Category: Money & Budget

I found out that Seoul’s subway fare had gone up by reading about it in the news. Not at a gate, not from a receipt — from an article, well after the fact.

That is a slightly embarrassing thing to admit as someone who lives here. It is also the most useful thing I can tell you about why the fare figure in your guidebook is probably wrong.

The current base fare is ₩1,550 with a transit card. A large share of English-language guides still say ₩1,400 — including, when I checked on 2026-08-05, the fare table on the Seoul Tourism Organization’s own English site.

What the fare actually is right now

What	Amount	Notes
Base fare, transit card	₩1,550	Covers the first 10 km
Base fare, single-journey ticket	₩1,650	Plus a ₩500 deposit, refunded at your destination
10–50 km	+₩100 per 5 km
Over 50 km	+₩100 per 8 km

All figures verified 2026-08-05 against the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s transit fare page.

How we got here

The fare has moved twice in recent years, which is most of the reason so much published information is stale.

• October 2023 — ₩1,250 rose to ₩1,400.
• 28 June 2025 — ₩1,400 rose to ₩1,550.

Guides written or lightly refreshed between late 2023 and mid-2025 landed on ₩1,400 and stayed there. Many were never revisited.

There has been no further increase since. Seoul discussed one in June 2026 — the figure floated for breaking even without subsidy was ₩2,591 — but nothing was implemented. As of 2026-08-05 it is still ₩1,550.

Lines that charge extra

Two lines add a surcharge on top of the standard fare:

• Airport Railroad (AREX), on the independent section running out to Incheon International Airport
• Sinbundang Line, the private line running south from Sinsa

Sinbundang is the one that catches visitors, because route apps will put you on it between Gangnam and the south without flagging that it costs more than the parallel Line 2 journey.

Other lines are sometimes listed as surcharge lines in older guides. I could not reach those operators’ own fare pages to confirm their current status — expired certificates and blocked pages — so I have left them out rather than repeat what I could not check.

Why the wrong number stays in circulation

Residents stop seeing the price

Here is the part that took me a while to notice about my own habits.

I drive to work most days and take public transport maybe twice a week. When I do, I pay with a Korean credit card that has a post-paid transit function built in. There is no balance to watch and nothing to top up — the month’s fares arrive on the card statement, bundled together, and I have not looked at a per-ride figure in years. I have not had an insufficient-balance error since I was a student.

So a ₩150 increase was invisible to me. It did not interrupt anything. It showed up as a slightly larger line item in a statement I skim.

That is the position most Korean residents are in, and it has a consequence: the people best placed to notice a fare change are the people least likely to feel one. Visitors, who tap a prepaid card and watch a balance count down, are the ones who actually see the number — and they are not the ones writing the guides.

Official pages go stale too

The instinct is to trust a government tourism site over a blog. Usually that is right. But large official sites have many pages and small teams, and a fare table is exactly the kind of buried detail that does not get revisited when policy changes.

On 5 August 2026, the Seoul Tourism Organization’s English transportation page still listed ₩1,400 for adults with a transit card. The fare had been ₩1,550 for over a year.

“It’s on the official site” is not the same as “it is current.” Check the date attached to a number, not the authority of the domain it sits on.

The number gets copied sideways

Once a figure is published, it propagates. One guide cites another, an AI-assisted rewrite absorbs the older phrasing, and a number that was correct in 2024 keeps surfacing in content dated 2026. Nothing malicious is happening. Nobody re-verifies.

What changed for visitors in 2026

You can now pay at the machine with a foreign card

Since 17 March 2026, ticket machines across Seoul’s subway accept overseas-issued Visa and Mastercard, along with Kakao Pay and Naver Pay, for buying and topping up transit products.

The hardware went in first: The Korea Herald reported 440 new kiosks across 273 stations on Lines 1 through 8, with installation finishing at the end of 2025. What launched in March was the payment feature running on them.

Two conditions worth knowing before you rely on it:

• A service fee of around 3.7% applies to overseas-card transactions.
• The machines handle the Climate Card short-term passes and single-journey tickets, not every product in the system.

Before this, foreign visitors generally had to convert cash to top up. If you travelled here previously and remember hunting for an ATM, that specific problem is largely solved.

What you still cannot do

You cannot tap a foreign Visa or Mastercard directly on the gate. Open-loop payment — the arrangement that works in London, Singapore and Sydney — is on a long schedule: Seoul’s published plan puts terminal replacement on Lines 1 to 8 starting in 2027, with full open-loop targeted around 2030.

You also cannot get the post-paid credit card arrangement I described above. That requires a Korean card and a credit assessment, which is not realistic on a tourist visa. Your options remain a prepaid transit card or a short-term pass.

