NS president Koolmees wants rush hour charges for full trains starting in 2026

NS president Wouter Koolmees hopes that from 2026 a rush-hour charge will apply to train tickets on busy routes, he said in an interview with de Volkskrant. However, Koolmees did not say how much more expensive the tickets should be. "We are still at the beginning of the discussion, also with politics.".

Koolmees notes in de Volkskrant that trains are fuller than ever during the morning rush hour, with a load factor of "sometimes more than 100 percent." Over the entire day, however, the load factor is "less than 30 percent. Koolmees refers to this as "thinning." To encourage people to travel off-peak, he wants to make tickets for busy train routes more expensive during rush hour.

The NS president says it won't make the railroad company any money "on the bottom line." "It will be budget neutral. What we earn from rush hour fees will lead to discounts on other routes. That way, rush hour will be quieter and many tickets will be cheaper," Koolmees told the newspaper.

The idea of a rush hour fee has come up more often in recent years. Back in 1992, NS called the idea of more expensive tickets during rush hour "inevitable." At the time, the idea was to introduce a higher fare during both the morning and evening rush hours. In 2010 and 2017, the rail company also expressed its intention to spread passengers more throughout the day with a rush hour fare.