Announced today- from a date to be confirmed in the 2nd half of 2026- you will need to have a National Railcard before you can buy railcard discounted fares (rather than buy such fares before having the railcard).
When buying online the railcard number will need to be registered with the relevant website, at machines the number will have to be entered at every purchase.
This is to help to combat fare evasion.
Date and further details to be advised in due course.
Thanks for this info, Stuart!
Do you know if the number given will have to be for a railcard valid on the date of travel? For example, if it's July, and I'm booking travel for September, but my current railcard expires in August- I'd be planning to renew it but wouldn't know the new number yet.
Your expired railcards stay in the app on your phone, albeit with the word “expired”, alongside your current card, so you have the full audit trail.
Railcard numbers are 15 characters long which will be challenging to get right at ticket machines. Online Railcards have this in a code that can be scanned but how widely this can be done at present is questionable. Also not clear whether there is to be any verification on these as not all Railcards are in a central database.
Another forthcoming change will see delay repay centralised & also available via independent retailers.
As always with such announcements the devil will be in the eventual detail, but I would suspect that yes you will have to wait for the new railcard- bearing in mind that it can be renewed up to 30 days early.
To be effective they would have to put the railcard number on the ticket- so rather than just say Snr Railcard on the ticket , it would say Snr Railcard 123456.
