Contactless or Oyster for London: What a Tourist Should Actually Tap in 2026

Oyster and contactless are two ways to pay for exactly the same journey, at exactly the same price. The fare is identical, the daily and weekly caps are identical, and nothing in the fare table will ever separate them. What separates them is a card fee of £10.50 that you never get back, which Transport for London’s visitor shop still lists as non-refundable as of 20 September 2026, plus whatever your own bank charges you for spending in pounds.

So the honest answer is that there isn’t one answer. Search for a contactless Oyster card and you will be told confidently to just use your phone, and just as confidently to buy the plastic. Both camps are right about somebody. An adult on a fee-free card, a family travelling with a twelve-year-old and someone landing on a Thursday for eight nights are three genuinely different sums, and only the first is solved by tapping and forgetting about it. Once the fares stop being the difference, what matters is what each card can carry.

Both Cards Buy the Same Ticket, and That Is Where the Real Question Starts

The gate reader has no idea what you tapped. It records that a unique number touched in at Victoria at 09:12 and touched out at Bank at 09:31, then prices that journey from the two taps: the zones crossed, the time you started.

An Oyster card is one such number. A bank card is another, a phone a third. Because the fare engine treats all of them as the same kind of object, there is no Oyster fare and no contactless fare. There is only a fare.

Every figure below was checked against Transport for London’s own published pages on 20 September 2026. TfL sets London’s fares and revises them, usually each March, so check the current number for your own journey before you commit to a plan.

One engine means one set of ceilings. TfL’s 2026 fare table puts the adult daily cap for Zones 1 and 2 at £8.90 and the Monday-to-Sunday cap at £44.70, and those apply whichever number you tapped with. Reach into Zone 3 and the day’s ceiling becomes £10.50; go out to Zone 6 and it is £16.30. The card in your hand appears nowhere in that sum.

The parity is recent enough that older advice still contradicts it. Answering a visitor on the Rick Steves travel forum in August 2025, one contributor wrote that “It is the contactless cap which runs for Monday to Sunday”, wording that leaves an Oyster user assuming the weekly ceiling is not theirs.

It was accurate for years. Weekly capping on Tube and rail arrived on contactless in 2014 and reached Oyster only on 27 September 2021, when TfL brought the two into line and said so in as many words. Anything written before that date describes a system that no longer exists.

Where does “the same fare” stop?

At the edge of the capped network, and that edge is not where most visitors expect it. A few services inside London accept both cards perfectly happily and then sit outside the ceilings altogether: TfL’s own fare table carries a footnote excluding Heathrow Express and Southeastern high-speed journeys from caps and Travelcards. Your card works. Your cap does not move. Spend £25 getting into town on one of those and the day’s capped travel still starts from zero.

Accepted and capped are two different questions, and the second is the one that costs money. Which airport route is worth taking is a decision in its own right, and it comes later.

So the fare table is a dead end for this choice. What separates an Oyster card from a bank card is the price of the card, the charge your bank adds on top, and the short list of things only one of them can hold.

The test: look up the daily cap for the zones you will cross, then confirm the services you plan to use sit inside the capped network. If they do, the card in your hand changes nothing about that number.

The Decision Test: Four Answers That Pick Your Card for You

Four questions settle this, and none of them is about London. They are all about you, which is why no guide can answer them on your behalf.

Does your bank charge you for spending in pounds? If it does not, the argument is already over, because contactless costs £10.50 less than Oyster on day one and never claws it back. If it does, the size of that charge becomes the whole question, and the way TfL bills you changes the answer more than most travellers expect.

Is anyone in your group aged 11 to 15? They pay a full adult fare on contactless. Half-price exists, but it lives on an Oyster card and nowhere else.

Do you hold a UK Railcard? Then contactless costs you money: National Rail lists Railcard discounts as unavailable on contactless pay as you go and available on Oyster, with a handful of Railcards excepted.

