The right Paris metro pass for tourists depends less on how long you’re staying than on which day of the week you land. The weekly one runs Monday to Sunday on a fixed calendar, so arriving on a Thursday means paying for a full week and using four days of it. That calendar rule is set by the region’s transport authority, not by whoever sells you the card, and it was unchanged when the official fare pages were checked on 20 September 2026.
The other half of the decision is physical. Paris sells two different visitor cards and they can’t hold the same products — the anonymous one takes single tickets and day passes but not the week, and the personal one takes the week but not single tickets. Airport journeys sit outside both and need a fare of their own. And the prices behind every calculation you’ve read changed in 2025, then changed again this January.
What Changed After the 2025 Fare Reform and What a Ride Costs Now in 2026
Open the Navigo weekly pass page on the region’s own transport site and it quotes €31.60, under a line saying those rates apply as of 1 January 2025. Open the 2026 fare page on that same site and the identical pass is €32.40. Both were live when they were checked on 20 September 2026.
The second figure is the one in force. The first is a price block on a product page that nobody has refreshed, and it explains most of the disagreement between the guides you’ve been reading — along with a useful tell: a fare quoted without the date it applies from is a fare you can’t trust.
Everything priced below comes from the 2026 fare schedule published by Île-de-France Mobilités, the authority that sets transport fares for Paris and the surrounding region, and it was checked on 20 September 2026 — that authority can change any of it, so confirm the figures for your own travel dates before you build a budget on them.
What happened in 2025 was a rebuild rather than a price rise. Paris used to charge by distance: zones set the fare, a trip out to the suburbs cost more than a trip across the centre, and a carnet of ten tickets took the edge off for anyone riding a lot. From 1 January 2025 all of that went. In RATP’s account of the reform, one flat-fare ticket now covers any metro, RER or suburban-train journey in Île-de-France, a second covers any bus or tram journey, and trips to the airports were pulled out into a ticket of their own.
The bulk discount went with the carnet. Ten rides now cost exactly ten times one ride.
That reform gets written up as a simplification, and for a day out to Versailles or the far suburbs it genuinely is one — same fare, any distance. Inside central Paris it runs the other way, and RATP’s own summary of the change says so: the flat ticket is less advantageous for occasional travellers within the old zones 1 and 2, which is most of what a visitor actually rides. If the metro feels dearer than you remember, you’re not misremembering.
Here is what each product costs an adult at full fare in 2026, and what each one actually buys.
| Ticket or pass | 2026 price | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Metro-Train-RER ticket | €2.55 | One rail journey anywhere in Île-de-France, airports excluded |
| Bus-Tram ticket | €2.05 | One bus or tram journey, airport coaches excluded |
| Paris Region ↔ Airports ticket | €14.00 | One rail journey to or from Orly or Charles de Gaulle |
| Navigo Jour (day pass) | €12.30 | One calendar day, all zones, airports excluded |
| Navigo Semaine (week pass) | €32.40 | Monday to Sunday, all zones |
| Paris Visite, 1 day | €30.60 | One day, all zones, airports included |
| Paris Visite, 5 days | €78.00 | Five consecutive days, all zones, airports included |
Two of those rows cause most of the damage when they’re skimmed. “Airports excluded” is not a zone technicality — it means the €12.30 day pass will not open the gate at the Charles de Gaulle or Orly station, so the €14 ticket arrives as a separate purchase on the day you land and the day you fly home. And “Monday to Sunday” is not a loose way of writing seven days. Both of those get their own sections further down, because between them they account for most of the money visitors lose on transport here.
What about the cardboard tickets from your last trip?
Cardboard t+ tickets stopped being sold in November 2025, and they are already refused on buses and trams. Île-de-France Mobilités’ published note on those tickets, updated in August 2026, says they still work on the metro until 15 December 2026, and that you can swap them at an RATP or SNCF ticket office until 14 January 2027, up to five a day, onto a Navigo Easy card bought for €2. There is no refund for unused ones.
Worth separating from that: the ticket bought in an app carries no expiry date at all. The deadline is a deadline for cardboard, not for the fare itself.
Which brings up the thing the rest of this decision hangs on. A ticket or a pass has to sit on something, and the two cards Paris sells to visitors do not hold the same products.
Navigo Easy vs Navigo Découverte: Price, Photo Requirement and What Each Card Can Actually Hold
These are not two versions of one card. They are two containers, and each refuses to hold something the other takes.
