About the data
Where our bus information comes from, how current it is, and the licences it's used under.
Last updated: 4 September 2026
Our sources
Bus Open Data Service (BODS)
Timetables, live bus locations and service disruptions come from the Bus Open Data Service, operated by the Department for Transport. Bus operators in England are required to publish their timetable, fares and real-time data here.
NaPTAN
Bus stop names, locations and codes come from NaPTAN (the National Public Transport Access Nodes dataset), also published by the Department for Transport.
OpenStreetMap
Our map imagery comes from OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
Licences and attribution
- BODS and NaPTAN data is published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
NextBusTime is an independent service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Department for Transport, any local transport authority, or any bus operator.
Scheduled times vs live information
This distinction matters when you're standing at a stop:
- Scheduled times — the published timetable. Departure times on stop and route pages are scheduled times.
- Live buses — actual GPS positions of vehicles currently running, shown on route pages and refreshed roughly every 15 seconds.
We don't currently show per-departure delay predictions. Matching a moving vehicle to a specific scheduled journey reliably is genuinely hard, and a wrong prediction is worse than an honest timetable.
How often data updates
- Live bus positions — every 15 seconds while you have a route page open.
- Service disruptions — fetched from the BODS disruptions feed when you load the page.
- Timetables and stops — imported periodically. There can be a short gap between an operator publishing a change and it appearing here.
Coverage
We currently cover North East England (Tyne & Wear, County Durham, Northumberland, Darlington and Tees Valley) and Yorkshire (West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, York, East Riding of Yorkshire and Hull). We're adding regions one at a time so that each is genuinely accurate rather than covering the whole country badly. London is served well by Transport for London's own tools and isn't a priority for us.
Found something wrong?
Timetable errors usually originate in the operator's published data rather than with us — but please report it anyway so we can check.