Does your trip sit inside one Monday-to-Sunday week? If it straddles two, the weekly ceiling may never be reached in either, and the product that fixes that, a 7 Day Travelcard, can only be loaded onto an Oyster card or a train company smartcard.

The table, by who you actually are

Find the row that describes your group, then read across. The middle column is the recommendation; the right-hand column is the thing that could still go wrong.

Three rows carry most of the money. The child row is the largest single saving open to any visitor, because it halves fares for a fortnight rather than a journey. The Railcard row is the only place an adult can get below the standard fare at all. And the last row is the one nobody checks, because a calendar looks like a detail right up until it costs you two days of travel.

Before any of that, though, there is your bank. Every recommendation in the middle column assumes you know what your own card does to a sterling transaction, and most people genuinely do not, because the charge rarely arrives as its own line. Find out before you decide anything else. It takes two minutes, and the section after next names the three numbers to look for.

The recommendation carries one real cost. Contactless suits most adult visitors, but it hands your fare history to a statement you may not be able to read properly until you are home, and it gives you no way to cap the spending in advance. If what you want is a fixed, prepaid transport budget that cannot overrun without you noticing, the £10.50 is buying something real, and “wasteful” is the wrong word for it.

The test: find the row that matches your group, then check your bank’s foreign transaction fee before you act on it. Those two facts decide this for almost everyone, and the rest of this guide is the evidence behind them.

£10.50, Not £7: What a New Oyster Card Costs Now and Why Older Guides Say Otherwise

A new Oyster card costs £10.50, and none of it comes back. That one number decides the whole argument, because the fee is the only thing Oyster charges you that contactless does not.

The fee has moved three times in four years, which is why so many pages disagree. Oyster cards were free when they launched in 2003. A refundable £3 deposit appeared in May 2009 and rose to £5 in January 2011. In February 2020 the deposit was replaced by a card fee, a change that mattered because a deposit comes back and a fee does not. On 4 September 2022 the fee rose to £7 and became formally non-refundable. On 7 September 2025 it went to £10. It now stands at £10.50.

That 2022 date still governs what you can reclaim today. MoneySavingExpert, a UK consumer site that tracks refund rights, draws the line at exactly that day: unused credit on an Oyster card has no time limit and is always reclaimable, but the card deposit itself only comes back on cards bought before 4 September 2022. If you buy a card this week, the £10.50 is spent the moment you pay it.

Why so many pages still say £7

Because £7 was correct for three years, and travel pages are rarely rewritten once they rank. The clearest example is live right now on an operator’s own website. Heathrow Express, the airport rail company, published its Oyster page on 14 September 2026 with both figures on it: the Visitor Oyster card “costs £10.50”, and two sections further down, buying a card in London “will cost you £7”. One page, one week old, two prices, and only one of them current.

So treat every fee you read as provisional, including this one. The ticket machine shows the live figure on screen before you confirm payment, and that screen is the only source that cannot be out of date. Read it before you pay.

What the £10.50 actually buys

Not credit. The fee is separate from any money you load, and you need a minimum of £5 of credit on top at the point of issue, so the realistic cost of walking away from a machine with a working Oyster card is about £15.50. A card holds a maximum of £90.

You can get unused credit back. Refunds of up to £10 can be taken in cash at a Tube station ticket machine, which deactivates the card in the process, so do it on your way out rather than midway through a trip. Larger balances go through TfL’s postal or online refund route, and anything above £15 requires proof of identity and address, which is awkward once you are home in another country. The practical lesson is to run the balance down rather than top it up near the end.

The Visitor Oyster is a separate problem

The Visitor Oyster card, the pre-loaded version aimed at tourists, cannot be bought in London at all. Heathrow Express states plainly that Visitor Oyster cards “aren’t available at Heathrow or in London” and must be pre-ordered online. As of today, TfL’s own Visitor Shop has suspended online purchases during a supplier transition, so the card is effectively unavailable from its official source. It also costs the same £10.50 plus postage, cannot hold a Railcard or a Travelcard, and cannot be registered.