So the balance-watching problem is a visitor-specific problem. It is not that Koreans are more careful with their transit balance. It is that most of us do not have one.

The Climate Card pass, and the arithmetic nobody prints

This is where most guides — and, until I sat down and checked, an earlier draft of this article — get it wrong.

The prices, including the bit that gets left out

The Climate Card Tourist Pass gives unlimited travel on Seoul subway and city buses for a flat price. Per the Seoul Metropolitan Government, verified 2026-08-05:

Duration	Price
1 day	₩5,000
2 days	₩8,000
3 days	₩10,000
5 days	₩15,000
7 days	₩20,000

Now the part that is almost never mentioned in English: the physical card itself costs ₩3,000 on first purchase, and that ₩3,000 is not refundable. Every break-even calculation you have read that ignores this is wrong by ₩3,000.

Why “four rides a day” is the wrong way to count

The common claim is that the pass pays for itself at around four rides a day. That number comes from dividing ₩5,000 by ₩1,550 and rounding up. It does not survive contact with how Seoul actually charges you.

Transfers are free. A journey from your hotel to a palace involving one line change is one fare, not two, as long as you board the next service within 30 minutes of tapping off. So a tourist who taps their card eight times in a day may well have paid for four journeys, not eight.

Count journeys, not taps. Here is what break-even looks like when you include the card fee and count properly:

Pass	Price + ₩3,000 card	Journeys to break even	Per day
1 day	₩8,000	6	6
2 days	₩11,000	8	4
3 days	₩13,000	9	3
5 days	₩18,000	12	about 2.4
7 days	₩23,000	15	about 2.2

The conclusion inverts the usual advice. The one-day pass is a bad deal for most visitors — six separate journeys in a single day is a punishing itinerary. The longer passes are good deals, because two or three journeys a day is simply what sightseeing looks like, and the fixed ₩3,000 spreads out.

Two things push the maths back toward the pass: journeys over 10 km cost more than ₩1,550, and if you already hold the card from an earlier trip you skip the ₩3,000 entirely.

What the pass does not cover

This is the expensive part to get wrong, and it is buried in Korean on the official page.

• Incheon Airport is not covered. AREX is included only between Gimpo Airport and Seoul Station. If you land at Incheon and expect to ride in on your new pass, you will be stopped at the gate.
• Sinbundang Line is excluded entirely — not “covered with a surcharge,” just not usable.
• Wide-area and airport buses are excluded.
• Leaving the service area triggers a separate fare collected when you tap out.
• The short-term pass does not include Ttareungyi bike share, unlike the 30-day resident version.

One more thing, and it lands this autumn

The 30-day resident Climate Card is being discontinued. Per Seoul’s own schedule: top-ups run until 31 August 2026 and stop from 1 September; prepaid cards can be used through 29 September 2026 and postpaid through 30 September; the programme ends on 1 October 2026, replaced by a nationwide K-Pass-linked card.

The short-term tourist pass in the table above is confirmed to continue. But if you read anything about “the Climate Card” written before mid-2026, check which product it means, because one of the two stops existing this autumn.

Transfers, and the rules that quietly break them

Free transfers are the single biggest saving available, and they have conditions.

• Within 30 minutes of tapping off, or 60 minutes between 21:00 and 07:00
• Base distance of 10 km, after which ₩100 is added every 5 km
• Up to four transfers, meaning five boardings, in one continuous journey
• On buses you must tap off as well as on

That last one has teeth. Failing to tap off a bus does not just cost you the transfer — the system treats the chain as broken and charges you a fresh base fare. The 10 km figure is often misreported as a transfer distance limit; it is not, it is the distance your base fare covers before surcharges start.

Quick summary

• Seoul’s base subway fare is ₩1,550 with a transit card, verified 2026-08-05. Not ₩1,400. It changed on 28 June 2025 and has not moved since.
• Single-journey tickets are ₩1,650 plus a ₩500 refundable deposit.
• AREX and Sinbundang charge surcharges on top of the standard fare.
• Since 17 March 2026, kiosks at 273 stations take overseas Visa and Mastercard, Kakao Pay and Naver Pay, with a fee of around 3.7%.
• You still cannot tap a foreign card at the gate. Open-loop is a 2027-to-2030 project.
• The Climate Card Tourist Pass costs ₩5,000 to ₩20,000 for one to seven days, plus a non-refundable ₩3,000 card fee that most guides omit.
• Count journeys, not taps — transfers are free, so the one-day pass usually loses money while the multi-day passes win easily.
• The pass does not cover Incheon Airport, the Sinbundang Line, or wide-area buses.
• Official sites go out of date. Trust the date attached to a figure, not the authority of the site.

