Suica, Welcome Suica or ICOCA: Which Japan IC Card Actually Fits Your Trip

The Suica card a Tokyo commuter taps every morning and the one sold to visitors at the airport open the same gates. What separates them is where you can buy one, how long it keeps working, and whether anyone gives your money back at the end. Japan’s visitor cards drop the refundable deposit and expire on a fixed date, while the ordinary ones keep it and stay usable for years, a split Tokyo’s official travel guide sets out plainly.

The awkward part is that you make this choice in an arrivals hall with a queue behind you, and most of it cannot be undone. A card sold with no deposit does not refund what you loaded onto it. A card sold with one refunds only in the region that issued it. The phone option is settled by hardware you cannot change between the gate and baggage claim. So the answer comes as a short set of questions: your airport, your handset, your dates, and your odds of coming back. One of those answers is already running before you tap in for the first time.

The 28-Day Clock Starts When You Buy the Card, Not When You First Tap It

The 28-day clock on a physical Welcome Suica starts on the day you pay for it, not on the day you first tap through a gate in Japan. The purchase date counts as day one, and the card switches off on the 29th day. Buy one at Narita on 2 October and it is dead on 30 October, used or not.

That is what JR East publishes, checked on its own purchase page on 20 September 2026. Every rule below comes from the company that issues the card, JR East, JR West or PASMO, and each of them can change its own terms, so open the issuer’s page for your own dates before you pay for anything.

The gap between the two versions of this rule is where the money goes. If the clock started at your first tap, a card bought at the airport and left in a wallet through four days in Kyoto would still hold its full 28 days by the time you reached Tokyo. Because it starts at purchase, those four days are spent. Anyone planning a trip close to four weeks, or buying on arrival and then travelling on a rail pass for the first stretch, is burning validity before the card has done any work.

The counting catches people separately. On Reddit in August 2025, a traveller asked whether a card bought at one in the afternoon would expire at one in the afternoon four weeks later. One reply worked it out as “28 days including day of purchase. so it 27 days after purchase day.” That matches JR East’s wording.

Read the end date as the last day the gates will open for you, rather than the first day they will not. And if a guide tells you the clock starts at the first tap, that guide is arguing with the company that issued your card.

Is the date printed on the back your expiry date?

No. Turn the card over and there is a date under the words GOOD THRU, usually years away, and JR East states in a note beside the validity rule that this is not the expiration date. What it marks is how long the card itself remains issued, which has nothing to do with your 28 days.

The date that actually governs the card is not printed on the card at all. It arrives on a small paper slip handed over with it, and that slip turns out to matter far more than its size suggests.

The ordinary Suica has no 28-day window at all. The phone version runs on a much longer one. And the newest no-deposit card at the Tokyo airports runs on exactly this one.

The Five Cards Actually on the Table in 2026

Five products are on sale to a visitor right now. The count comes out wrong elsewhere because two of them are new this year and one of them died quietly.

All five open the same gates and buy the same bottle of tea at the same convenience store, because Japan’s regional cards have been mutually usable for years. So the table is not about what the cards do. Read the two middle columns instead and the real pattern is blunt: pay a deposit and the card outlives your trip, pay none and the card is on a timer. No option gives you both, and no amount of shopping around at the airport will produce one.

The two no-deposit plastic cards are close to interchangeable. TOURIST PASMO runs the same 28-day purchase-date clock, takes no deposit and refunds nothing; PASMO Co. announced it in April 2026 and now sells it at Haneda and Narita. What separates the two is not terms but counters — JR East sells one, Keikyu and Keisei sell the other — so which you can reach depends on where you land.

The two JR East digital products, by contrast, are not interchangeable, and guides merge them constantly. A Suica sitting in Apple Wallet and the Welcome Suica Mobile app are different products with different lifespans.

Then there is the card that is no longer there. PASMO PASSPORT was the Tokyo tourist card for years, and PASMO Co. published the abolition of its usage rules in October 2024. A guide last updated in July 2026 still lists it in its comparison table as a live option, which is how travellers end up at the airport hunting a counter for a product retired before the current one launched.