Some travel agencies resell Visitor Oyster cards, and this guide is published by one, so treat any recommendation to pre-order a card, here or anywhere else, as a recommendation with a seller behind it. On the facts above, the standard card from a machine does more for the same fee.

The test: your bank’s charges across the whole trip have to exceed £10.50 before an Oyster card saves you anything. The next section is how to find that figure on your own statement.

What Your Bank Actually Charges: One Line a Day, Not One Line a Tap

Here is the mechanism that decides the money, and almost every guide gets it backwards.

TfL does not bill your bank when you tap. It adds up everything you did and sends one charge. National Rail, the official source for UK rail ticketing, puts it in one sentence: “Your journeys will be added up at the end of the day and you’ll receive one charge.” That charge usually reaches your account within three days, which is why your statement lags behind your sightseeing.

So a foreign transaction fee lands on the day, not on the tap. Eight journeys on a Tuesday produce one transaction, and your bank can only charge you once for it.

The claim that gets this wrong, and who makes it

TfL’s own Visitor Shop tells visitors to expect “1-3% foreign transaction fees on each journey”, and repeats it further down as “1-3% per transaction, which can add up quickly over multiple journeys”. That page sells Visitor Oyster cards. It is describing the cost of the product it competes with, and it is describing it wrongly, because National Rail and TfL run the same fare engine and that engine issues one charge per day.

Treat the number with the same care. The same page says a family saves “£20-30+ per child for a week-long visit” in one section and “£30-50 per week” in its FAQ, which are different answers to the same question on one page.

What it costs once you do the arithmetic

UK banks publish their rates, and they cluster tightly. HSBC UK charges 2.75% on debit cards and 2.99% on credit cards. Metro Bank charges 2.99%. Overseas issuers vary more, but 1% to 3% covers most of them.

Run 2.99% against a full day of Zone 1 and 2 travel, which caps at £8.90. The fee is 27p. A seven-day trip at that cap costs about £1.86 in bank charges. Against a £10.50 card fee, an Oyster card would need roughly 39 capped days of travel before it saved you anything, and at 2.75% it needs 43. Nobody visits London for 39 days.

A fixed fee changes the answer completely. If your bank charges a flat amount per foreign transaction rather than a percentage, you pay it once per travel day, so £1.50 a day reaches £10.50 in exactly seven days. That is the one common case where buying the card is the cheaper choice, and it is invisible unless you go looking.

The three numbers to find before you fly

Open your card’s fee schedule, not its marketing page, and write down three things.

The percentage charged on non-sterling transactions, which is the one most banks lead with. Any fixed or minimum fee per transaction, which is the one that decides this for you. And whether your issuer adds a conversion margin on top of the network rate, which some do and describe separately.

One more charge is worth knowing because it is avoidable. If you buy or top up an Oyster card at a ticket machine with a foreign card, the machine may offer to bill you in your home currency. Decline it and pay in pounds. HSBC’s guidance is blunt about why: when you convert at the point of sale “the merchant sets the conversion rate”, and it is usually worse than the rate Visa or Mastercard would have given you. No such prompt appears at a ticket gate, so this only bites at machines and shop counters.

The test: multiply your fee percentage by the daily cap for your zones, then by your number of travel days. If the answer is under £10.50, contactless wins, and for percentage-based cards it almost always is.

One Person, One Card: Why a Phone, a Watch and the Plastic Are Three Different Travellers

The rule sounds obvious and is routinely broken by people who think they are following it. Touch in and touch out with the same physical object, every time.

Your bank card and that same card loaded into Apple Pay are not the same object as far as the gates are concerned. TfL said so directly when MoneySavingExpert put the question to it: “Cards loaded onto a mobile device are treated as a separate device to the associated contactless card and therefore you need to ensure you only use one or the other to complete your journey.” Your phone and your watch are likewise two travellers, even with one account behind them.