The descriptions you’ll find everywhere are accurate as far as they go. The Navigo Easy costs €2, carries no name and no photograph, and can be handed to anyone. The Navigo Découverte costs €5, carries your name and your photo, and belongs to you alone. Neither description mentions the thing that actually catches people out at the window.
Île-de-France Mobilités and RATP each publish a short list of what a Navigo Easy will carry, and the week pass is on neither. RATP’s version runs to the Metro-Train-RER ticket, the Bus-Tram ticket, the Paris Region ↔ Airports ticket, the Navigo Jour day pass and a pass sold only during pollution peaks; the transport authority’s own list swaps that last one for the Paris Visite pass. Asking nicely at the counter will not add the week to either. The published terms for the Découverte run the other way: it carries the day, week and month passes, and no single tickets at all.
| Medium | Holds | Does not hold |
|---|---|---|
| Navigo Easy, €2 | Single rail and bus tickets, up to 20 of each; the €14 airport ticket; two day passes; Paris Visite | The week pass |
| Navigo Découverte, €5 | Navigo Jour, Navigo Semaine and Navigo Mois passes | Any single ticket |
| Your own phone | Single tickets, day passes and the week pass | Nothing, but it needs an app account first |
Read that for the collision rather than the contents. The week pass is the product most visitors arrive wanting, and it is the single product the €2 card cannot take. The €5 card takes it happily — and is then no use at all to someone who only needs four rides, because it will not hold a single ticket. Buy the cheap card for a trip that turns out to want a pass, and you end up buying the other card as well.
Can you just use your phone instead?
Often, yes, and it sidesteps both cards and both fees. A phone holds single tickets, day passes and the week pass. The catch is the account you need before any of that works.
Creating an Île-de-France Mobilités Connect account requires a mobile number that can receive an SMS verification code, and only numbers from a published list are accepted. The version circulating in forums and guides — that you need a European number — is not what the account creation page said when it was checked on 20 September 2026. Numbers from Canada, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom are accepted alongside the European ones, from anywhere. A second group — the United States, Australia, Brazil, India, China, Mexico, Morocco, Argentina, Algeria and Colombia — is accepted only when the account is created from mainland France.
That second clause is the whole thing. Try to set this up from home in Texas or Sydney the week before you fly and it fails, and you reasonably conclude the phone route is shut to you. Do it after you land and it goes through. For anyone whose country appears on neither list, Île-de-France Mobilités’ own instruction is the same shape: open the account once you’re in France, or ask at a Navigo agency.
One physical detail before the next section, because it changes what you’re actually carrying. The Découverte isn’t one object. It’s a chip card plus a paper name card in a plastic sleeve, sharing a six-digit number, and the pass’s general terms say the two halves are inseparable and have to be shown together. Lose either half and neither the card nor the pass loaded on it is replaced or refunded.
That’s a manageable risk over a few days. The harder question is which week the pass on it actually covers — because that part isn’t yours to choose.
Why the Weekly Pass Runs Monday to Sunday and What Happens If You Buy It on Friday
Divide €32.40 by the days you’ll actually get and the arrival day stops being a detail.
Land on a Monday and the week pass works out at about €4.60 a day. Land on Wednesday and the same €32.40 buys five days, so roughly €6.50 each. Land on Thursday and you’re paying around €8.10 a day for four days — the point at which a day pass and a handful of single tickets stop looking like the fiddly option.
The rule underneath that arithmetic is exact rather than approximate. Under Île-de-France Mobilités’ general terms for the weekly and monthly passes, the Navigo Semaine runs from Monday 00:00 to the following Sunday 23:59, and the moment that counts is when you tap in, not when the train moves. Night buses get a small extension the rest of the network doesn’t: on the Noctilien network the same pass stays valid until 06:00 on the Monday morning after. A late Sunday night home is covered. The first metro of Monday morning is not.
The purchase window sits inside the same logic. A weekly is on sale from the Friday before the week it covers until the Thursday of that week inclusive. Read that from the counter’s side rather than the calendar’s: on a Wednesday you can still buy the week you are standing in, and on a Friday you cannot, because the only weekly on sale by then is next Monday’s.
So the honest answer to the Friday question is that nothing goes wrong — you simply haven’t bought what you thought you were buying. You’ve bought a pass for a week that starts after you leave.
That is worth checking rather than assuming, because the machine tells you. Whenever a weekly is offered, on a screen or by an agent, it is labelled with the Monday it starts from. Read that date before you pay: a Monday already behind you means you have this week, and a Monday still ahead of you means you’ve bought something that does nothing until then.
