Is the Tokyo Subway Ticket worth it, or should you just tap an IC card?

Tokyo has two subway operators, thirteen subway lines between them, and a tourist ticket that covers all of it for a flat price. On paper that sounds like an easy yes. In practice it depends almost entirely on which lines your week actually uses, and a lot of visitors buy the wrong thing because the Yamanote line looks like part of the subway on the map and is not.

I should be straight about my position on this one. I live in Tokyo, which means I am not allowed to buy a Tokyo Subway Ticket — it is sold to overseas visitors and to Japanese residents from outside the Tokyo area. So what follows is the published conditions from Tokyo Metro and Toei, the current fare tables from both operators, and the arithmetic, rather than a story about the time I saved ¥400. Where I do have direct experience is the boring end of this: the fare machines, the orange transfer gates, and watching friends tap a credit card at a gate and quietly overpay for a week.

Every figure below was checked on the operators' own pages on 2026-08-03. Please check them again before you rely on them — Tokyo Metro raised the price of this ticket, and there are still popular articles quoting ¥800 for the 24-hour version.

Some links on this page are affiliate links, and this site earns a commission if you book through them. The ticket costs the same either way, and the official operator pages I link to earn me nothing.

What the ticket is, and what it costs

The Tokyo Subway Ticket gives unlimited rides on all nine Tokyo Metro lines and all four Toei Subway lines for a fixed number of hours from first use.

Ticket	Adult	Child
Tokyo Subway 24-hour Ticket	¥1,000	¥500
Tokyo Subway 48-hour Ticket	¥1,500	¥750
Tokyo Subway 72-hour Ticket	¥2,000	¥1,000

Both operators publish the same figures, and both offer a QR-code version you carry on a phone as well as the physical card. If you buy several QR tickets at once you can distribute them to other people's devices, which is genuinely useful for a family arriving on different flights.

The important word in the name is hours. A 24-hour ticket bought at 14:00 on Tuesday runs until 14:00 on Wednesday. That is not how most day passes in Japan work, and it is the single biggest reason to prefer this one — more on that below.

The break-even maths

Tokyo Metro's ordinary adult fares, from its own fare table:

Distance	Paper ticket	IC card
1–6 km	¥180	¥178
7–11 km	¥210	¥209
12–19 km	¥260	¥252
20–27 km	¥300	¥293
28–40 km	¥330	¥324

Toei Subway's fares run on a different, slightly steeper scale: ¥180 for 1–4 km, ¥220 for 5–9 km, ¥280 for 10–15 km, ¥330 for 16–21 km, ¥380 for 22–27 km and ¥430 for 28–46 km.

So the pessimistic case — every single journey is a short Metro hop at the ¥180 minimum — gives you this:

Ticket	Price	Rides to break even at ¥180	Per day
24-hour	¥1,000	6	6
48-hour	¥1,500	9	4.5
72-hour	¥2,000	12	4

Tokyo Metro's own guidance is a shade more conservative than my arithmetic on the 48-hour ticket — it quotes five rides a day rather than four and a half — and identical on the other two. Either way the pattern is the same and it is the useful bit: the longer tickets are easier to justify, not harder. Six rides in a single day is a busy day. Four rides a day for three days is just normal sightseeing: hotel to the first place, first place to lunch, lunch to the second place, back to the hotel.

And that ¥180 assumption is deliberately unkind. Real sightseeing days cross town. Asakusa to Shibuya on the Ginza line is a ¥260 fare. Once a couple of your hops are ¥260 or ¥300, the 72-hour ticket clears its ¥2,000 in about eight rides rather than twelve.

The trap: what it does not cover

This is where the money is actually lost.

The Yamanote line is the specific problem. It is the loop that connects Tokyo, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa, Ueno and Ikebukuro, it appears on every tourist map of Tokyo, and it belongs to JR East. A visitor whose plan is "Shinjuku, then Shibuya, then Harajuku, then Ueno" is describing a Yamanote day, and this ticket does nothing for it.

Where the subway wins is the stuff between the loop and inside it: Asakusa, Ginza, Roppongi, Tsukiji, Kagurazaka, Nihonbashi, the Imperial Palace side of Tokyo Station, Oshiage for Skytree. If your list looks more like that than like the loop, the ticket is a good buy.

There is also a through-running quirk worth knowing. Several subway lines continue onto other companies' tracks — the Hanzomon line becomes a Tokyu train, the Chiyoda line becomes an Odakyu train, the Asakusa line becomes a Keikyu train to Haneda. The train does not change, but the ticket's validity stops at the boundary. Nobody stops you boarding; the gate at the far end simply asks for the difference.

How it compares with the other Tokyo passes

Tokyo has an unhelpfully large number of day tickets. These are the ones you might actually be choosing between, all adult prices from the operators' own pages on 2026-08-03:

Ticket	Price	Covers	Clock
Tokyo Subway 24-hour Ticket	¥1,000	Metro + Toei Subway	24 h from first use
Common One-day Ticket	¥1,100	Metro + Toei Subway	Calendar day only
Tokyo Metro 24-hour Ticket	¥700	Tokyo Metro only	24 h from first use
Toei 1 Day Pass	¥700	Toei subway, bus, tram, Nippori-Toneri Liner	Calendar day only
Tokyo Combination Ticket	¥1,720	All of the above plus JR inside the 23 wards	Calendar day only

Three things fall out of that table.

The Common One-day Ticket is beaten by the tourist version. It costs ¥1,100 for exactly the same two subway networks that the ¥1,000 Tokyo Subway Ticket covers, and it expires with the last train of one calendar day instead of running a full 24 hours. If you are eligible for the tourist ticket, the Common One-day Ticket is never the better buy for the same coverage. If you are not eligible — because you live here, like me — it is the one you fall back to.

