Train chart vacancy and live seat availability

What “chart vacancy” actually is

Before a train leaves, the railway prepares a reservation chart: the final list of who is travelling in which berth. At that moment every ticket that is still waitlisted is dropped, RAC passengers move up, and the berths those cancellations free are put back on sale.

Those released berths are the chart vacancy. In the booking system they show as current booking, the status string CURR_AVBL. They can be booked right up to the second chart, at a counter or online. A train that showed a long waiting list all week can have berths free an hour before it departs.

• Before the chart: what you see is the ordinary quota position — available, RAC or a waiting list.
• After the chart: a CURR_AVBL figure is a real count of berths on offer right now.
• It moves fast. Anything we show is true as of the timestamp printed beside it, and no later.

Read the full explanation of chart preparation, with the circulars the timing comes from. Or read what to do if your ticket is still waitlisted after the chart is made.

The reservation system answers in codes. The code is its own, printed unchanged; the plain wording beside it is ours.

When will your train’s chart be made?

Two worked examples, using the bands in the table above.

A train that leaves at 06:00. That falls in the morning band, so its first chart is expected at 20:00 the previous evening. If you are waitlisted, the evening before departure is when your position resolves, not the morning of travel. Anything released afterwards shows as current booking.

A train that leaves at 17:00. That falls in the other band, so the first chart is expected around 07:00 on the day of travel. The gap between the chart and departure is where most released berths are picked up, and it is short.

Both figures are targets taken from a rule, not observations, and zones do miss them. Press-reported, not verified. The timing comes from a Railway Board letter reported as dated 16 December 2025, which we have not read and for which no circular number appears in the Board's own 2025 index. The Daily Jagran reported it on 17 December 2025; the earliest announcement in a railway's own name was South Central Railway's, for its own zone, on 20 December 2025. The effective date is reported as both 20 and 30 December 2025.

The last chart order we have read in full is Commercial Circular 10 of 2 July 2025, which sets 21:00 the previous day or eight hours in advance, and which says “preferably”. It has been superseded. Rule verified 3 September 2026. We re-read the Railway Board’s own index of 2025 circulars that day. It runs to Circular 24, and holds no chart circular after Circular 10 of 2 July 2025. The evidence trail is on when the chart is prepared, and every hour of the clock is worked out on the chart preparation time table.

What happens if you are still waitlisted?

If you booked online and your whole booking is still on the waiting list when the chart is made, the rules answer this for you. Rule 8(5) of the 2015 refund rules drops the names from the chart and credits the fare back, less ₹60 clerkage per passenger. You file nothing, and you must not board.

A counter ticket is different. It is not dropped automatically, so you have to cancel it yourself to get anything back. The deadlines are measured from the train’s scheduled departure rather than from when the chart was made, and that distinction costs people money. The charges, the RAC rules and what is worth trying next are set out in still waitlisted after the chart.

How fresh is the figure you see?

Every availability figure on this site carries the time in IST at which we fetched it. That stamp is the whole claim we are making: the number was true at that moment and we do not know what it is now.

If we cannot reach the provider, we may show you an older answer, and we label it as stale with the time it was actually true. How we fetch and cache a figure sets out every period in full.

Four limits are worth knowing before you rely on anything here.

• We cannot show berth-by-berth coach vacancy. Which berth in which coach is free appears only on the railways’ own online chart page, at irctc.co.in/online-charts. That page is the place to go for it, and the checker points you there when we cannot answer.
• We cannot tell you whether a waitlisted ticket will clear. Nobody can. Any site offering you a confident percentage should be asked where that number came from and over how many journeys.
• We do not know or store your PNR. We never ask for one and never accept one, so we cannot look up your booking. See privacy.
• The exact charting minute varies by train and by zone. We publish the window the rule sets, not a prediction of when a particular zone will act.

How fresh a number here is. Seat figures are fetched from our live data provider at the moment you press the button, and each one is printed with the IST time it arrived. Nothing on a page you loaded earlier is live. How we fetch and cache it.

What our sources are. Times, distances and halts come from our own timetable database, built from a published Indian Railways timetable feed, version 2026-08-30. Chart times are computed by us from a published railway order, and the order is named beside every one. We hold no booking data of our own, and we are not a booking agent. Where the timetable data comes from.

If something here is wrong, write to the address on the contact page; the corrections page explains what happens next. What we do and do not promise is in the terms of use.