6.0% |
| Poorly managed engineering work | 4.8% | 4.3% |
| Knock-on delays from foreign networks | 4.4% | 9.5% |
| Electrical infrastructure | 3.1% | 2.7% |
| Incidents involving people on the track | 2.8% | 5.3% |
The most frequent causes are small: a few minutes here and there. The minutes that really add up come from rolling stock failures — 9% of events but 13.1% of all lost time — and delays imported from foreign networks: just 4.4% of events, yet nearly one delay minute in ten across the whole country.
High temperatures deserve their own note. At 5.8% of events they look modest, but a year earlier this cause barely registered. Heat means speed restrictions on expanded rails, track buckling, and air-conditioning failures that take a whole set out of service.
What our own measurements show for July and August
UTK's data stops at the end of June. Ours does not. Our monitoring captures a snapshot of delays several times a day and archives it, so we can look at the period official statistics have not covered yet: 2 July to 17 August 2026 — 47 days and 232 snapshots.
| July | August (to 17th) | |
|---|---|---|
| Average daily worst delay | 4 hrs 41 min | 5 hrs 19 min |
| Largest delay of the month | 10 hrs 11 min | 10 hrs 46 min |
August is running worse than July, and July was already worse than June — the month UTK called the weakest of the quarter. The holiday season has not brought relief; it looks more like a continuation of the trend.
The record for the whole period was set on 8 August: PKP Intercity service 31/33004 from Zaporizhzhia to Przemyśl Główny arrived 10 hours 46 minutes behind schedule.
In those daily top-ten lists, 77% of the entries belong to PKP Intercity and a further 11% to POLREGIO. The routes cluster into two groups: services from Ukraine (Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv and Kharkiv towards Przemyśl, Warsaw and Chełm), which is precisely the "foreign network" category UTK describes, and domestic holiday routes to the Baltic coast, such as Poznań–Ustka and Kraków–Kołobrzeg.
What this means if you are travelling in Poland
- The longer the route, the higher the risk. Operator statistics are largely a function of route length. Do not rely on a fifteen-minute scheduled buffer when connecting from a long-distance service.
- Delays above 60 minutes entitle you to compensation. EU passenger rights apply to Polish rail: a delay of an hour or more means a partial refund of the ticket price.
- Check before you leave, not on the platform. Delays are usually visible at earlier stations long before the train reaches you.
Sources: Urząd Transportu Kolejowego — train punctuality in Q2 2026 (statement of 10 August 2026) and the UTK statistics portal. July and August figures come from Trainradar24's own monitoring (2 July – 17 August 2026, 232 snapshots).
