What makes up your train fare

A train fare on Indian Railways is a distance-based basic fare, plus a reservation fee of ₹20 to ₹60 by class, plus a superfast supplementary charge of ₹15 to ₹75 on superfast trains, plus GST at 5 per cent in air-conditioned classes and nil elsewhere. On Rajdhani, Shatabdi and Duronto trains the basic fare also rises as the train fills, capped at 1.4 times.

Last verified 3 September 2026.

What are the parts of a train fare?

Five, and only the first one depends on how far you are going.

A sixth thing sits on top of the basic fare rather than beside it: on some trains the basic fare itself moves with occupancy. That is the flexi fare scheme, and it has its own section below.

The useful thing about this structure is that the flat parts are the same however short your journey is. On a two-hour hop in AC Chair Car, ₹40 of reservation fee and ₹45 of superfast charge can be a large share of what you pay. On a two-night run they are a rounding error.

How much is the reservation fee, and the superfast charge?

Both were last revised together, in the Railway Budget for 2013-14, with effect from tickets issued on and after 1 April 2013. These are the figures from that announcement.

Are these still the current figures? We should be careful here rather than confident. The 1 April 2013 revision is the most recent official notification of these amounts that we could find. Separately, when the Ministry of Railways rationalised basic fares with effect from 1 July 2025, its announcement said in terms: "Reservation fees, superfast surcharges, and other charges remain unchanged." Those two statements together are good evidence that the table above is still what you pay, but they are not the same as a 2026 notification, and we did not find one. If the figure on your ticket differs, the ticket is right — please tell us through corrections.

Notice that the table already carried a separate line for AC 3 Economy in 2013, at the same amounts as AC 3 Tier. That is much older than the AC 3-Tier Economy coach introduced in 2021, and it is a reminder that a class code can outlive the stock it was written for. AC 3-Tier Economy today is a different animal from the class that line was written about.

Which trains carry the superfast charge?

The ones the railway classifies as superfast. That is a formal classification the railway applies to a service; it is not something you can work out from the timetable, and we do not hold it.

We can tell you what our own data says, as long as it is not mistaken for the same thing. Counting over the timetable feed this site is built from, version 2026-08-30: of the 4,423 trains classified as reservable, 1,836 average 55 km/h or more end to end, and the median reserved train averages 52.4 km/h. We computed that as scheduled end-to-end distance divided by scheduled end-to-end duration, including day offsets, over every reservable train in the feed.

That is our arithmetic, not the railway's classification. An average speed over the whole run, including every halt, is not what decides whether a service is designated superfast, and we are not going to present one as a proxy for the other. Use it as a sense of scale — roughly two in five reserved trains are quick enough for the question to arise — and nothing more. Where the data comes from describes the feed and how we classify what is in it.

How much GST is on a train ticket?

Five per cent in air-conditioned classes and first class; nil in the others.

The clearest official statement of it we found is in the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs' Circular No. 178/10/2022-GST, dated 3 August 2022, which was written about cancellation charges but states the underlying rate on the way through: cancellation charges "for a class would attract GST at the same rate as applicable to the class of travel (i.e., 5% GST on first class or air-conditioned coach ticket and nil for other classes such as second sleeper class)."

So a Sleeper ticket carries no GST and an AC 3-Tier ticket on the same train carries five per cent — on the fare, and again on the cancellation charge if you give it up. Refunds and cancellation charges works through the second half of that. On the newest premium trains the tax is stated separately: Railway Board Commercial Circular No. 03 of 2026 says of the Vande Bharat Sleeper Express that its published basic fare "is all inclusive" and that "Goods and Services Tax as applicable shall be levied separately."

What is flexi fare, and which trains use it?

Flexi fare, also called dynamic fare, is the scheme under which the basic fare climbs as the train fills. The Ministry of Railways described the mechanism in January 2019: it "has been introduced in Rajdhani, Shatabdi and Duronto trains from 09.09.2016. Under this scheme, the fare increases by 10% with every 10% of berths sold subject to maximum limit of 1.5 times in classes Second AC, Sleeper, Second Sitting (reserved), AC Chair Car and 1.4 times in 3rd AC class."

