Travelled with South West Trains from London in 2015 to 2017? You have until Friday 10 January to check if you're due £30+

Payouts will be made following a group legal claim brought by campaigner Justin Gutmann, who argued that an estimated 1.4 million passengers who held TfL Travelcards had effectively been charged twice for parts of their journeys with South West Trains, which ran the South Western railway until 20 August 2017.

The case has now been settled out of court, with South West Trains agreeing to pay up to £25 million in compensation. Here's what you need to know.

Why you may have overpaid for your South West Trains ticket

South West Trains ran services to and from London Waterloo station and covered destinations in south west England including Basingstoke, Bournemouth, Bristol Temple Meads, Exeter St. Davids, Guildford, Portsmouth, Reading, Salisbury, Southampton Central, Weymouth and Woking. See the full network map (link opens PDF).

The legal case against the firm revolved around so-called 'boundary fares' for those with TfL Travelcards. Boundary fares let you travel beyond the zones of your Travelcard by only paying for the portion of the journey outside those zones.

For example, if you had a zone 1-4 Travelcard, but needed to travel from London Waterloo in zone 1 to Reading (outside the TfL zones), you should've been able to buy a fare from the edge of zone 4 to Reading – as you would have already paid for the part of your journey covering zones 1-4 through your Travelcard.

Mr Gutmann and his lawyers claimed that South West Trains didn't do enough to make customers aware of boundary fares, and didn't make it easy enough to buy them – though South West Trains denied this, and has not admitted any liability as part of the settlement.

You can claim up to £30 without any evidence – or more with proof

Boundary fares would've saved passengers between £3.85 and £5.11 for each journey, according to estimates from legal documents relating to the case. The same documents show that each affected passenger lost a total of £27.90 on average.

These figures are reflected in the amounts you can claim under the settlement – £5 a journey, capped at either £30 if you've no proof or £100 if you've limited proof. If you can provide all the evidence required, there's no cap – you can claim a full refund of the difference between what you paid and what the boundary fares would've cost.

You'll most likely get the full amount you claim for. However, if many more people claim than expected, you could get back less. This is because South West Trains has only agreed to pay up to £25 million, and the structure of the settlement means that most of this money is reserved for people who can provide full evidence – while the amount available for those with limited or no evidence is capped at a lower level.

The lawyers who ran the case will be paid at least £4.75 million and could get a share of any unclaimed compensation on top of that.

Who's eligible for compensation

You can make a claim if you meet ALL of the following criteria:

• You had a TfL Travelcard at any time between 1 October 2015 and 20 August 2017;

• While you had the Travelcard, you bought one or more South West Trains tickets for travel from a station within the zones covered by your TfL Travelcard (such as London Waterloo) to a station outside those zones (see examples);

• You lived in the UK on both 19 October 2021 and 30 April 2024 (these dates relate to judgments in the case); and

• You haven't previously opted out of the legal case (if this is the first you're hearing of the case, you don't need to worry about this point – everyone living in the UK was opted in automatically and you would've had to fill in a form or contact the law firm to opt out).

Season tickets count, but you must've had a TfL Travelcard for the whole period of the season ticket.

Only journeys outbound from London are covered – this was done "for the sake of simplicity", according to one of the judgments in the case.

Note: If you did manage to buy any boundary fare or 'point to point' fare tickets (which cover the portion of your journey from the last station covered by your Travelcard to your destination), you can't claim for these.

The deadline for claims is this Friday

You can submit a claim online. You have until 11.59pm this Friday (10 January 2025) to do this.

If you're making a claim without any evidence, you won't be asked for any details about the journeys you took – just the number of them (up to six). If you do have evidence and want to claim for more than six journeys, you'll need to provide the date of each journey and the origin and destination stations.

Important: When you complete the form, you'll be asked to attest that the information you've given is true and correct to the best of your knowledge. The claims administrator may do random anti-fraud spot checks, so don't claim unless you're sure you've been affected.

Payments will be made later this year

Once the claims deadline has passed, the administrator and the law firm working on the case will sort through the claims and work out how much each one is worth.

We don't yet know exactly when payments will start, but the administrator has said that they'll be sent at some point this year.

Similar claims about other train firms are ongoing

Mr Gutmann and his legal team are also pursuing claims relating to boundary fares against South Western Railway (which took over from South West Trains in August 2017), Gatwick Express, Great Northern, Southeastern, Southern, and Thameslink.

The next trial in relation to these claims is scheduled for June 2025, and there'll be at least one more after that – so it will be some time before we find out whether any compensation is due. In the meantime, it's worth keeping any evidence of your Travelcard ownership and train ticket purchases just in case.