Oyster, contactless or Travelcard? The answer is contactless

This is the most-asked question about visiting London and it has a boring answer, so most guides pad it out to two thousand words. We won't.

What it costs either way

Contactless and Oyster charge identical pay-as-you-go fares. As of 2026:

Peak means 06:30–09:30 and 16:00–19:00, Monday to Friday. Everything else, including all weekend, is off-peak.

The daily cap is the important number. Once your journeys in a day reach the cap, every further journey is free. You never need to calculate this or opt in — keep tapping and the system stops charging.

Why contactless beats Oyster

Three reasons, all practical:

1. No £7 deposit or £5 card fee, and no refund queue. A Visitor Oyster card costs £5 that you never get back. A standard Oyster costs £7 as a refundable deposit that you have to remember to reclaim at a machine before you fly home. Contactless costs nothing.
2. Weekly capping. Contactless also caps across a Monday-to-Sunday week; Oyster pay-as-you-go does not. If you are in London five or more days across one calendar week, this quietly saves you money that Oyster won't.
3. Nothing to top up. No queuing at a machine because you're 40p short at 8am.

Foreign-issued cards work. Your bank may apply a foreign transaction fee, so a card with no FX fees is worth using, and a phone wallet works exactly the same way.

When Oyster is still the right call

• Your card is not contactless, or is a card type TfL doesn't accept.
• You want a fixed, prepaid budget you cannot overspend — genuinely useful for a teenager travelling separately.
• You are buying for a child aged 11–15, where a Zip Oyster photocard or a Young Visitor discount applies. That discount can halve fares and cannot be loaded onto a bank card.

When a Travelcard is the right call

Rarely. A 7 Day Travelcard only beats contactless weekly capping if you travel unusually far and often, and it locks you into fixed zones. If you are wondering whether you're the exception, you almost certainly aren't. Buy nothing and let the cap do the work.

The one real exception: a Travelcard bundles discounts on some attractions and river services through Days Out Guide's 2-for-1 offers, which require a paper or National Rail ticket. If you're doing several paid attractions as a pair, check whether that offer set beats the extra cost. It sometimes does.

The four rules that stop you overpaying

One card per person. This is the big one. If two of you tap the same card, the system reads it as one person making an impossible journey, charges an unresolved fare, and destroys your capping for the day. Everyone taps their own card or phone.

Use the same card all day. Switching between your phone and your physical card mid-day splits your journeys into two accounts, and each is capped separately. Pick one and stay with it.

Tap in and tap out on the tube, Elizabeth line and rail — but only tap in on buses. Buses have no exit reader. Tapping out on a bus does nothing, or worse, charges you a second fare.

Watch the pink readers. On some routes there are pink card readers on interchange platforms — Highbury & Islington, Stratford, Whitechapel and others. Touching them mid-journey proves you avoided Zone 1 and gets you a cheaper fare. Nobody tells you this and it is worth a few pounds a week.

What about the buses?

At £1.75 a journey, capped at £5.25 a day, London buses are the best-value transport in the city and considerably more pleasant than the tube in summer. The Hopper fare gives you unlimited bus and tram changes within an hour of your first tap for that single fare, so a bus-plus-bus journey costs £1.75, not £3.50.

Buses are cash-free. Contactless or Oyster only.

The short version

Tap your own bank card or phone. Don't buy anything. Don't share a card. Don't tap out on buses. That's the whole system.