ICOCA is the outlier worth keeping in view. JR West sells the card from ticket machines and Midori-no-madoguchi ticket offices, the ¥500 deposit sits inside the purchase price the same way, and — as JR West states on its own guide, checked 20 September 2026 — a credit card cannot be used to buy one. Everywhere else in the country it behaves like a Suica. Its only real difference is whose counter you must reach to get the deposit back.

None of the five is the best card. The right one falls out of four things about your trip, and you already know all four.

Answer These Five Questions and Your Card Picks Itself

Work down the list in order and stop at the first question that gives you an answer. The order matters: the early questions remove cards from the shelf whatever you would have preferred, so answering them later means unpicking a choice you already made.

1. Do you land in Kansai? If you arrive at Kansai International rather than Narita or Haneda, buy an ICOCA and stop reading the list. The no-deposit visitor cards are a Tokyo-airport product; JR West’s card is the one on sale where you are standing.
2. Is your stay longer than 28 days? If yes, a no-deposit card will die before you fly home with your balance inside it. Take the deposit card.
3. Will you be back in Japan within ten years? If yes, take the deposit card again — this time not to survive the trip but to survive the gap between trips.
4. Is the phone in your pocket an iPhone? If yes, the mobile route skips the airport counter entirely. If you carry an Android bought outside Japan, treat this as a no; the reason is hardware you cannot install your way around.
5. Did everyone in your group answer question 4 the same way? If not, route each traveller separately. Fares are calculated per card from tap-in to tap-out, so two people cannot share one, and a household can legitimately end up carrying two different products.

Your four possible answers

• Welcome Suica, for a short Tokyo-area trip with no return planned and no iPhone. TOURIST PASMO is the same trade on a different counter, so take whichever one you reach first.
• Mobile Suica, for a short trip with an iPhone in your pocket. You skip the queue and top up without cash, which is the biggest day-to-day difference between the two routes.
• ICOCA, if you land in Kansai. It works identically in Tokyo, so there is no second card to buy later.
• A regular Suica you keep, if you are staying more than four weeks or expect to be back. The deposit is the price of a card that is still alive next time.

This question set is a practical tool built for this guide out of the four things that genuinely change the answer — where you land, how long you stay, whether you return, and what phone you carry. It is not an official JR East, JR West or PASMO recommendation, and none of those companies publishes a routing rule of this kind.

Two of those questions do more work than they look like they do. Your phone settles the answer before preference gets a vote, and so does the airport your flight happens to land at.

What Your Phone Decides Before You Do: FeliCa, iPhone and the Android Wall

Your phone settles whether the mobile route is open to you at all, and it settles it before any preference you have gets a vote. An iPhone can hold a Japanese transit card anywhere in the world. An Android bought outside Japan almost certainly cannot, and no setting, app or account change fixes it.

The Apple side is more generous than most guides report. Apple sets a general floor of iPhone 8 or Apple Watch Series 3, then adds a separate line for Suica: an iPhone 7 will do. Guides printing “iPhone 8 and later” have copied the general rule and dropped the exception, which matters if your handset is a few years old.

The Android explanation you will read everywhere is now out of date. The old line was that the chip is simply absent from phones sold abroad. On the newest Pixels sold outside the United States it is listed as present, and the Suica option has started appearing inside Google Wallet.

Appearing is not working. Google still conditions Suica and PASMO on devices purchased in Japan, checked on 20 September 2026. On Reddit in August 2026, owners of international Pixel 11 models described the card appearing and then failing at the moment of issue; one comment put it as “For all global Pixel 11 models, you need to be in Japan to enable FeliCa, even if you bought the phone in Japan.” Those are individual reports, not policy. The policy is Google’s, and it has not moved.

So there are two locks, not one. The chip has to be present, and the issuer has to be willing to put a card on that device in that country — and it is the second lock, not the first, that shuts on visiting Android users. Rooting a handset is not travel advice.

If you are on Android, what is the honest alternative?

Two of them, and they are not equivalent. The reliable one is a physical card. The partial one is tapping a contactless credit card straight on the gate, which now works on a good many private rail and subway lines around Tokyo.