The ¥700 Tokyo Metro 24-hour Ticket is underrated. Tokyo Metro is much the bigger of the two networks, and a lot of itineraries never touch a Toei line at all. At ¥700 it breaks even at four rides. Anyone can buy it, at a ticket machine, with no passport and no eligibility questions. If you are staying near Ginza, Marunouchi, Omotesando or Ikebukuro and you only need one day of heavy subway use, this is often the sharper choice.

The Tokyo Combination Ticket is the one that includes JR. At ¥1,720 it adds the Yamanote loop, Toei buses, the Sakura tram and the Nippori-Toneri Liner. It is a lot of money for one calendar day and most people will not clear it. But if you have a single day planned that is genuinely all over the city on mixed operators, it exists and it is the only one of these that solves the JR problem.

What about just tapping a card?

Two pay-as-you-go options compete with all of the above.

An IC card — Suica, Pasmo or Welcome Suica — charges the 1-yen-precision fare, which is a yen or two cheaper per Metro ride than a paper ticket and works on JR, private railways and buses as well. That flexibility is worth more than the couple of yen. It is what I use every day.

Tap to Ride, where you put a contactless credit or debit card straight on the reader, now works across Tokyo Metro and ten other Kanto operators including Toei. It is convenient and it needs no setup. It is also the most expensive way to pay:

One genuine discount does survive on both IC and Tap to Ride: transferring between a Tokyo Metro line and a Toei Subway line takes ¥70 off the combined adult fare, per Toei's own fare rules. That narrows the gap between paying per ride and buying a pass on days when you cross between the two networks a lot — which, to be fair, is exactly the kind of day the pass is aimed at.

Who can buy it, and where

Eligibility is real and it is checked.

Tokyo Metro describes the ticket as being for overseas visitors, and for domestic visitors living outside Tokyo, Kanagawa, Saitama, Chiba, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Yamanashi. The official Tokyo Subway Ticket site adds that if you buy it inside Japan, your short-term stay status is confirmed using your passport.

In practice that means:

• Tourist on a short-stay entry. Eligible. Carry your passport when you buy.
• Foreign resident of Japan on a work, student or spouse visa. Not eligible — your status of residence is not short-term stay.
• Japanese resident of Tokyo. Not eligible. This is me.
• Japanese resident of, say, Fukuoka, visiting Tokyo. Eligible, per the prefecture list above.

You can buy it before you fly, through the official online store or through a travel platform, or in Japan at the airports and designated sales points. Buying ahead has one practical advantage beyond price: you are not stood at a machine at Narita at 21:00 working out whether you want 48 or 72 hours. Booking through the link below supports this site at no extra cost to you.

Whichever way you buy, the clock does not start until you first pass a gate, so there is no penalty for collecting it on arrival day and starting it the following morning.

A worked example

Say you land at Haneda on a Friday evening, stay near Ginza, and have Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning before flying home.

A plausible three-day pattern: Saturday is Asakusa, Skytree, then Akihabara, then dinner in Shinjuku. Sunday is Meiji Shrine, Omotesando, Roppongi, Tokyo Tower. Monday morning is the Imperial Palace and back to the hotel for bags.

Count the subway legs: roughly four on Saturday, four on Sunday, two on Monday. Ten rides. At an honest mix of ¥180 and ¥260 fares that is somewhere around ¥2,100 to ¥2,300 paid per ride, against ¥2,000 for the 72-hour ticket. So the ticket wins — but by a couple of hundred yen, not by a landslide.

Now change one thing. Move the hotel to Shinjuku and let two of those days run around the Yamanote loop instead. Half the legs become JR, the pass covers none of them, and the same ¥2,000 no longer clears. That is the whole decision, really: it is a question about your hotel and your itinerary, not about the ticket.

The other lesson from that example is that the marginal cost of going longer is low. Going from 24 hours to 72 hours costs an extra ¥1,000 and buys you two more days of not thinking about fares. If you are on the fence between two durations, the longer one is usually the better mistake to make.

So should you buy one?

Buy the 72-hour ticket if you have three consecutive days of central Tokyo sightseeing, your hotel is on a Metro or Toei line, and your list is heavy on Asakusa, Ginza, Roppongi, Nihonbashi and Oshiage. This is the case the ticket was designed for and it wins comfortably.

Buy the 24-hour or 48-hour ticket if you have one or two dense subway days inside a longer trip — perhaps you are in Tokyo for a week but three of those days are day trips to Nikko, Kamakura or Hakone on other railways entirely.

Buy the ¥700 Tokyo Metro 24-hour Ticket instead if you only need one heavy day, you are not going near a Toei line, or you are not eligible for the tourist ticket. It is available at any Metro machine with no questions asked.

Skip all of them if your days revolve around the Yamanote loop, if you are moving between cities more than around one, or if you are the kind of traveller who walks between two of every three stops. Put the money on an IC card and stop thinking about it.

And if you are not eligible, the Common One-day Ticket at ¥1,100 covers the same two networks for a calendar day, and nobody checks anything.

A few related pieces if you are still assembling the trip: you will want an IC card sorted out either way, and if you are on an overseas iPhone it is worth knowing which cards actually load onto Suica before you land. For the journey in from the airport, the four routes from Narita and Haneda are a separate calculation from this one. And if Tokyo is only part of the trip, whether a Japan Rail Pass is worth it matters far more to your budget than any of the tickets on this page.