How to Read a Cyprus Bus Timetable

Published August 14, 2026

Most "Cyprus bus timetable" results are mobile app listings, not an explanation of how to read one. That is a gap, because a Cypriot timetable does not read the way the ones you may know from home do. Three things trip people up, and this page kills all three before you stand at a stop:

there is no national bus network, only per-district operators,
so a route number is not unique across the island,
and buses only stop at every stop on paper.

This site shows the same live timetable data the operators publish, but readable. Everything below is how to read it, plus which column to trust and which one to ignore.

Cyprus has one bus timetable per district

Nobody runs "the Cyprus bus". Each district has its own operator, its own route numbers, and its own fare system.

District	Operator
Paphos	OSYPA (Pafos Transport Organisation)
Limassol	EMEL
Famagusta (incl. Ayia Napa)	OSEA
Nicosia and Larnaca	NPT and LPT (both under Cyprus Public Transport)
Between cities	Intercity Buses

Each district reuses the same small set of numbers, so a route number alone tells you almost nothing. Route 101 is both a Nicosia urban bus and an OSEA beach run between Agia Napa and Paralimni. Route 501 in the Famagusta district is not route 501 anywhere else, because nowhere else has a 501. Read the district first.

The one rule that survives is by operator, not by number. Within a district the urban, rural and night services keep separate ranges: NPT night buses are in the N series, LPT's in a different band again, and the resort districts run their day buses as a single flat-fare network. The exact digits are not worth memorising; the fact that every district has its own book is.

This is the single most useful thing to remember: the operator tells you which fare and which timetable applies, and the district tells you which operator.

Request stops: the table is optimistic

The timetable says a bus stops at your stop. In Cyprus, buses do not stop at every stop automatically.

To board, wave your hand as the bus approaches. It is not a bus stop with guaranteed service; if you stand still, an empty bus will go past you.
To alight, press the bell or the stop button at your stop, not earlier. The buttons sometimes fail, so if it does not ring, tell the driver where you are getting off.
On the small rural routes and the school-run hours, the driver is used to regulars and will not slow for a stranger. Make yourself visible.

At the terminal stations (like Tombs of the Kings in Paphos, or Dionysios Solomos Square in Nicosia) buses wait for passengers, so you do not flag those. Everywhere in between, flag.

How to read the tables on this site

Most of our route guides and stop pages show the same style of table. It is a grid, not a list of times.

A Hour / Minutes table means the times under a column are the minutes of that hour that a bus arrives. A cell showing "05, 25, 45" in the 14:00 row means buses depart at 14:05, 14:25 and 14:45. The hour is shown once, the minutes are the cell. That is why it looks sparse compared to a European timetable that prints every full time.

Three things decide which cell you read:

The date. Feeds change with the season and the day type. Pick the date in the picker; a weekday, Saturday and Sunday can be genuinely different tables, and public holidays usually run on the Sunday timetable.
The headsign, not just the number. One route number can appear several times under different headsigns when the same bus serves different end points. Read the headsign, then the number.
The direction. Urban buses show departure times per stop in both directions, so check you are reading the table for the way you are going.

The number that matters most on a return trip is the last departure, not the first. Every guide on this site that covers a place you go out to and come back from calls out the return table, because that is the one people miss.

A worked example

Open the Tombs of the Kings Bus Station schedule in Paphos, pick today, and you will see several blocks, one per headsign. Each block is its own destination, even where two blocks share a route number.

To go to Coral Bay, read the block headed Coral Bay, then the route 615 rows, then the times in your hour. To come back, the same page (or the Coral Bay stop schedule) shows the block headed toward Tombs of the Kings. The 615 is frequent, so you rarely wait long, but the last 615 is a number worth knowing before you plan a late dinner.

Connecting two tables

The route guides on this site cover the common origin to destination pairs in full, including the transfer and the fare, so you rarely need to stitch tables together yourself. When you do:

Read the outbound trip's last useful departure, not a random middle one.
Note the transfer stop and give yourself more time than the "convenient" gap, because a shared stop in Cyprus is not always a short hop.
Look up the return leg from its own end, where the departure times differ.

Two separate tickets usually means two separate tables. There is no single pan-Cyprus timetable to flip between them.

Which operator is this, again?

Branded coaching services sit outside the district networks and outside the district fares:

Intercity Buses run between the cities, are green, and show a destination rather than a number.
Airport shuttles (Kapnos, and EAL's airport express) are separate tickets with their own timetables and prices.

For the fares and the Motion card across all of them, see Cyprus bus fares and the Motion card.

The short version

Find the operator, mind the duplicate numbers between districts, flag your stop down, and read the hour then the minutes of your day. That is the whole system.