Read the limit before you plan around it. GO TOKYO states that credit-card tapping is not available on JR lines, the Keisei Line or the Tokyo Monorail, and only on certain Tobu and Seibu lines, as of its 1 September 2026 update. JR lines are the ones a first-time visitor uses most, and the Tokyo Monorail is how you leave Haneda. A contactless card is a good second payment method; building a Tokyo week on it means finding the gaps at a gate.

Which leaves the counter. And which counter you can reach is decided before you land.

Narita, Haneda or Kansai: Your Arrival Airport Narrows the Choice

The card you can buy is decided by the counter you can walk to, and the three main arrival airports do not stock the same shelf. Before any preference about deposits or expiry dates, geography takes options away.

At Narita, two companies are selling to you in the same building. JR East runs Travel Service Centers at both Terminal 1 Station and Terminal 2·3 Station, with dedicated Welcome Suica vending machines at each, and its own page sets a limit of one Welcome Suica per person. Keisei sells TOURIST PASMO from the Skyliner & Keisei Information Center at Terminal 1 and Terminal 2·3, and there it comes in exactly one denomination: ¥2,000. If you want a different opening balance, that decides which company you queue for.

Haneda works the same way with different geography. JR East’s Welcome Suica counter and machine sit at Terminal 3 on the Tokyo Monorail station, which is also the train you will take into town. Keikyu sells TOURIST PASMO from traveller ticket machines at the Terminal 1·2 station gates and from the Keikyu Tourist Information Center at Terminal 3, in six amounts from ¥1,000 to ¥10,000 — and those machines take credit cards, which the cash-only machines elsewhere do not.

That last detail is worth more than it looks after a long flight with no yen in your pocket. It is also the one place where the two near-identical visitor cards stop being interchangeable in practice.

The question left over from the last few years is whether any of this is in stock. It is. The chip shortage that suspended sales of plain Suica and PASMO cards ended, unrestricted sales resumed in March 2025, and regular Suica is back at JR East ticket machines. JR East’s own list does still show several city Travel Service Centers with Welcome Suica sales temporarily halted, which is a reason to buy at the airport rather than assume you can pick one up later at whichever station you happen to pass.

If you land at Kansai, the shelf looks different

There is no Welcome Suica and no TOURIST PASMO at Kansai International. Those are Tokyo-airport products, and travellers arriving in Osaka regularly lose time looking for a counter that does not exist there.

JR West lists Kansai-airport Station as having a ticket office — Midori-no-madoguchi, open 05:30 to 23:00 — alongside green ticket machines and ordinary ticket machines, with staff on hand for enquiries from overseas visitors, on its arrival guide checked 20 September 2026. The ordinary machines sell ICOCA cards directly, so an early arrival does not have to wait for the office to open. Follow the blue JR West signs in the concourse rather than the red Nankai ones.

Two things to know before you reach the machine. JR West states that a credit card cannot be used to buy an ICOCA, so have yen ready. And the visitor-design ICOCA sold at the ticket office is not open to everyone: it requires a passport issued outside Japan and Temporary Visitor status, one card per person, at ¥2,000 including the ¥500 deposit. If that does not describe you, the ordinary ICOCA from the machine does the identical job.

One more thing, worth saying plainly because of who publishes it. The publisher here is a travel agency, and agencies sell trips, transfers and add-ons — but on this purchase there is nothing to sell you. Every card above is sold at the airport for exactly the value you load onto it, with no markup, and a reseller who posts you a voucher to exchange on arrival has added a fee and a queue to a two-minute transaction at a machine. Buy it at the airport, or put it on your phone before you leave home.

Welcome Suica Mobile: 180 Days, No Queue, iPhone Only

Six months instead of four weeks, and no counter to find on arrival. That is the pitch, and it is broadly true. The detail worth reading first is when the six months actually start.

JR East’s rules for the app, checked on 20 September 2026, set the validity at 180 days from the date of issuance — and issuance happens when you make your first top-up, not when you install anything. The app repeats the plastic card’s habit of starting its clock before you tap. When the 180 days run out the balance expires with them, and the rules state that it cannot be refunded.