Break the rule and the system does not see one journey paid oddly. It sees two journeys that never finished, and National Rail spells out the consequence: “this will show as 2 incomplete journeys, meaning you’ll be charged the maximum fare for each journey.” You pay two maximum fares for one trip.

What that costs in practice

A London musician, Grace Savage, told MoneySavingExpert she had overpaid £706.56 across a year of commuting, because she sometimes tapped in with her debit card and out with the same card in Apple Pay. One off-peak trip from Piccadilly Circus to Southwark billed her £16 instead of £2.40, recorded as “Piccadilly Circus to unknown” and “unknown to Southwark”. She was refunded after contacting TfL.

Those fares are from 2019 and have risen since, so treat the amounts as illustration rather than a price list. The mechanism has not changed, and neither has the scale: TfL took over £210m from incomplete journeys in 2025.

The maximum fare itself is not one number. National Rail quotes it as “up to £30.40”, while MoneySavingExpert puts the common case at around £8.90 at peak and “even more at some stations”. Both are right, because the charge is the worst-case fare from wherever you touched in, and the network now reaches well past London.

Card clash is the same failure from the other direction. Present a wallet with two contactless cards and the reader cannot tell which one you meant, so it may take neither cleanly. Keep one card out and the rest away from the reader.

The phone question, answered properly

Most guides say keep your phone charged, which is true and useless once the battery is at two per cent in a tunnel. The specific answer is better.

Apple’s Express Mode lets a card work at a gate without waking or unlocking the phone, without Face ID, Touch ID or a passcode, and it is on by default for an eligible card. Apple’s own documentation states that power reserve then “works for up to five hours” after the phone no longer has enough charge to run iOS, so a dead-looking phone can usually still touch you out. Press the side button to confirm the cards are still available.

One condition matters and is almost never mentioned: if you turn the phone off yourself, the feature stops working. Let a dying phone die on its own rather than powering it down to save it. Google Wallet has an equivalent that lets Android users pay at transit readers without unlocking the device, which is worth switching on before you land rather than at a gate.

If you do break a tap, you have recourse. You can complete a journey manually through a TfL account, up to three times a month, and claim a refund on an overcharge for eight weeks afterwards. Contactless journey history runs to 13 months, though the refund window does not.

The test: pick one payment object before your first journey, and use only that one for the whole trip. Put every other card in a different pocket. If your phone is the chosen one, turn on Express Mode before you fly, and never power it off to conserve battery.

The Discounts That Only Live on a Registered Oyster Card

Contactless has exactly one price: the adult fare. There is no version of it that is cheaper for a student, a pensioner, a veteran or a fourteen year old. National Rail states it without qualification: “Currently discounts cannot be applied to pay as you go with contactless.”

Every discount below therefore requires a physical Oyster card, and most require one that has been registered. That is the real argument for buying one, and it is a much better argument than the fare comparison.

Children aged 11 to 15

This is the largest saving available to an ordinary visitor. A child in that age band pays a full adult fare on contactless, and half the adult rate on an Oyster card with the Young Visitor Discount applied.

The discount is free, lasts up to 14 days, and works on the Tube, buses, the DLR, the Overground and the Elizabeth line. It cannot be applied online or at a machine. A member of TfL staff has to set it, the child has to be standing there, and staff may ask to see a passport to confirm the age. It is available at Tube station ticket offices in Zone 1, at the Heathrow terminals, and at Travel Information Centres, so plan to do it at the airport or on your first day in the centre rather than at a suburban station.

It works on both a standard Oyster card and a Visitor Oyster card, which makes it the one discount the Visitor version can carry.

Children under 11

They travel free on the Tube, the DLR, the Overground and buses when they are with a fare-paying adult, up to four children per adult, and they need no card at all.

The exception catches families heading out of London. On most National Rail services, free travel requires a 5-10 Zip Oyster photocard, which is an application with a photograph rather than something a visitor can arrange on arrival. Airport and day-trip journeys on National Rail are where this bites.

