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Marketplace ranges, not a rate card — every space is priced by its owner.
| What you're buying | Typical range | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Bus superside (about 9.5 × 1.8 m) | £300 – £700 per vehicleper 4-week cycle | City and route. A central corridor costs roughly double an outer-suburb route for the same vehicle. |
| Bus rear | £180 – £450 per vehicleper 4-week cycle | Priced below a side, but read head-on by stationary drivers — often the better-read panel in congestion. |
| Full vehicle wrap | £2,000 – £5,000 per vehicleper 4-week cycle | Print and fitting are most of it. A wrap takes the vehicle out of service for a day at each end. |
| Rail or metro platform 48-sheet | £600 – £2,400per 2-week cycle | Station entries and exits. A city terminus prices several times a suburban stop on the same line. |
| Escalator panel run | £1,200 – £6,000per 2-week cycle | Sold as a run rather than singly — you buy the whole ride, which is what makes it work. |
Ranges are what buyers typically pay across the marketplace, not a rate card. Every space is priced by the company that owns it, and the price on a listing is what a buyer pays.
What buyers check before they book this format.
Where buyers of transit put the rest of the budget.
A superside runs roughly £300 to £700 per vehicle for a four-week cycle and a rear panel £180 to £450, with central city routes at the top of both ranges. A full wrap is £2,000 to £5,000 per vehicle because print and fitting dominate the cost. Fleets are quoted as a package, so ask for the per-vehicle figure if you want to compare routes.
Because fitting is the expensive part. A panel is printed, cut to template and installed overnight at a depot, and the operator carries that cost whether the vinyl stays on for four weeks or four months. Selling shorter runs would mean charging far more per week than most buyers would accept.
On transit, almost always. Only the operator's crews are allowed to work on the vehicles, so print, overnight fitting and removal are usually quoted inside the listed price. Check the listing anyway, since station and platform inventory is sometimes sold as space only.
Ask before you book. Reputable operators keep a small buffer and will move the panel to another vehicle or extend the cycle, but the remedy varies and it is rarely automatic. Get the number of guaranteed vehicles and the replacement policy written into the booking.
Transit advertising puts a message on things that move, and on the places people wait for them. It covers bus sides, rears and full wraps, tram and metro exteriors, taxi livery, and the panels inside the network — platform 48-sheets, escalator runs, concourse banners and interior car cards. The unit you buy is the vehicle or the panel; the product is the route.
It behaves less like a billboard than it looks. Vehicles are booked as fleets across a four-week cycle, installation happens overnight at a depot, artwork is cut to a template that differs by chassis, and the audience is defined by where the route goes rather than where any single panel stands.
On the road: a superside runs roughly 9.5 metres by 1.8 along the offside of a double-decker and is the standard large panel; a streetliner is the shorter version; a T-side wraps the panel around a window; a rear panel is around two metres wide and is read by everyone stuck behind the bus. A full wrap covers the vehicle including perforated window film. Taxi livery ranges from door panels to a full wrap with interior tip-seat cards.
Off the road, the same operators sell the estate around the network: 48-sheet and 16-sheet panels on platforms, 4-sheets in ticket halls, cross-track panels read from the opposite platform for the length of a wait, escalator panel runs sold as a whole ride rather than singly, suspended concourse banners, and floor and gateline graphics. Airports sit at the top of this group — long dwell, a captive audience and prices to match.
Ten working days is standard, and every panel in a fleet must be supplied together because the depot fits them in one overnight window. Work from the operator's template for the exact vehicle type — panel shapes differ between chassis, and a file built to the wrong template gets cropped rather than rejected.
It is priced lower, but not always worth less. A rear is read head-on by drivers sitting still in traffic, which gives it dwell a side never gets. Sides win on pedestrian visibility and on the sheer size of the canvas, so the two do different jobs on the same route.
Only as precisely as a route allows. You choose the route and the route decides the streets, which is good for covering a corridor and poor for pinpointing one postcode. If a single location is the point, a fixed panel or a station panel at the relevant stop does the job better.
Vehicle advertising is sold per vehicle across a four-week cycle, and four weeks is normally the minimum because printing and fitting cost the same whether the vinyl stays on for a month or a year. You buy a number of vehicles on a named route or out of a named garage, and the price per vehicle reflects the traffic on that route and the streets it covers. Twelve buses on a central corridor cost more than twenty on an outer-suburb route running the same mileage.
Station and platform inventory is usually sold in two-week cycles, in line with the poster sites it sits alongside, and is often bought as a package — a full station domination, or a run of panels along one escalator. Print, overnight installation and removal are quoted inside the listed price far more often than on a roadside billboard, because only the operator's own crews are allowed near the vehicles and the track.
For vehicles, the audience is a route calculation rather than a site one. It combines the mileage a vehicle covers, the streets it covers it on, the hours it is in service and the number of vehicles carrying your panel, then applies the same visibility discounts used for fixed panels. The result is a daily impressions figure for the fleet rather than for any one bus — which is the right way to read it, because no single vehicle is anywhere in particular.
For station panels, measurement is closer to indoor screens: entries and exits at the station, adjusted for where the panel sits and how long people stand near it. Dwell is what makes this inventory valuable. A platform wait is measured in minutes, not the second and a half a driver gives a roadside board, which is why transit is the one outdoor environment where a panel can carry more than six words.
Artwork is built to the operator's template for that exact vehicle type. A superside is not the same shape on every chassis, so a design that fits one double-decker will be cropped on another and a fleet campaign often needs several versions of the same creative. Rear panels have to leave the registration plate, lights and access hatches clear. Wraps use perforated film on the windows and must leave the driver's glass, destination blinds and legal markings untouched.
Production is cast vinyl, printed and laminated, then fitted overnight at the depot while the vehicle is off the road — the reason ten working days is a normal deadline and why every panel in a fleet has to be supplied together. Order spares. A bus is a vehicle before it is a poster site: panels get scuffed in the depot, clipped in traffic and jet-washed weekly, and a replacement is only quick if the vinyl is already there.
Transit reaches places that have no advertising sites at all. A bus travels through residential streets, past schools and along high streets where no owner could get consent for a panel, and it does it again every twenty minutes, so frequency along a corridor builds fast. Inside the network, the dwell time makes it the best outdoor environment for a message that needs more than a glance — a proposition, a code, an actual offer.
The frustrations are all about control. You cannot say where a given vehicle will be, or guarantee that all twelve are on the road every day, because vehicles go into maintenance and get moved between routes. Sides are read at an angle by people at street level, so tall type and pale colours fail. And a panel on a vehicle gets dirty in a way a glazed 6-sheet never does, particularly through winter.
Establish the fleet guarantee: how many vehicles, on which routes, and what happens if one is off the road for part of the cycle — replacement, an extension, or nothing. Then confirm that print, fitting and removal sit inside the price, and that you get depot proof photographs of every vehicle rather than one representative shot.
On the creative side, get the templates before you design rather than after, and get the operator's approval process and timescale in writing — most reserve a veto over content, and some categories, political advertising in particular, are excluded outright. For station inventory, ask what else is on sale around your panel: a cross-track 48-sheet loses most of its value if three more are booked either side of it.