The confusion is durable enough to survive long explanations. In a July 2023 thread on the Rick Steves forum, a traveller planning a Thursday-to-Sunday visit wrote, several rounds into the discussion, “I’m still confused about Navigo Easy, Navigo Weekly, and Navigo Découverte.” That traveller finished the thread choosing a Navigo Easy loaded with individual tickets for the four days instead of a weekly. Every price quoted in that thread has since been superseded, but the arrival day pushed that decision the same way the current rule still pushes it.
Can you get your money back if you buy the wrong week?
Sometimes, and the cut-off is precise. The same terms say an unused weekly is refunded in full when it is cancelled before its validity begins, so a pass bought on Friday for the following Monday can still be undone over the weekend. Cancellation happens at a ticket office or a vending machine, or inside the app if the pass is on your phone, and the money returns by bank transfer or to the card rather than in cash across the counter.
Once the week has started, that door mostly closes. A partial refund exists, but the terms limit it to illness, dismissal or an imposed change of workplace — none of which describes a visitor whose plans simply shifted.
None of this settles the weekly’s other selling point, which is how far it reaches once you’re through the gate. That is where the day pass and the single ticket stop behaving the same way at all.
Airport, Versailles and Disneyland: Which Ticket Actually Covers Them
Two of those three stopped being a special case in January 2025. The third never will be.
Versailles and Disneyland Paris both sit well outside central Paris — zone 4 and zone 5 under the old system — and under the old system each needed its own longer-distance ticket priced by distance. The flat-fare rebuild ended that. A €2.55 Metro-Train-RER ticket is valid for rail journeys throughout Île-de-France, and the Château de Versailles and Marne-la-Vallée–Chessy are both inside Île-de-France. One ticket, each way, including the metro leg that gets you to the RER.
This is worth stating flatly because plenty of otherwise current guides still say otherwise. A widely read English guide reviewed in June 2026 still instructs readers that Versailles needs a point-to-point RER C fare and that Disneyland needs a separate RER A ticket because it sits outside zone 1. That was true before the reform. Following it today means paying for something you already have.
Airports are the genuine exception, and they are the exception on purpose. Journeys to and from Orly and Charles de Gaulle sit outside every flat-fare single ticket and outside the day pass. The €14 Paris Region ↔ Airports ticket exists precisely to cover that gap, by metro, train or RER, from anywhere in the region.
The Navigo Jour day pass is where this catches people. It is an all-zones product, so it will take you to Versailles and to Disneyland without a second thought — and it will not open the gate at the airport stations. Île-de-France Mobilités states the exclusion in one line beside the price, and it is not a zone technicality you can argue with at a barrier.
The weekly pass is the one product that does reach the airports by rail, which is a large part of why it looks so good on paper for a Monday arrival. Its published terms still carve out a specific list, though, and these are named services rather than zones:
- the Orlyval shuttle between Antony and Orly
- Le Bus Direct and the VEA shuttles to Disney
- the OpenTour and Cars Rouges sightseeing buses
- the TGV, and any line that doesn’t apply Île-de-France fares
One more trap sits in the zoning. The weekly is also sold in two-zone versions — 2–3, 3–4 and 4–5 — at a few euros less, and those are valid only inside the pair you bought. A 2–3 weekly reaches neither central Paris nor Charles de Gaulle. For a visitor, all zones is the only version that does the job the pass is being bought for.
Why your card may refuse the airport ticket
This one is mechanical rather than geographic, and it happens at the machine on arrival day.
A Navigo Easy will hold the airport ticket. It will hold ordinary Metro-Train-RER tickets. Under Île-de-France Mobilités’ compatibility rules, updated in April 2026, it will not hold both at once, and RATP’s own airport-ticket guidance says the same thing from the other direction. If the machine simply doesn’t offer you the Metro-Train-RER ticket, an incompatible ticket is already sitting on the card — usually an airport ticket, or leftover cardboard-era t+ credit.
The published remedy is blunt and has two branches: use up the tickets that can’t coexist, or put the new one on a different medium. In practice that means landing at Charles de Gaulle with the €14 ticket on your Easy, riding in, using it, and only then loading your metro tickets — or putting the airport leg on your phone and keeping the card for the city. There is a capacity ceiling underneath this too: the rigid version of the card holds up to four ticket types at once and the flexible version only two.
The same rules block one thing families run into without warning. A single Navigo Easy cannot carry full-fare and reduced-fare tickets together, so an adult and a child aged four to nine cannot share one card for single tickets. That is a second €2 card, not a workaround.
Coverage tells you where each product reaches. It doesn’t yet tell you which one to buy, and that comes down to a number you can work out in about a minute.
