Cost guide
What metro advertising costs, and what decides it
The city, the station, the format and the period set the rate. Which station you pick matters more than how many people pass through it.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read
A metro quotation moves on four things: the city, the station, the format, and how long the display runs. Sellers lead with a fifth. Footfall is the least useful number in this medium. A station's daily entry count tells you how many people came through a building, and nothing about whether any of them will walk into yours.
Every network is its own market
The property belongs to a government authority. The advertising on it is sold by an agency that authority appointed, for a set of stations and a fixed term. Rates in one city bear no relation to rates in another, and two corridors in the same city can sit with two different agencies at two different prices.
So the first question is not the rate. It is who holds the rights to this station today and what date that contract runs to. The second is what the authority allows on its property. Rules on wording, materials and what may sit near a platform edge are set by the system, and the agency cannot negotiate them for you.
Which station, not how many people
A metro panel is a local medium in a city-wide costume. The crowd at a station is not the network's crowd. It is the few square kilometres around that station, walking in each morning and out each evening.
That changes what a big number is worth. An interchange handles enormous numbers and most of those people are changing trains, moving fast, with a connection on their mind. They never leave the building. A quieter station in a residential belt puts the same people in front of your panel ten times a fortnight, and they live near enough to act on it.
Then ask which end of the journey you want. A clinic or a coaching centre wants the station its buyers live near, because that is where they are on a Saturday. A lunch place or an office services firm wants the station those same people get off at. The two are different stations and the second one is often dearer.
Inside the station, a few metres decides everything. A panel facing the escalator exit is read. The same panel on a blank corridor wall is walked past. A station with four entrances splits its riders four ways, and the gate count at the top of the report says nothing about the entrance your site faces.
Three different products, priced apart
On the platform and concourse. Pillar wraps, backlit panels, escalator and staircase panels, gate branding and screens in a digital loop. This is the buy for a business near that station. It repeats to a fixed catchment daily for the whole cycle.
Inside the train. Panels above the seats, grab handles, window stickers and screens. A seated commuter has twenty minutes and nothing to look at, so this format carries detail that a platform panel cannot: a price, a model number, a map. What you cannot buy is location. The rake goes where the roster sends it, so you are buying a line and its timings, not a station.
On the outside. The station facade, the entrance structure and the pillars along the viaduct face the road rather than the commuter. That is an outdoor buy in everything but name, and it should be priced against the hoardings on the same road, not against the panel inside. Where a system offers co-branding of the station name, it is a long commitment at a large number, and it is bought for standing rather than for enquiries.
A wrapped train sits apart from all three. It is seen from every platform it passes for the whole cycle, it costs the most, and the rake has to come out of service to be wrapped.
The period, and the dates that hide in it
Metro space sells in monthly cycles, with a minimum period and a better rate the longer you commit. Availability turns over every cycle, so the site you were shown last month may be gone.
Work happens after the last train. The printed material has to reach the station before mounting night, and the artwork has to clear the authority's approval before it is printed at all. A file sent late does not delay the cycle. It shortens it.
Two dates belong in writing: whether the cycle starts on mounting night or on the first of the month, and who bears the lost days if approval runs late. If you are running three months on the same station, plan a second creative for the back half. The same commuters see it every working day, and by week six they have stopped seeing it.
What the quotation must break out
| Line | Why |
|---|---|
| Station, format, exact panel size, and the entrance or platform it faces | Two panels at one rate can be an escalator exit and a dead corridor |
| Single-site rate for each station, before any package | A package hides which station you are actually paying for |
| Cycle dates, and whether mounting night counts as day one | Decides whether you bought thirty display days or twenty-six |
| Printing, mounting and removal, priced separately | These are not inside the media rate, and the material must meet the system's specification |
| The approval timeline, and who submits the artwork | Approval comes before printing, and the notice period belongs to the authority |
| For digital screens: loop length, seconds, how many screens, playout report | Otherwise you own an unknown share of a screen |
| Who holds the concession for that station, and until when | You are booking with an agency that must still hold the rights on your mounting night |
What arrives after the quotation
Printing in the material the system demands, mounting by an approved crew at night, and removal at the end. Artwork revisions when the authority asks for a change. Dated photographs of the panel in place, which you will want because you are not going to be standing there at eleven at night.
And the route for a response. A panel keeps no record of who passed it. So the artwork carries a number, a code or a QR, with a page behind it written for a commuter holding a phone on a platform.
When metro is the wrong buy
When your buyers arrive by car. A metro panel never reaches the car park, and half the catchment of a showroom on a main road is driving past it.
When the station near you is not the station your buyers use. The one closest to your office is the most common wrong answer in this medium.
When you need to prove which enquiry came from it. The panel reports nothing. We compare enquiries from that catchment before and during the cycle, which shows a direction and never a count.
When the budget covers one month at one small panel. A single cycle at the minimum size buys a photograph for the office wall and very little else.
What to do next
Go and stand at the two stations on your shortlist, once at nine in the morning and once at seven in the evening. Watch which entrance the crowd uses and where they look while waiting. Ten minutes of that beats a page of footfall figures.
For example, a coaching centre a few minutes from Rajajinagar station is buying the families who live around it, not the whole Green line. Its panel belongs at the exit those parents use. We work that out with you in the free audit, then put the enquiries from the station's catchment into the monthly report against the weeks before the cycle began.