Deutsche Bahn’s punctuality rate was 62.5% in 2024, and 74.4% in 2015. Germany’s rail operator counts a train as late if it is delayed by six minutes or more.
Germany really needs to finally separate high speed trains from regional and cargo trains. That is the only way to finally reduce delays. It will cost a lot, but still badly needed. However given how car brained the current government is, that is unlikely. I sometimes hope China kills the German car industry for that reason. At least EVs make it weaker, which is good.
Note: as far as I know, this statistic does not include the instances when the train didn’t arrive at all. I wonder if there’re any numbers on the overall adherence to the schedule.
The DB’s full report is yet to come, but the cancelled trains don’t make a significant difference in that statistic. What should be said is that a train is counted as delayed when the delay is at least 6 minutes, which is less than some other countries use as a metric. Also, this is purely accounting for long distance trains. If you add local trains, the punctuality jumps significantly to just under 90%.
What they do have is the traveller’s punctuality of long distance customers. Essentially the question is: how many passengers actually arrived to their destination within 15 minutes of their scheduled arrival time. That includes cancelled trains and also missed connections due to delays (e.g. if your train has 10 minutes delay but that causes you to miss a connection and have to take the next train which leaves an hour later, than your arrival delay is an hour). The DB actually likes to focus on this statistic since this is actually what matters, but unfortunately the media prefer to focus on the other statistics. Not that the traveller’s punctuality is great, though - the punctuality there was 67.4% in 2024.
That’s a popular DB trick to doctor the statistics, a train that’s entirely cancelled doesn’t count as “late” in the delay statistics. If you’d factor those in, the whole picture would look even worse.
How does this compare to European and non-European countries?
Can’t speak for non-European countries but compared to European it’s bad. As soon as I cross the boarder into Switzerland, The Netherlands, Belgium, or France all the trains are super punctual.
Funny note around this. When Swiss trains have delays on the German network they ROAST Deutsche Bahn, saying stuff like “Due to faults and issues on the German network outside of our control we are delayed by 30 min. One we cross the boarder we are expected to make up 10 minutes. Until then we will do our best inside the existing difficult circumstances”