What you get in exchange is a genuinely English, membership-free setup. You choose a secret keyword instead of registering an account, and top-ups run through the credit card already sitting in Apple Pay, so there is no cash and no ticket machine. Since March 2026 it also sells Green Car tickets for local trains, books JR East shinkansen and limited-express seats, and lets you ride non-reserved shinkansen seats with no paper ticket at all.

It is not, however, the only way to put a Suica on an iPhone, and that is the part the pitch leaves out. Asked for feedback on the app in the Tripadvisor Japan forum, a destination expert for Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka answered: “This app is pointless to get. If you want a Suica on your phone, just add it to your wallet.”

Harsh, and broadly right. Its App Store rating sits at 2.7 out of 5 from 99 ratings, checked on 20 September 2026, and the most prominent critical review is headed “Useless. You may lose your money. Avoid!” The 180-day deadline belongs to the Suica this app issues, not to Suica in general, so installing it means accepting an expiry you were not otherwise obliged to take.

Three rules in the terms that catch people out

Balances do not move between the app and plastic. The rules block transferred issuance in both directions: you cannot pour a physical Welcome Suica into the app, and you cannot pour the app onto a card on the way out. Whichever one you start with is the one you finish with.

The Apple Pay card has to be in your own name. JR East states that credit cards in the name of others cannot be used, which quietly rules out the common arrangement where one partner’s card pays for everything. Under-13s are excluded too, because Apple Pay excludes them.

You may not be able to load it before you arrive. Charging can be restricted by the law of the country you are standing in, and the rules set out a fallback in which issuance waits until you have entered Japan. A March 2025 App Store reviewer described the same wall from the other side: “you can only load once you’re in the country.”

One rule runs in your favour, and almost nobody prints it. If the phone is lost, stolen or broken and the Suica cannot be reissued, the terms send you to the Support Center, which refunds the remaining balance through a Suica Pocket. That is the app’s only refund route, and it covers the situation travellers actually worry about.

Take it if you want an English interface, seat booking in the same place as your fare, and no queue on arrival. Skip it if all you wanted was a Suica on your iPhone. Either way you have now met both of the ways this system keeps money that was yours: a balance that expires, and a fee taken out of what is left.

Deposits, Handling Fees and the Money You Never See Again

The deposit is the part almost everyone misreads, and the misreading costs nothing until the last day. Asked on Reddit in March 2026 whether the ICOCA deposit could be spent on a snack at the airport, a commenter set it straight: “the deposit is inaccessible to you until you return the card”, and “if you buy an ICOCA from a machine with ￥2000, you get a card with ￥1500 loaded on it.” The ¥500 is not hidden balance. It is the price of holding the card, and it comes back only when you hand the card over.

JR East publishes the arithmetic for its own card, checked on 20 September 2026. Return a Suica and you get the ¥500 deposit plus whatever balance is left, minus a ¥220 handling fee taken out of that balance. The fee never touches the deposit, which is the one quietly generous part of the design.

Read the middle row twice. Anywhere below ¥220, the fee simply eats whatever is there, so a card handed back with ¥180 on it pays exactly the same ¥500 as a card handed back empty. Spending the balance down to nothing is worth real money, and it is a departure-day job rather than an airport-morning improvisation.

Whose counter takes the card back?

This is where refunds actually fail. JR East states that Suica cards it issued can only be returned at JR East stations, and that cards issued by other companies — its own example is the Tokyo Monorail — cannot be returned to JR East at all. You go back to whoever issued yours.

Set that against where you bought the thing. Tokyo Monorail, the train most people take out of Haneda, issues Suica cards under its own name, and those are not JR East’s to refund. The useful question at the counter is not whether you are buying a Suica but whose Suica it is, because that answer decides which window in which city gives you your ¥500 back.

The same logic runs west. An ICOCA goes back to JR West, and no amount of standing at a Tokyo ticket office will change that, which matters if your trip lands in Osaka and leaves from Narita.

None of this applies to Welcome Suica, TOURIST PASMO or the app, because there is no deposit to return and no refund to claim. Whatever sits on those cards when the clock runs out stays with the issuer.

One figure this guide cannot give you cleanly. JR West publishes the ¥500 deposit for ICOCA but does not state the refund handling fee anywhere on its English-language pages, checked on 20 September 2026; the terms themselves sit in Japanese PDFs. The fee is widely reported as the same ¥220 and the structure plainly matches JR East’s, but treat that as expected rather than confirmed, and ask at Midori-no-madoguchi when you hand the card over.