Railcard holders

If you already hold a UK Railcard, it can be loaded onto a standard Oyster card. Southeastern, one of the train operators inside the London zones, sets out the effect precisely: “A 34% discount will apply to the off-peak daily price cap with the following Railcards: 16-25, Senior, Disabled, HM Forces and Annual Gold Card.” TfL describes the single-fare side as a third off off-peak pay as you go.

Three conditions decide whether this is worth anything to you. The discount applies off-peak, so it does nothing for an 08:00 journey on a weekday. It has to be added by staff at a ticket office, with the Railcard and the Oyster card both in hand. And your Railcard has to be one of the eligible ones.

That last condition is where families get caught. National Rail lists the discount as available on Oyster “except 16-17 Saver, Two Together, Family & Friends and Network Railcards”. The Family & Friends Railcard is the one a visiting family would most plausibly own, and it is on the excluded list. Buying one for a London trip on the assumption it will cut your Tube fares would be £35 spent on nothing.

A Visitor Oyster card cannot take any Railcard, because a Visitor Oyster cannot be registered. That same limitation is why it cannot hold a Travelcard either. If you own a qualifying Railcard, the pre-loaded tourist card is the wrong product.

What none of this covers

Buying a Railcard purely for a holiday rarely pays, and for a family it may buy nothing at all. The discount is worth claiming if you already hold a qualifying card, and worth ignoring otherwise.

The test: if anyone in your group is aged 11 to 15, or if an adult already holds a qualifying Railcard, buy a standard Oyster card and have staff set the discount on your first day. Otherwise the discounts in this section give you no reason to own one.

Mondays Decide Your Weekly Cap, and Your Flight Does Not Care

The weekly cap is not a rolling seven days. It runs Monday to Sunday, it resets at midnight on Sunday whatever you have spent, and it does not know when your holiday started.

TfL designs it to give “7 days’ travel for the price of 5”, and the numbers bear that out. In Zones 1 and 2 the daily cap is £8.90 and the weekly cap is £44.70, which is a fraction over five capped days. Travel Monday to Friday and you pay £44.50. Saturday costs you 20p more, and Sunday is free.

That is a good deal, and it is available on Oyster and contactless alike. It is also completely unavailable to a large share of visitors, for a reason nobody plans around.

The arithmetic of arriving on a Thursday

Take seven days of Zone 1 and 2 travel. Inside one Monday-to-Sunday week, the cap holds you to £44.70.

Now land on a Thursday. Your first four days fall in one capping week and your last three fall in the next. Four capped days cost £35.60, three cost £26.70, and neither block ever reaches £44.70. You pay £62.30 for exactly the same travel.

The calendar just took £17.60 off you, and no amount of tapping correctly prevents it.

The same logic applies at every length. A Saturday-to-Saturday week, the most natural shape for a holiday, splits two and five and never caps either. A trip of four or five days that happens to straddle a Sunday night is paying daily rates throughout.

What fixes it, and what it costs

A 7 Day Travelcard. National Rail confirms the two properties that matter here: “Travelcards can start on any day”, and “Travelcards for 7 days or longer can only be added to your Oyster or train company Smartcard.”

A 7 Day Travelcard for Zones 1 and 2 costs £44.70, the same as the weekly cap, because it is the same product priced from a different starting line. Bought on the Thursday you arrive, it covers all seven days for £44.70 rather than £62.30.

That is £17.60 saved, against a £10.50 card fee if you do not already own an Oyster card, so the trip nets about £7. Thin, but real, and it grows with the zones you cover.

Two conditions before you act on that. The Travelcard has to be loaded onto an Oyster card or a train company smartcard, so contactless cannot do this at all. And you pay for five days whether you travel or not, so a Travelcard is wasted on a trip with two heavy days and five idle ones.

Two details that change the count

The capping day runs from 04:30 to 04:29 the next morning, not midnight to midnight. A journey home at 01:00 belongs to the previous day’s cap, which occasionally works in your favour after a late night and occasionally costs you a fresh day’s fare if you set out at 05:00.