Before you go

Do one thing with this: when you next read a Korean fare, price or opening hour anywhere online, look for a date beside it. If there isn’t one, treat it as an estimate and confirm at the point of use — at the gate display, at the counter, on the operator’s own page.

That habit is worth more than the ₩150.

The same pattern shows up in shopping, where the tourist tax refund minimum is ₩15,000 and much of the internet still prints ₩30,000 — the current threshold, and five ways people still lose the refund at the till.

This article will go out of date too. It was verified on 2026-08-05. If you are reading it much later and something no longer matches what you see at the station, tell me through the contact page and I will check it.

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Sources and last verification

Prices, fares and hours in Korea change often. Everything above was checked against these sources on the dates shown. If you spot something out of date, please tell me via the contact page.

• 서울시 교통정보 — 대중교통 요금 안내 (Seoul Metropolitan Government, transit fares) — accessed 2026-08-05
• 서울시 교통정보 — 수도권 통합환승할인제도 (transfer discount rules) — accessed 2026-08-05
• 서울시 교통정보 — 기후동행카드 단기권 안내 (Climate Card short-term pass) — accessed 2026-08-05
• 서울시 교통정보 — 기후동행카드 30일권 종료 안내 (30-day Climate Card discontinuation) — accessed 2026-08-05
• Visit Seoul (Seoul Tourism Organization) — Transportation — accessed 2026-08-05
• The Korea Herald — Subway now accepts overseas-issued cards — accessed 2026-08-05

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Related guides

• Which Korea transit pass actually saves you money
• T-money refunds: what the official guide actually says
• Seoul’s Climate Card ends October 1, not August

You are at the airport with ₩8,400 stranded on a plastic card and a queue behind you. The question is simple: where do you get it back, and how much of it?

Almost every English guide answers this the same way — go to a convenience store, they refund up to ₩20,000, there is a small fee. I went to look at Tmoney’s own English guide for travellers on 2026-08-05 to check the numbers.

It does not say that. It says something more useful, and one thing that will annoy you.

What the official guide actually states

Three rules, quoted from Tmoney’s own Foreigner Guide, verified 2026-08-05.

Rule	Wording
Where	Any Tmoney card sales or top-up location
Card cost	“Refund does not include the cost of card”
Fee	“The service fee of ₩500 will be charged”

You hand over the card, tell the staff how much you want back, and they give you cash in Korean won.

The card fee is gone and it is not coming back

That ₩2,500 to ₩4,000 you paid for the plastic is not a deposit. It bought you the card. Only the money you loaded on top comes back, minus ₩500.

So a card bought for ₩3,000 with ₩5,000 loaded returns ₩4,500, not ₩7,500. If you are choosing between buying a card for a two-day trip and just tapping a foreign card at a ticket machine, that ₩3,500 gap is the actual cost of the card.

Subway stations are listed as top-up only

This is the detail that sends people to the wrong place.

The guide lists three kinds of location. Convenience stores — GS25, CU, 7-Eleven, MINISTOP, Story Way, Emart24, 365PLUS. Subway stations, marked explicitly “Top-up Only”, covering the top-up machines, ticket issuers and information centres. And Tmoney Town at Seoul Station Exit 10, Seoul City Tower 1F.

The subway machine that happily took your money on the way in is not where you get it back on the way out.

Partial refunds are a separate, stricter thing

There is a second mechanism most guides never mention, and it has hard limits.

Partial refunds — taking some money off and keeping the card — are available only at Tmoney Town and Tmoney service centres inside subway stations, only for amounts between ₩10,000 and ₩50,000, only in units of ₩10,000, and only for plate cards.

Read that as a practical rule: if you want to keep the card for a future trip and pull cash off it, you need at least ₩10,000 on there and you need to go to a service centre. Anything smaller and your only option is closing the card out entirely.

The ₩20,000 figure I could not confirm

Here is where I have to be straight with you.

The convenience-store cap of ₩20,000 appears in a large number of guides, in both English and Korean, stated with total confidence. It is probably operationally true — store staff work to a float limit.

But it is not in Tmoney’s official English guide, and I could not find it on an official Tmoney page. The company’s site put a session error in front of several of its own pages while I was checking.

So: widely reported, not verified here. If you are carrying a large balance, assume a convenience store may decline and plan on Tmoney Town at Seoul Station instead. That is the location the official guide names for larger transactions, and it is a five-minute walk from the AREX platforms you will be using anyway.

