Getting Around Tokyo: IC Cards, JR Pass and the 2026 Fare Changes

If you are reading fare advice written before this year, most of it is out of date.

1. JR East raised fares on 14 March 2026 — its first real revision since 1987. Crucially, it abolished the discounted Tokyo zones. The old *densha tokutei kukan* (Tokyo special zone) and *Yamanote-sen nai* (inside-Yamanote) cheap fare tables are gone, merged into the standard nationwide trunk-line table. Inside-Yamanote ordinary fares rose 16.4%.

2. The JR Pass rises again on 1 October 2026 — six weeks from now, at the time of writing.

The practical upshot of the first change is that Tokyo Metro is now cheaper than JR on several routes where JR used to win. Shinjuku to Tokyo Station on JR went from ¥208 to ¥253; the Marunouchi Line does the same trip for ¥209. That reverses the standard advice.

For a Tokyo trip, a Suica or Pasmo covers essentially everything: JR, Tokyo Metro, Toei, private railways, buses, convenience stores, vending machines and most coin lockers. Tap in, tap out, stop thinking about it.

The 2023 card shortage is over. Sales of unregistered Suica and Pasmo were suspended in June 2023 during a global chip shortage; registered cards returned in September 2024 and unregistered sales resumed on 1 March 2025. In 2026 anyone can walk up to a Tokyo ticket machine and buy one.

Regular Suica: ¥500 deposit, refundable. The refund is deposit plus balance minus a ¥220 handling fee — but the fee is capped at your balance, so a card you have spent down to zero still returns the full ¥500. Balance cap ¥20,000. Refunds only at JR East ticket offices; a Suica cannot be refunded at a Pasmo operator or vice versa.

Welcome Suica (physical, tourists): no deposit, so the whole purchase price is spendable. Sold in fixed amounts from ¥1,000 to ¥10,000. Valid 28 days and the balance is NOT refundable — spend it down before you fly. Available at Narita T1 and T2·3, Haneda T3, and JR East Travel Service Centers at Shinjuku, Shibuya, Ikebukuro, Ueno and Yokohama.

Welcome Suica Mobile is the better option if you have an iPhone. Launched March 2025, valid 180 days rather than 28, accepts foreign credit cards through Apple Pay, and can be issued and loaded before you land.

Android travellers have no equivalent — Google Wallet Suica needs a Japan-market handset. Several travel blogs present Welcome Suica Mobile as the Android workaround. It is not. Buy a physical card.

PASMO PASSPORT was discontinued in 2024 and replaced by TOURIST PASMO, which launched in May 2026. Any page still telling you to buy a Pasmo Passport is out of date.

No deposit and no service charge, sold in ¥1,000 to ¥10,000 denominations, valid 28 days, and the remaining value is not refundable. If the card is lost it cannot be reissued. Sold at Haneda (Keikyu) and Narita (Keisei) airport station machines and information counters.

Functionally Suica and Pasmo are interchangeable across Tokyo. Pick whichever you find first.

Tokyo Metro's own fare table has two columns: IC card, and credit-card tap or paper ticket.

IC fares are calculated to the yen. Paper and contactless-credit fares are rounded up to the nearest ten. Tapping your Visa instead of a Suica quietly costs you a couple of yen every single journey, and the paper column is what you pay.

It is small per trip and irritating across a week. Load an IC card.

One more foreign-card quirk: for topping up a Suica in Apple Wallet, Mastercard and Amex are the reliable choice — foreign-issued Visa is widely reported to fail at network level. Sources differ on how absolute that is, so carry an alternative.

Post-14 March 2026 fares. Metro times and fares below are from Tokyo Metro's own published table.

| Journey | Line | Time | IC fare |

|---|---|---|---|

| Shibuya → Asakusa | Ginza Line, direct | 33 min | ¥252 |

| Shibuya → Shinjuku | Fukutoshin express | 6 min | ¥178 |

| Shinjuku → Tokyo Station | Marunouchi, direct | 18 min | ¥209 |

| Shinjuku → Tokyo Station | JR Chuo Rapid | ~14 min | ¥253 |

| Ueno → Asakusa | Ginza Line | 5 min | ¥178 |

| Ginza → Asakusa | Ginza Line | 17 min | ¥209 |

| Shinjuku → Harajuku | JR Yamanote, 2 stops | ~5 min | ¥155 |

The JR Yamanote minimum is now ¥155 IC (was ¥146). Tokyo Metro's minimum is ¥178 and did not change in 2026 — Metro's general fares have been unchanged since March 2023.

A realistic day of five or six journeys lands around ¥1,000 to ¥1,400. That number is what decides whether any pass is worth buying, and usually it isn't.

This is the single most common expensive mistake visitors make, so here is the arithmetic.

The 7-day ordinary pass costs ¥50,000 (it was ¥29,650 before the October 2023 increase — a 69% jump). A Tokyo–Kyoto round trip on a Hikari, which the pass covers, costs about ¥27,700.

So one Tokyo–Kyoto round trip recovers barely 55% of the pass. You need roughly *two* long-distance round trips inside seven days to break even. A Tokyo-only visitor makes none.

Worse, the pass covers only JR lines. Tokyo Metro and Toei — the two networks you will actually ride most — are excluded entirely. In Tokyo it buys you the Yamanote loop, the Chuo/Sobu lines, the Narita Express and the Haneda monorail. That's it.

It rises again on 1 October 2026: 7-day ordinary ¥50,000 → ¥53,000, 14-day ¥80,000 → ¥84,000, 21-day ¥100,000 → ¥105,000. Sources differ on whether the official website holds pre-October pricing for a window while agency prices rise — check japanrailpass.net if you are close to the date.

Buy the pass only if your itinerary has multiple intercity legs. For Tokyo plus one day trip, an IC card wins by a wide margin.

There are narrow cases where a pass beats pay-as-you-go, and they are all about density, not distance.

The Tokyo Subway Ticket (24, 48 or 72 hours) covers all Tokyo Metro and Toei lines and is sold to short-stay foreign visitors at the airports and major stations. It pays for itself if you are making six or more subway journeys a day — realistic on a packed sightseeing day, unrealistic on a relaxed one.

The honest rule of thumb: if your day looks like three or four journeys, an IC card is cheaper and simpler. If it looks like seven or eight, price the subway ticket. Most visitors overestimate how much they will move.

A different way to cut fares entirely is to stop using trains for the short hops. Central Tokyo is flat and the side streets carry almost no traffic — a three-hour e-bike loop covers ground that would otherwise be four or five separate paid journeys, and you see the bits between the stations.

Carry some cash. Japan is far more card-friendly than its reputation, but shrine offerings, small restaurants, older shops and some markets remain cash-only.

Tap out, always. Japanese fares are distance-based, so failing to tap out leaves the system unable to calculate your fare and will block the card until a staff member fixes it.

Know which company you are on. Tokyo's network is run by JR East, Tokyo Metro, Toei and several private railways. Transferring between operators means paying two base fares, which is why an apparently short trip sometimes costs double. Where an all-Metro routing exists, it is usually cheaper than a mixed one — Shibuya to Asakusa on the Ginza Line is a single ¥252 fare the whole way.

Luggage. Large suitcases are awkward on rush-hour trains and many older stations have stairs only. Coin lockers at major stations take IC cards, and takkyubin courier services will move a suitcase hotel-to-hotel overnight for a modest fee — the standard move for anyone changing cities mid-trip.