The weekly cap also requires the same card or device for every journey in the week. Switch from your phone to your plastic midweek and you have split your spending across two identities, and neither may reach the ceiling. That is the rule from the earlier section arriving in a more expensive form.

The test: write down your travel days and mark which Monday-to-Sunday weeks they fall in. If they sit inside one week, tap with anything and the cap handles it. If they straddle two and you will travel most days, price a 7 Day Travelcard on an Oyster card against your split daily caps before you leave.

Airports, Buses and the Edge of the Map, Plus What Happens If You Break a Tap

There is a line on the map where Oyster stops working and contactless carries on. It runs through West Drayton, and most visitors meet it on the way to or from an airport.

Great Western Railway, which shares those tracks with the Elizabeth line, states it plainly: Oyster “isn’t available between Reading and West Drayton, fares and daily caps are the same”. Contactless runs the whole way, through Iver, Langley, Slough, Windsor and Eton Central, Maidenhead, Twyford, Henley-on-Thames and Reading. GWR is blunt about the consequence for the plastic: “all Oyster products … are not valid to these stations.”

Board at Paddington with an Oyster card intending to reach Slough and you have no valid ticket for most of the journey. People do get penalty fares for this, because the train does not change and neither does the line name.

The edge has its own edges. Contactless is not accepted at Reading West or Reading Green Park, and it is not valid between Feltham and Reading on South Western Railway services, so the same two endpoints can be payable or not depending on which operator you board.

Which airport you fly into changes the answer

Heathrow takes both cards on the Tube and the Elizabeth line. Heathrow Express also takes both and sits outside the caps entirely, as covered earlier.

Luton takes only one. The Luton DART, the shuttle linking the airport to Luton Airport Parkway, says that “Oyster cards aren’t accepted, but contactless payment works at the barriers”, and the airport sits outside the London fare zones. An Oyster card cannot get you there.

Stansted and Southend Airport joined the contactless network on 8 March 2026, as part of 20 new stations added by National Rail.

Since airports differ from each other more than any other part of this system, check your specific route on TfL’s single fare finder before you travel rather than assuming the card in your pocket covers it.

Buses are the simple part

Touch in only. There is no touch out on a London bus or tram, so none of the incomplete-journey machinery applies.

A single fare is £1.75, and the Hopper gives you unlimited bus and tram journeys within one hour of touching in for that one fare. TfL confirmed in July 2026 that the freeze holding it at £1.75 runs until 1 November 2026, after which the single fare is expected to rise to £1.85 and the daily bus and tram cap to rise by 30p to £5.55, which puts that cap at £5.25 today. If you are travelling after early November, budget the higher numbers.

One trap for families on the western branch. GWR notes that under-11s travel free on Elizabeth line services in that area with an adult, and that this “doesn’t apply on GWR services”. Same platform, same destination, different rule for your child.

If you break a tap

You have three repairs, in order of preference.

Complete the journey yourself through a TfL account, which you can do up to three times a month. Failing that, claim the overcharge back within eight weeks. Both need the card registered to an account, which takes two minutes and is worth doing on your first evening rather than after something goes wrong.

The third outcome is the one to avoid. Travelling without a valid ticket, which includes riding past the Oyster boundary, carries a Penalty Fare of £100 plus the single fare, reduced to £50 if you pay within 21 days.

The test: before any journey towards an airport or out past Zone 6, check that your destination accepts the card you are holding. If you are carrying an Oyster card and the answer is Reading, Slough or Luton, use contactless for that journey instead.

How much you should spend

Here is the whole guide compressed into the decision you have to make.

Most adult visitors should tap a contactless card or phone and stop thinking about it. The fares are identical, the caps are identical, and you avoid a £10.50 fee that never comes back. On a card charging a typical 2.99% on foreign transactions, a week of Zone 1 and 2 travel costs about £1.86 in bank charges, which is nowhere near the cost of the card.

