The Government’s Office of Rail and Road publishes annual statistics including estimates of station usage.  These are defined as ‘entrances and exits’ and are derived from ticket sales (‘entrance’ at origin station, ‘exit’ at destination).  For the reporting year April 2024 to March 2025, these figures were released on 4th December 2025.
The total for Market Harborough in the year was 943,468, which was a 6.9% increase on 2023-24’s total of 882,598.  This just exceeds the pre-Covid peak of 937,484 in 2019-20.  Market Harborough’s increase roughly matches the national picture, with UK rail journeys totalling 1.73 billion, up 7.4% from the previous year’s 1.61 billion.
Market Harborough is thus the 566th busiest station on the national network, out of a total of 2,589 stations. 
The main destination or origin for journeys from or to Market Harborough continues to be London, with 447,496 journeys, up slightly from 439,770 in 2023-24.  London's proportion of the overall total for Market Harborough fell slightly, however, from 49.8% in 2023-24 to 47.4% in 2024-25. 
Journeys made with season tickets totalled 171,658 (18.2% of total journeys), up from 147,122 (16.7%) in 2023-24.  Despite this modest increase, season ticket usage is still not much more than half of the pre-Covid total of 311,164 in 2019-20 (33.2% of total journeys).
Will Market Harborough have over a million passengers next year?!

The introduction of EMR’s new bi-mode Hitachi Class 810 Aurora train fleet has been severely delayed; they were meant to start running in 2022!  Covid interrupted things, of course, and testing identified issues with the first of the new trains that needed extensive rectification.
Promised starts in November 2025 did not happen and it began to look as though the first run would not be until the December 2025 timetable change. However, on 3rd December, Aurora unit number 810010 operated the first public duty for the type, the 07:00 Sheffield to St Pancras (which does not call at Market Harborough).  The same unit later worked the 17:05 St Pancras to Nottingham, calling at Market Harborough at 18:07 and thereby becoming our first Aurora service, and thus our first electric train.  However, the electrification only extends as far as Wigston South Junction, so the train was diesel powered by the time it arrived in Leicester. The changeover from electric to diesel takes place at speed and is almost unnoticeable.  We look forward to more Auroras being introduced into service over the next few months.