Which makes the amount you load on day one an actual decision, rather than a shrug at the machine.

How Much to Load, and Why ¥20,000 on Day One Is a Mistake

Every one of these cards stops at ¥20,000. JR East, JR West and PASMO all cap the stored balance there, and a certain kind of traveller reads a maximum as a target — load it once, forget it, enjoy the holiday. The ceiling is not a recommendation. It is the largest amount you are allowed to put at risk.

Start with what a day actually costs. Tokyo Metro publishes its fares by distance band, checked on 20 September 2026: an IC card pays ¥178 for one to six kilometres, rising to ¥324 for the longest runs on the network. Four rides in a day therefore lands somewhere between roughly ¥710 and ¥1,300. JR lines and the private railways price separately, so treat that as the shape of the spend rather than the exact number.

Set that against what travellers report actually using. In a 2024 thread on Reddit asking how much to put on an IC card, one traveller finished a twelve-day trip having loaded ¥11,000 in total and reached the airport with about ¥50 left; another spent roughly ¥10,000 across two weeks; a third got through twenty-one days on ¥8,000. Those are whole trips costing less than the ceiling. Loading ¥20,000 on day one is not buying convenience, it is prepaying for a holiday you have not taken yet.

Three things go wrong at the top of that range, and they are different problems. On Welcome Suica, TOURIST PASMO or the app there is no refund, so an unspent balance is simply gone. On a Suica or ICOCA the money comes back, but only at the issuing company’s window, minus the handling fee. And on every physical card, JR East states plainly that a lost Suica cannot be reissued.

That last one has a face. In the same thread, a traveller described loading ¥5,000 and losing the card an hour later, “braindead after the long flight”, and now refuses to carry more than ¥2,000 on one.

A loading rule that survives contact with a vending machine

Put ¥2,000 to ¥3,000 on it at the airport and top up as you go. JR East’s machines take ¥500, ¥1,000, ¥2,000, ¥3,000, ¥5,000 and ¥10,000, there is no limit on how often you top up, and every station has a machine that does it. The penalty for under-loading is about sixty seconds at a screen; the penalty for over-loading runs from a handling fee to the whole balance.

Expect the spend to drift upward anyway, because the card stops being a train ticket about two days in. Travellers in that thread describe it going on convenience stores, restaurant bills, vending machines, coin lockers and — repeatedly — arcade claw machines. That is genuinely the card working as intended. It is also why a figure calculated purely from train fares will be too low.

One group should ignore most of this. If you took a deposit card because you are coming back, the balance is not at risk in the same way: it survives the flight home and waits for the next trip. Load what is convenient. The tight discipline above belongs to anyone holding a card with an expiry date on it, which is most first-time visitors.

Topping up is easy, right up to the moment you try to do it with a foreign card.

Topping Up: Cash Machines, Konbini and the Foreign-Visa Problem

If you are carrying plastic, the famous foreign-card problem does not exist for you, because you were never allowed to use a card anyway. JR East states flatly that Suica cards cannot be topped up with a credit card; top-ups are cash, in yen, at a machine. That sounds like a limitation and works out as an immunity.

The machines are everywhere and they are not fussy. Ordinary ticket machines, multifunction machines and fare-adjustment machines all take cash top-ups in ¥500, ¥1,000, ¥2,000, ¥3,000, ¥5,000 and ¥10,000 steps, and convenience-store registers and 7-Eleven ATMs do it too. Cash recharge runs around the clock, which is not true of every other method.

The phone is where it gets complicated, and the cause is not your bank. It is the Visa payment network itself, which spent from August 2022 blocking foreign-issued Visa cards from loading money onto Suica through Apple Pay. The block was lifted for Suica with the iOS 17.2 update in December 2023. It was never lifted everywhere.

Joel Breckinridge Bassett, who has tracked Apple Pay in Japan for close to a decade, keeps a troubleshooting page last updated on 27 July 2026. It reports that Visa still blocks some foreign-issued cards for Suica recharge in Wallet, especially when the iPhone is physically outside Japan, and that some blocked cards will only work once you have landed. It also reports that no foreign-issued Visa card works for direct recharge on Apple Watch — you route it through the Watch app on the iPhone instead.

