London has been struck by four days of travel disruption this week, with the National Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport Workers (RMT) staging two 24-hour walkouts on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday. Cebr estimates the economic impact will be substantial, with direct losses arising from lost working days this week standing between £130 million and £250 million.
The industrial action stems from a dispute over working arrangements following a proposal by Transport for London (TfL) to restructure driver shifts and is set to be repeated in the same format in May and June if an agreement is not reached. With one wave of strikes already underway and two more in prospect, the cumulative direct cost to the UK economy from April to June could rise to between £390 million and £760 million.
Cebr’s estimates are based on lost working days, both among RMT members directly on strike and among the broader commuting workforce unable to reach their workplace due to service disruption. On this basis, this week’s action alone is estimated to have resulted in between 320,000 and 630,000 lost working days, with the majority of these expected to arise from the broader commuting base rather than from TfL staff themselves. The range in estimates reflects uncertainty over how the 24-hour walkouts – each spanning two working days – interact with different working arrangements.
To contextualise the cumulative impact, if the upper bound of lost working days is realised across all three strike periods, the direct losses would reduce London’s nominal Gross Value Added (GVA) growth by approximately 0.1 percentage point in 2026.[1]
Importantly, Cebr’s estimates capture only the direct impact of lost working days. There will be wider knock-on effects not captured by these figures, with two channels being especially important.
First, commuters diverted onto alternative routes will increase congestion across the transport network. This will raise journey times even for those who do not use the Tube, increasing the time cost of commutes.
A second indirect channel operates through lower footfall across the city, weighing on retail and hospitality spending. This comes at a particularly fragile time for these sectors, which have shown clear signs of cooling in recent months – partly due to increases in National Insurance Contributions (NICs) and the minimum wage over recent years.[2] Early evidence suggests the disruption is already having a material effect on businesses, with workforce management platform Harri estimating that hospitality revenue fell by nearly 20% this week compared to the previous one.[3]
There are, however, some mitigating factors. In particular, the rising popularity of cycling hires may partially offset some of the disruption to commutes, allowing more people to reach their workplaces during the strikes. Data from the September 2025 Tube strikes showed a marked increase in cycle hires, helping to attenuate some of the impact on lost working days. Early evidence points to a similar pattern emerging during the current strikes.[4]
A separate mitigating factor is the normalisation of remote working since the Covid-19 pandemic. The share of London workers able to work from home on strike days is considerably higher today than a decade earlier, meaning the direct impact of similar strikes in previous years would have been much larger.
Taken together, the analysis suggests that the economic cost of this dispute will not be insignificant, especially if it continues in May and June. At the upper bound, our figures suggest that an ongoing dispute would generate a drag large enough to weigh on London’s GVA growth in 2026. While uncertainty remains around the full costs of the industrial action, the framework set out here provides a useful baseline for assessing the economic stakes as the dispute unfolds.
[1] This calculation is based on Cebr’s latest projections for regional GVA. This estimate is not sensitive to the growth trajectory: GVA growth is set to be reduced by 0.1 percentage point regardless of the assumed growth rate.