Buy a standard Oyster card, from a machine on arrival, in four situations.

You are travelling with a child aged 11 to 15, and want the Young Visitor Discount that halves their fares for a fortnight. You already hold a qualifying Railcard, which is any of them except 16-17 Saver, Two Together, Family & Friends and Network. Your trip straddles two Monday-to-Sunday weeks and you will travel most days, so a 7 Day Travelcard beats two half-used weekly caps. Or your bank charges a flat fee per transaction rather than a percentage, in which case the daily charges add up fast enough to pass £10.50 inside a week.

Do not pre-order a Visitor Oyster card. It costs the same £10.50 plus postage, cannot hold a Railcard or a Travelcard, cannot be registered, and as of today cannot be bought from TfL’s own shop at all.

Before you fly, do three things. Find your card’s foreign transaction fee and whether it is a percentage or a fixed amount. Turn on Express Mode or its Android equivalent if you plan to pay with a phone. Write down which Monday-to-Sunday weeks your travel days fall into.

On your first day, do two more. Register whatever you are tapping with to a TfL account, so you can fix a broken tap later. And decide on one payment object, then keep every other card away from the readers for the rest of the trip.

Fares change, usually each March, and the bus and tram freeze ends on 1 November 2026. Every figure here was checked on 20 September 2026, so confirm the current numbers for your own dates before you commit.

Common questions

Is contactless cheaper than an Oyster card?

For the journey itself, neither is cheaper. Single fares, daily caps and Monday-to-Sunday caps are the same on both. Contactless is cheaper overall for most adult visitors only because it avoids the £10.50 card fee, and an Oyster card becomes cheaper when it unlocks a discount or a Travelcard that contactless cannot carry.

How much does an Oyster card cost in 2026?

£10.50, and the fee is not refundable. Pages quoting £7 are describing the price between September 2022 and September 2025. Unused credit on the card is refundable with no time limit, and up to £10 of it can be taken in cash at a Tube ticket machine, which deactivates the card.

Can two of us share one card?

No. Each person aged 11 or over needs their own card or device, on every mode. Tapping two people through on one card produces incomplete journeys rather than two fares.

Can I tap in with my phone and out with my card?

No, and this is the most expensive mistake in the system. TfL treats a card loaded into a phone as a different device from the card itself, so a split journey becomes two incomplete journeys and two maximum fares. Pick one object and use it for the whole trip.

What if my phone battery dies before I tap out?

An iPhone with Express Mode enabled can usually still tap for up to five hours after the battery is too low to run iOS. This stops working if you switch the phone off yourself, so let it run down rather than powering it off.

Do I need to touch out on a bus?

No. Buses and trams are touch in only. A single fare is £1.75 and covers unlimited bus and tram journeys within one hour under the Hopper fare.

What happens if I forget to tap out on the Tube?

You are charged a maximum fare, which depends on where you started and can reach £30.40 on the wider network. You can complete the journey yourself in a TfL account up to three times a month, or claim a refund within eight weeks.

Does my child pay less on contactless?

No. Child and Railcard discounts do not exist on contactless. Under-11s travel free with a fare-paying adult on TfL services regardless, but an 11 to 15 year old pays a full adult fare unless you put them on an Oyster card with the Young Visitor Discount applied by staff.

Should I buy a Visitor Oyster card before I travel?

Probably not. It costs £10.50 plus postage, cannot be registered, and cannot hold a Railcard or a Travelcard. TfL’s Visitor Shop has also suspended online sales during a supplier transition, and the card cannot be bought in London. A standard Oyster card from a ticket machine does more for the same fee.

Can I use Oyster to get to Luton or Reading?

No. Luton sits outside the London fare zones and the Luton DART does not accept Oyster. Oyster is also invalid between West Drayton and Reading, including Slough and Maidenhead, though the Elizabeth line runs through all of them. Contactless works on all of these routes.