How Many Rides Make a Day Pass or Weekly Pass Cheaper Than Single Tickets
Three numbers settle most of this, and all three come out of the 2026 fares.
A single rail ride is €2.55 and the day pass is €12.30, so the day pass overtakes singles at five rail rides in one day. Four rides costs €10.20 and you’re better off paying per journey. Five costs €12.75 and the pass has won, by forty-five cents. That’s a thinner margin than most guides imply, and it matters because four rides is a very ordinary Paris day.
The weekly overtakes singles at thirteen rail rides across the Monday-to-Sunday week — thirteen journeys at €2.55 comes to €33.15 against €32.40. Add the €5 Découverte card if you need one and the threshold moves to fifteen.
Then the airport changes everything, which is the part the ride-counting misses.
A return rail journey to Orly or Charles de Gaulle is two €14 tickets, so €28 before you have ridden anywhere in the city. Against a €32.40 weekly that leaves almost no room. On a phone, where there’s no card fee, two further rail rides tip the balance: €33.10 in singles against €32.40 for the pass. On a physical Découverte, with the €5 card, it takes four. Either way, a Monday-to-Wednesday arrival that flies in and out by train has effectively already bought the weekly before doing any sightseeing — provided both flights sit inside the same calendar week.
Before you decide, walk one ordinary day of your itinerary in your head and count the rail legs: hotel to first sight, sight to lunch, lunch to afternoon plan, and back. Most people land on three or four, not six. If your honest number is four and your trip has no airport rail leg, the arithmetic above says buy nothing but single tickets.
Four questions that pick the product
- What day of the week do you land?
- Does your whole stay sit inside one Monday-to-Sunday week?
- How many rail rides will you take on a normal day?
- Will you take the train to or from Orly or Charles de Gaulle?
Answer those four and the table below routes you. It is a decision tool built for this guide out of the four variables that actually move the answer at 2026 fares — not an official recommendation from Île-de-France Mobilités, which publishes prices rather than advice.
| You land on | Stay inside one Mon–Sun week | Airport by train | Best buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday to Wednesday | Yes | Either way | Navigo Semaine |
| Monday to Wednesday | No | Either way | Weekly for the covered days, singles after |
| Thursday | Yes | Yes | Navigo Semaine, four days, still cheapest |
| Thursday | Yes | No | Navigo Jour on five-ride days, singles otherwise |
| Friday to Sunday | No | No | Navigo Easy with single tickets |
| Friday to Sunday | No | Yes | Paris Visite for your exact days |
The row that surprises people is the last one, so it is worth showing the working rather than asserting it.
When the tourist pass actually wins
Paris Visite has a reputation as the thing you buy by mistake, and for a Monday arrival that reputation is deserved: €78.00 for five days against €32.40 for a week is not a close contest. But it runs for consecutive days from first validation rather than on a fixed calendar, and RATP’s visitor guidance for 2026 confirms it covers the airport services the day pass excludes.
Put a weekend trip through that. Two days, landing Saturday, train both ways to the airport.
The two-day Paris Visite is €45.40. Two day passes plus two airport tickets come to €52.60 before the card. Single tickets at four rail rides a day come to €50.40 with the card. The pass everyone warns you about is the cheapest of the three, by several euros, because the weekly it normally loses to isn’t available to you at all.
One more asymmetry worth knowing if you’re travelling with children. Paris Visite halves for children aged four to under ten. The day pass has no child rate and the weekly has no visitor child rate either, so a family of four pays four adult weeklies. For a short weekend with young children that gap can reverse the answer again.
None of this helps until you can actually get the thing in your hand, and that is where the last few traps live.
How to Buy Your Card at the Station, on Your Phone, and Avoid the Photo Fine
The place most visitors plan to buy a Navigo Découverte is the one place that stopped selling them.
Both Charles de Gaulle train stations withdrew the Découverte in August 2025, and Paris by Train, updated in March 2026, still records the pass as withdrawn there, with the reason given as the time it takes to set a new card up while other passengers wait. This is a station-level operating decision rather than a published rule, so it could be reversed without notice — but planning around it costs you nothing, and planning around the old advice costs you a queue and a change of plan with luggage.
What is still sold at Charles de Gaulle is the Navigo Easy, the airport ticket and the Paris Visite pass, which is enough to get you into the city and buy you time. The Découverte then comes from a staffed window at a mainline station — Gare du Nord, Gare de Lyon, Gare de l’Est and the other big ones all have Île-de-France ticket offices — or from an approved local retailer.