Two things about that sentence matter more than the mechanism. First: "No change has been made in the fare of First AC and Executive class." Those two classes sit outside dynamic pricing entirely. Second, the same 2019 announcement rationalised the scheme:

• the maximum cap was reduced to 1.4 times in all flexi-fare applicable classes;
• flexi fare was discontinued from 15 trains with average monthly occupancy under 50 per cent, for the full year, and from 32 trains with occupancy between 50 and 75 per cent during a defined lean period of February, March and August;
• a graded discount was introduced on flexi-fare trains and Humsafar trains where class-wise occupancy is under 60 per cent four days before departure.

How many trains does this reach? Counting the same 2026-08-30 feed by our own train-type classification: 31 Rajdhani, 39 Shatabdi and 47 Duronto services, so 117 of the 4,423 reservable trains fall within the three types the scheme was written for, plus 72 Humsafar services that the graded discount also covers. That is under three per cent of reserved services — flexi fare is a premium-train phenomenon, not a network-wide one. As with the superfast figure above, the classification into types is ours and is described on where the data comes from; the railway may not draw the lines in exactly the same place.

We did not find an official page listing which named trains are currently inside or outside the scheme, and we are not going to reconstruct that list from press reports.

When was the basic fare last changed?

With effect from 1 July 2025, and the Ministry published the change class by class.

The release also lists the premium services the revision applies to — Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Duronto, Vande Bharat, Tejas, Humsafar, Amrit Bharat, Mahamana, Gatimaan, Antyodaya, Jan Shatabdi and Yuva Express, together with AC Vistadome and Anubhuti coaches — and confirms that tickets issued before 1 July 2025 remained valid at the old fare with no adjustment.

The direction of travel is worth noticing if you are choosing a class: the AC classes went up at twice the rate of the non-AC ones. Sleeper or 3A puts the whole comparison, fixed charges included, in one table.

What this page cannot tell you

Your fare. We mean that literally, and it is not modesty.

The distance-based basic fare comes from the Indian Railway Conference Association's Passenger Fare Table, which is a large table indexed by distance and class, and it is applied to the distance for your particular pair of stations on your particular train, then rounded under the railway's own rounding rules. On some trains it is then multiplied by an occupancy factor that changes while you are looking at the screen. There is a minimum chargeable distance, which on the Vande Bharat Sleeper Express is 400 km. Concessions, child fares and quota-specific rules apply on top.

No static page can compute that honestly, and any page that quotes you a rupee figure for "Delhi to Mumbai in 3A" without saying which train, which date and which quota is guessing. The only fare that is real is the one the booking system quotes you before you pay.

What we can do is tell you which components exist, what each one depends on, and where each number was published — so that when you look at a fare breakdown you can tell whether it adds up. If something here is wrong, corrections explains how to tell us and what we do about it. If you are booking at short notice, Tatkal booking time and charges covers the extra charge that applies there, and Vande Bharat classes compares CC and EC; we found no document applying flexi fare to Vande Bharat. Corrected 4 October 2026: this line said Vande Bharat has one class the flexi-fare scheme leaves alone.

Sources

Every factual claim above was checked against these documents on 3 September 2026, apart from the corrections made on 4 October 2026 and listed in the corrections log.

• https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=94296
• https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2140857
• https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=187188
• https://cbic-gst.gov.in/pdf/cir-178-08-2022-cgst.pdf
• https://www.indianrail.gov.in/tatkal_Scheme.html
• https://www.staffnews.in/2026/01/fare-structure-of-vande-bharat-sleeper-express.html
• https://indiankanoon.org/doc/30426228/

Written and reviewed by Vijesh Rathore · Page last updated 4 October 2026 · how often we re-check.