Fares and tickets

Get a card before you do anything else

Suica and PASMO are the same thing as far as a visitor is concerned: a stored-value card you touch on the way in and on the way out. They work on the subway, JR, the private railways and the buses, and in convenience stores. Which one you get depends on which machine is in front of you.

• Suica and PASMO Sold in ¥1,000 to ¥10,000 denominations. The price includes a ¥500 deposit; the rest is credit you can spend.
• Welcome Suica The visitor version: no deposit, but it stops working after 28 days. Otherwise the same card.
• On your phone The Suica, PASMO and Welcome Suica apps let you make and top up a card without going to a ticket office — including before you land.
• Contactless credit cards Toei Subway stations and the Keikyu Line also let you pay at the gate with a contactless card, without a Suica at all.

Buying a paper ticket instead

You do not need a card for one trip. Every station has a bank of machines, and every bank of machines has the fare map above it — find your destination on the map, read the number beside it, put that in, and the machine gives you a paper ticket. The machines have an English button.

Photos: MaedaAkihiko and タチヤマカムイ on Wikimedia Commons — full credits on the credits page.

What one ride costs

Toei charges by distance, in six steps. These are IC-card prices for a journey that stays on Toei lines — the same figures the route finder quotes when it can.

1. 1 ¥178
2. 2 ¥220
3. 3 ¥272
4. 4 ¥325
5. 5 ¥377
6. 6 ¥430

Tokyo Metro publishes its own fares and we do not hold them, so every figure on this page is Toei's. What matters for planning is the shape, not the exact yen: a journey that uses both companies pays both companies, which is the whole reason the joint passes below exist.

Does a pass pay for itself?

The Tokyo Subway Ticket is the one most visitors mean. It covers every Tokyo Metro and Toei line — the 13 this site is built around — and it counts hours, not calendar days.

Which hours, though, depends on what you buy it as. The paper ticket starts its clock at first use. The version loaded onto a PASMO starts at purchase — so buying one at the airport and sightseeing before you first ride the subway spends the ticket while you walk.

One more thing the arithmetic hides: no subway pass covers JR, and the Yamanote Line is JR. The Tokyo Tour Ticket is the one that does, at ¥1,720.

Tax-free shopping changes on 1 November 2026

Japan is moving to a refund method (リファンド方式) for visitor tax-free purchases. If you are shopping in Tokyo after that date, this is what it means for you:

• You pay the full price, consumption tax included, at the till.
• You show your passport to customs on departure, within 90 days of the purchase.
• You must be able to show customs the goods if asked — so keep them with you, not in a bag you have already checked.
• The refund is then paid out. The law does not fix the method: it may be a bank transfer, a credit-card refund, an app payment, or cash at the airport after the customs check.
• If the goods are not exported, the tax that was exempted is collected back.

Until 1 November 2026 the current system still applies — registered shops handle the exemption at the point of sale.

Where these numbers come from

Card and pass prices are from GO TOKYO , Tokyo's official travel guide, published by the Tokyo Convention & Visitors Bureau, read 1 August 2026, and restated here in our words. Single fares are Toei's IC-card prices from the Public Transport Open Data Centre (CC BY 4.0, credit 東京都交通局・公共交通オープンデータ協議会). The tax-free change is from 国税庁, the National Tax Agency: the refund-method notice and its index page . Prices change. Tokyo Metro and Toei publish the current ones, and the machine in front of you is the final word.