Why this kind of number drifts

A cap like that is a float limit, not a policy. It lives in an operations manual, it varies by franchise and by how much cash is in the till at 7am, and it never appears in the public guide because it was never meant to be a public rule.

Then one traveller has one experience, writes it down as a number, and it propagates. The figure is not invented. It is just not the thing it is being presented as.

Not overloading the card in the first place

The better fix is upstream. The guide gives the loading rules plainly.

The limits worth knowing

• Top-ups are in ₩1,000 units, from ₩1,000 to ₩90,000 per transaction
• The card can hold a maximum of ₩500,000

How much to actually put on

Seoul’s base subway fare is ₩1,550, verified 2026-08-05 against the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s fare page, with transfers free inside the window.

Most sightseeing days come to two or three separate journeys. Call it ₩5,000 a day and top up in small amounts as you go rather than loading ₩50,000 on arrival because the machine offered it. Convenience stores are everywhere and the reload takes fifteen seconds.

The traveller who ends up at Tmoney Town on departure day is almost always the one who loaded a round number at the airport on day one.

Quick summary

• Refunds are given at Tmoney sales and top-up locations, in cash, with a ₩500 service fee, verified 2026-08-05 against Tmoney’s official English guide.
• The card purchase price is never refunded — only the loaded balance.
• Subway stations are top-up only. You cannot close out a card at the machine that filled it.
• Partial refunds exist but only at Tmoney Town or a subway Tmoney service centre, only for ₩10,000–₩50,000, in ₩10,000 units, plate cards only.
• The widely quoted ₩20,000 convenience-store cap is not in the official guide and is not verified here.
• Tmoney Town is at Seoul Station Exit 10, Seoul City Tower 1F — the named location for larger amounts.
• Top-ups run ₩1,000 to ₩90,000 at a time, with a ₩500,000 maximum balance.
• Budget roughly ₩5,000 a day and reload as you go rather than front-loading.

Before you go

The pattern here is one you will meet again in Korea. There is an official page, in English, with the real rules on it — and there is a much louder consensus in travel guides that is close but not the same, and that nobody re-checks.

The official page is usually shorter and less satisfying than the blog version. It is also the one the person behind the counter is working from.

Verified 2026-08-05. If a convenience store has refunded you an amount that contradicts any of this, the contact page is right there — that is exactly the correction worth having.

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Sources and last verification

Prices, fares and hours in Korea change often. Everything above was checked against these sources on the dates shown. If you spot something out of date, please tell me via the contact page.

• Tmoney — Foreigner Guide (official English usage guide) — accessed 2026-08-05
• 서울시 교통정보 — 대중교통 요금 안내 (Seoul Metropolitan Government, transit fares) — accessed 2026-08-05
• VISITKOREA (Korea Tourism Organization) — Transportation cards — accessed 2026-08-05

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Related guides

• Which Korea transit pass actually saves you money
• Seoul subway fare 2026: why guides still say 1,400 won
• Seoul’s Climate Card ends October 1, not August

There are at least five things sold to visitors as “the Korea transit pass,” and the marketing does not tell you which one loses you money. Most of the comparisons online also skip the two figures that decide it.

Here is the whole thing worked out, verified 2026-08-05.

The two numbers everyone leaves out

Before any comparison, two corrections.

The card itself costs money

The Climate Card Tourist Pass is advertised at ₩5,000 for a day. The physical card is a further ₩3,000, and it is not refundable. A one-day pass therefore costs ₩8,000 on first purchase, not ₩5,000.

A T-money card costs ₩2,500 to ₩4,000, also unrefundable. The Korea Tour Card costs ₩4,000. Every comparison that starts at the advertised pass price is understating by the price of a coffee, and on short trips that decides the answer.

Transfers are free, so count journeys not taps

Seoul’s base fare is ₩1,550 and transfers are free within 30 minutes of tapping off, or 60 minutes between 21:00 and 07:00, up to four transfers.

So a trip from your hotel to a palace involving one line change is one fare. Someone who taps eight times in a day has often paid four fares. Break-even tables built on “rides” are built on the wrong unit.

The passes, with real break-even

Climate Card Tourist Pass

Unlimited Seoul subway and Seoul city buses. Prices verified 2026-08-05 against the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s own page.

Duration	Price	With ₩3,000 card	Journeys to break even
1 day	₩5,000	₩8,000	6
2 days	₩8,000	₩11,000	8
3 days	₩10,000	₩13,000	9
5 days	₩15,000	₩18,000	12
7 days	₩20,000	₩23,000	15

Six separate journeys in one day is a punishing itinerary. Two or three a day for a week is just sightseeing. The one-day pass usually loses; the multi-day passes win comfortably.