That difference in where things are sold is worth holding onto, because it is not symmetrical. A Navigo Easy comes out of a machine, and the machines run in English and take Visa and Mastercard. A Découverte never does: it is assembled by a person at a counter, which is exactly why the airport stations dropped it.
What the photo rule actually says
Less than the internet thinks, and more than is convenient.
Île-de-France Mobilités’ general terms for the Découverte require the holder to write their first and last name on the paper card, stick on a photo — frontal, bareheaded, plain background, not scanned and not photocopied — and close the self-adhesive flap. Those terms don’t specify millimetres. The 25 × 30 mm figure that circulates everywhere comes from the practical guides and the photo services, and it is a sensible thing to bring; a standard passport photo is too large and gets trimmed at the counter.
What the terms do say is what happens at an inspection: the smart card, loaded and validated, and the name card with its photo attached and flap closed, have to be produced together, and irregular use means a lump-sum penalty under the rules covering public transport in Île-de-France. Left unpaid for three months, that becomes an increased fine collected by the French Treasury. No euro amount appears in the terms themselves.
Individual amounts do appear in traveller accounts, and they are worth reading as accounts rather than as a tariff. On the Rick Steves forum in April 2019, someone described being fined €35 at a Paris metro station for a card with no photo on it, and wrote that “You will not be told that the photo is mandatory.”
Another poster in the same thread pointed out what is actually printed in the photo space on the card: collez ici votre photo d’identité — paste your ID photo here. Seven years on, the amount in that account tells you nothing reliable about today’s penalty. The sequence still does: the card is not finished when you pay for it, and nobody at the window is required to finish it for you.
So bring a printed photo from home, cut roughly to size, and attach it before your first tap rather than after. Station photo booths exist and cost around €5 for a set of four, which is money spent on a problem you could have solved with a printer.
Why everyone in your group needs their own card
The Découverte is personal and non-transferable in its terms, so it obviously can’t be shared. The Navigo Easy is anonymous, which makes people assume it can be — and at the gate it can’t. You can’t hand it back through the barrier for the next person, so a couple with twenty tickets on one card is a couple with one working card.
That means two €2 cards for two adults, and a third for a child aged ten or over who pays full fare. A younger child needing the reduced fare needs a separate card anyway, because one Easy can’t hold full-fare and reduced-fare tickets at the same time.
There’s a simple way to stay ahead of it. If your phone has NFC, the transport apps will read a physical Navigo card when you hold it against the back of the handset, and show what’s actually loaded on it and how many journeys are left. Doing that once at the end of your first day tells you whether your ride estimate from the previous section was right, while there’s still time to change the plan.
One last thing about where you buy. Travel agencies sell Paris transport products and airport transfers, and this publisher is one of them — but none of it needs to be bought that way, and the Découverte can’t be: there is no online sale of the physical card, so it is collected at a counter in Paris no matter who took your money first.
At a central station outside the morning rush the queue is usually short, and the official price is the price. Once you have the right thing in your hand, the remaining skill is reading the gates, the transfers and the exits, which the companion guide to riding the Paris metro for the first time covers in detail.
Quanto Você Deveria Gastar
Almost all of this reduces to one question you can answer before you leave home: does your whole stay sit inside a single Monday-to-Sunday week, and will you take a train to the airport inside it? Two yeses and the €32.40 weekly is close to unbeatable. Anything else and a €2 card with €2.55 tickets usually wins. Work it out against your real dates before you reach a ticket window, because the machine will sell you a pass that starts the day after you fly home, and once that week begins the refund door has already shut.
Frequently asked questions
Can I buy a card before I get to France?
No. The Découverte has no online sale and is handed over at a staffed counter in Paris, and a Navigo Easy comes out of a station machine when you land — so the only thing you can really arrange in advance is the app account.
I land on a Sunday. Should I buy the weekly that day or wait?
Buy it on the Sunday. From Friday onwards the only weekly on sale is the one starting the next Monday, so a Sunday purchase is ready the moment you wake up and runs a full seven days. Only your arrival evening falls outside it.
If I switch from the metro to a bus, does one ticket cover both?
No. Under the published transfer rules, a Metro-Train-RER ticket covers rail-to-rail transfers for up to two hours, and a Bus-Tram ticket covers bus and tram transfers for up to ninety minutes. A journey combining the two needs one of each.
Is a Navigo Easy card from an earlier trip still usable?
Usually yes, with one catch. Any leftover cardboard-era t+ credit sitting on the card blocks the purchase of current Metro-Train-RER and airport tickets until it is used up, and those t+ tickets themselves stop working on the metro after 15 December 2026.
