You are standing at a subway gate with a queue behind you. There is a card reader, a turnstile, and no obvious slot for anything you own.
Your credit card will not open that gate. Not a Visa, not a Mastercard, not Apple Pay linked to a foreign bank. Korea runs its own transit card system and the gates only speak to that.
Seoul is trialling direct tap-to-pay with foreign cards on lines 1, 2 and 9, and plans a full rollout somewhere between 2027 and 2030. For your trip, assume it does not work.
Get a card before you need one
Two ways, and one of them is much better if you have the right bank card.
On your iPhone. Since 18 March 2026 the Mobile Tmoney app has a “Foreigner” option that skips the Korean identity check that used to block visitors. It creates a card in Apple Wallet, and you tap the phone at the gate. You can set this up before you fly.
There is a catch worth knowing before you land: topping it up works with Mastercard and American Express, but not Visa. If Visa is all you carry, buy the plastic card instead and stop reading this section.
Plastic. A 교통카드 (gyotong-kadeu, transit card) — the common one is branded T-money — costs 3,000 to 5,000 won at any convenience store. Say “T-money card” at the counter and they will know. Load cash onto it there and then.
Since 17 March 2026 the ticket machines take foreign cards too. There are around 440 of them across 273 stations on lines 1 through 8.
The subway is the easy part
Tap the reader on the way in. Tap again on the way out. That is the whole procedure.
Both taps matter. The fare is worked out from the distance between them, so skipping the exit tap leaves the system unable to close out your trip.
Signs are in English and Korean everywhere. Station names are announced in both. The line numbers and colours on the map are the same ones on the platform.
Buses have one trap
Board at the front, tap on the way in. Press the bell on the wall before your stop, then leave by the rear door.
Tap again on the rear-door reader as you get off.
This is the mistake. The front tap is obvious because the bus will not move until people do it. The exit tap feels optional, and nobody stops you. But without it the system does not know where you got off, so it cannot give you a free transfer, and on longer routes it can bill you the maximum distance fare instead of what you actually rode.
The colour of the bus tells you what it does:
| Colour | Korean | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Blue | 간선 (gansŏn) | Main routes across the city |
| Green | 지선 (jisŏn) | Local feeders to subway stations |
| Red | 광역 (gwangyŏk) | Long distance, out to satellite cities |
| Yellow | 순환 (sunhwan) | Short loops around a district |
Green also covers 마을버스 (maeul-beoseu, village bus), the small ones that climb the hills into residential streets where the big buses will not go.
Transfers are free, within limits
Korea charges you for a journey, not for each vehicle. Move from subway to bus, bus to subway, or bus to bus and you pay nothing extra for the second leg.
The rules on that:
- Within 30 minutes of tapping out of the previous ride
- 60 minutes if you are travelling between 21:00 and 07:00
- Up to four transfers in a day
- The same bus number does not count — riding the 273 again is a new fare, not a transfer
Changing between subway lines inside the gates has never been a transfer at all. You never tapped out, so it is simply one journey.
What it costs
Prices as of June 2026, in Seoul:
| Ride | Fare |
|---|---|
| Subway, with a transit card | 1,550 won |
| Subway, single-journey ticket | 1,650 won |
| City bus | 1,500 won |
| 마을버스 (maeul-beoseu, village bus) | 1,200 won |
Longer subway rides add distance charges on top of the base fare. A single-journey ticket also carries a deposit you get back from a machine at your destination, which is a small errand you can avoid entirely by using a card.
Should you buy the Climate Card
The 기후동행카드 (gihu-donghaeng-kadeu, Climate Card) is unlimited rides inside Seoul for a fixed number of days.
| Days | Price |
|---|---|
| 1 | 5,000 won |
| 2 | 8,000 won |
| 3 | 10,000 won |
| 5 | 15,000 won |
| 7 | 20,000 won |
Do the arithmetic before you buy. The three-day card at 10,000 won is worth about six and a half subway rides. If you are doing two or three journeys a day, ordinary pay-as-you-go is cheaper and works outside Seoul as well.
It stops at the city boundary, which matters more than the price does. A day trip to Suwon, or the airport express, is not covered.
For most visitors the plain transit card wins, because it works in Busan, on Jeju, in small towns, in taxis and at station lockers. One card, whole country, no thinking required.