This Sunday, contactless tube fares will rise by an average of six percent, but if you can switch to season tickets, those fares are being frozen.
Even with more people commuting to work more frequently now, paying with contactless daily still seems like a saving, but depending on your travel pattern, fare rises may push the monthly spend closer to what a season ticket would cost anyway.
The advantage that a season ticket offers is that you get a whole week/month/year of travel for a fixed amount, so you can, and usually do, travel more often.
In my situation, I often wait until the 9:30am trigger for off-peak travel to save a bit of money, but in doing so, I end up with a less flexible schedule for trips into central London.
Working out if you can save money – or pay a modest extra amount for added travel flexibility should be fairly simple if you use online banking, as most let you search for transactions by name – and contactless payments are billed as “TfL”.
Generally, if you travel five days or fewer and never make more than two trips per day, you will find contactless is cheaper – but if you regularly make three or more trips, hence hitting the daily fare cap, that might tip you over the cost of a monthly season ticket.
In my situation, I worked out that last year, an annual season ticket would have cost £200 more than I spent on contactless, so not a saving. With this year’s fare rise and assuming I make the same number of trips, I would still save around £100 by sticking with contactless.
However, I am then stuck with a lot of post 9:30am travel and tend to think about the cost implications for quick trips into town for random things. A season ticket is essentially unlimited travel all day, so you don’t have to worry about the cost of making ad hoc trips.
The contactless fare cap applies only to daily and weekly travel, so if you are a regular traveller, you might want to check whether returning to a pre-pandemic way of buying a monthly or annual season ticket would save you money.
Or be so little extra on top that it’s worth paying for the added flexibility.
The details of TfL fares from 1st March 2026 are here.
Travelcard prices
| Zone(s) | 7 Day | Monthly | Annual |
| 1 only | £44.70 | £171.70 | £1,788 |
| 1 & 2 | £44.70 | £171.70 | £1,788 |
| 1, 2 & 3 | £52.50 | £201.60 | £2,100 |
| 1, 2, 3 & 4 | £64.20 | £246.60 | £2,568 |
| 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 | £76.40 | £293.40 | £3,056 |
| 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 | £81.60 | £313.40 | £3,264 |
Annual Gold Card
Depending on your travel and financial situation, if an annual season ticket is looking like a better option, the icing on the cake is that it comes with a Gold Card discount.
This gives you a third off national rail tickets, plus a third off TfL off-peak pay-as-you-go fares. That’s useful if for example, you have a Zones 1-4 season ticket, but travel occasionally to zone 5 or beyond.
If you enable automatic top-up on your TfL account, you can just tap out at the destination, and it deducts the payg fare from your debit card.
And finally: Oyster cards work a fraction of a second faster on ticket barriers than contactless. You could save almost an entire minute with a year of tapping in and out. What will you do with all that extra time!