What it does not cover: the Sinbundang Line, GTX, wide-area and airport buses, and anything outside the Seoul service area — where tapping out triggers a separate fare. On the Airport Railroad it covers only Gimpo Airport to Seoul Station. Landing at Incheon and expecting to ride in on it will not work.

Korea Tour Card

A T-money card with a discount programme attached. Issuance ₩4,000, then you load and pay per journey exactly like ordinary T-money. It adds 20–30% off a list of attractions including N Seoul Tower, Lotte World and Everland.

This is not a transit saving. It is a T-money card that costs ₩1,500 more and may pay that back at the first attraction you were visiting anyway. Worth it if your itinerary has two or three paid attractions on it; pointless if it does not.

M-Pass

The Korea Tourism Organization still lists it: ₩15,000 for one day up to ₩64,500 for seven, capped at 20 rides a day, and unlike the Climate Card it includes the Airport Railroad on ordinary trains.

I have to flag this one. The Tmoney pages for M-Pass would not load while I was checking, and I could not confirm it is still on sale in 2026. The prices on the tourism page have not changed in years, which can mean a stable product or an unmaintained page. Treat M-Pass as unconfirmed and check at the counter before planning around it.

At ₩15,000 a day it also needs ten journeys to beat paying per fare, so it only makes sense if the airport leg is doing the work.

Discover Seoul Pass

Not really a transit pass. It is an attractions pass with some transit attached. Per the Seoul Tourism Organization, the newer Pick 3 Basic is ₩49,000 and Pick 3 Theme Park ₩70,000, both valid five days from first use; the unlimited tiers run ₩70,000 for 48 hours to ₩130,000 for 120 hours.

Judge it on the attraction list, not on fares. If you would not have paid for three of the included attractions anyway, the transit component will not rescue it.

The thing that changes next month

The 30-day Climate Card — the resident product, not the tourist one — is being retired. Top-ups stop 31 August 2026, prepaid cards work until 29 September, postpaid until 30 September, and the programme ends 1 October 2026, with a replacement launching in September.

The short-term tourist passes in the table above are explicitly confirmed to continue. But two Seoul city pages were showing different dates while I checked, and the schedule was extended by a month at the end of July. If you are reading anything about “the Climate Card” written before mid-2026, check which product it means.

Why the dates moved

The replacement is a nationwide card, and Seoul and the central government spent July arguing about a discount band that would have left some users worse off during the handover. The result was a one-month extension agreed at the end of July.

That is why one official page still shows July dates and another shows August ones. The later page is the current one, and it is worth checking again before September.

Quick summary

• Seoul’s base fare is ₩1,550, verified 2026-08-05, and transfers are free — count journeys, not taps.
• The Climate Card Tourist Pass costs ₩5,000–₩20,000 for 1–7 days, plus a non-refundable ₩3,000 card.
• Including that card fee, break-even is 6 journeys in one day for the 1-day pass but only about 2 a day for the 7-day.
• The one-day pass is a bad deal for most visitors. The 3, 5 and 7-day versions are good ones.
• The Climate Card does not cover Incheon Airport, the Sinbundang Line, or wide-area buses.
• Korea Tour Card (₩4,000) is a discount card, not a fare saver — worth it only if you are paying for attractions.
• M-Pass is still listed by the tourism board but I could not confirm it is on sale in 2026.
• The 30-day Climate Card ends 1 October 2026. The tourist passes continue.

Before you go

If you want one rule instead of a table: buy a plain T-money card for trips under three days, and a multi-day Climate Card for anything longer, unless your plan is heavy on paid attractions.

That covers most itineraries, and it costs you nothing to be wrong by a little. What costs you is buying a seven-day attractions pass for a four-day trip because the display at the airport was bright.

Verified 2026-08-05. Pass prices and coverage in Seoul have moved twice in the last two years, so check the date on any figure you read — including this one.

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Sources and last verification

Prices, fares and hours in Korea change often. Everything above was checked against these sources on the dates shown. If you spot something out of date, please tell me via the contact page.

• 서울시 교통정보 — 기후동행카드 단기권 안내 (Seoul Metropolitan Government, Climate Card short-term pass) — accessed 2026-08-05
• 서울시 교통정보 — 기후동행카드 30일권 종료 안내 — accessed 2026-08-05
• 서울시 교통정보 — 대중교통 요금 안내 — accessed 2026-08-05
• VISITKOREA (Korea Tourism Organization) — Transportation cards and passes — accessed 2026-08-05

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Related guides

• Seoul subway fare 2026: why guides still say 1,400 won
• T-money refunds: what the official guide actually says
• Seoul’s Climate Card ends October 1, not August