Then the part that should change somebody’s plan: the same page states that Visa currently blocks all foreign-issued cards for Apple Pay ICOCA and PASMO. If you are flying into Kansai, intending to put an ICOCA on your iPhone and feed it with a Visa card, that is the combination to test before you rely on it.

Why your top-up fails at three in the morning

Mobile Suica is not a 24-hour service. Card recharge through Wallet or the Suica app runs from 04:00 to 02:00 Japan time, leaving a two-hour maintenance window overnight when it simply will not work. Jet lag puts a lot of first-time visitors at a screen at exactly the wrong hour.

Travellers work this out the hard way and then pass it on. On the Tokyo forum at Tripadvisor, a traveller from Wellington reported no trouble at all with a New Zealand-issued Wise Visa card, then added the caveat plainly: “The system shuts down between about 2am-4am Japan time – but weekends are fine.” In the same thread a Londoner got “Payment not completed” on both a Lloyds Visa debit and a Lloyds Mastercard. A US traveller reported an Apple Card working throughout the trip.

One thing not to panic about. If several attempts fail, your banking app may show a row of pending charges; those are temporary authorisations that the Mobile Suica system clears during the nightly maintenance, though your bank’s own display can lag behind.

So the drill is short. Turn Location Services on for Wallet, try between 04:00 and 02:00 Japan time, carry a Mastercard or Amex as a backup to a Visa, and remember that a ¥1,000 note in a ticket machine has never once been declined.

And if the card you bought came with a small paper slip, do not lose it. On the visitor cards, that slip carries something the card itself does not.

The Reference Paper You Must Not Throw Away

The information that decides whether your card still works is not printed on the card. It is printed on a small slip handed over with it, and both issuers use the same unglamorous name for it: a reference paper.

On the JR East version it carries four things — whether the card is adult or child, the Welcome Suica validity period, the balance loaded at purchase, and the name and dates of any pass registered to the card. JR East states in the same breath that this information is not displayed on the Welcome Suica card itself, and instructs holders to keep the paper on them and show it to staff on request.

PASMO is equally blunt about its own. Using TOURIST PASMO, it says, “please make sure you have your reference paper”, which lists the expiration date at the top, the age category, the value on the card and details of any discount tickets bought with it. Two companies, two products, one identical instruction that most guides do not mention at all.

The consequence is easy to picture and unpleasant to live through. A gate closes on you somewhere in Tokyo, an attendant asks how long the card has been valid, and the answer exists on a piece of paper in a bin at the airport. The date on the back of the card is not it, and the card will not tell anyone when it was bought.

Lost it already? You can print another one

This is the part worth knowing, because it turns a small disaster into a two-minute errand. JR East’s own purchase page, checked on 20 September 2026, states that a lost Welcome Suica reference paper can be reprinted: insert the card at an automatic or multifunction ticket vending machine anywhere inside the Suica area, press the reprint button, and the slip comes back out. Station staff will also do it for you.

The machines default to Japanese, so change the language first and then look for the reprint option rather than the top-up one. It costs nothing and the card does not need to be topped up for it to work.

PASMO does not publish an equivalent reprint route for TOURIST PASMO, which makes the slip more precious on that side rather than less. Its precautions also note that a lost TOURIST PASMO cannot be reissued at all, and that a card used improperly will be voided and confiscated — two good reasons to be able to produce your own paperwork.

There is a simpler habit that covers both. Photograph the slip with your phone the moment it is handed to you, then keep the paper somewhere that is not your back pocket. That is this guide’s suggestion rather than an issuer instruction, and it has the advantage of surviving a lost wallet.

The paper tells you when the card dies. It does not tell you where the card stops working, and that boundary catches out far more people.

Where One Tap Stops Working: Area Boundaries and the Shinkansen

Every one of these cards is sold on the promise that it works all over Japan, and that promise is mostly kept. What it does not mean is that you can ride anywhere you like on one tap. There are two separate ways the arrangement breaks, and they fail in different places for different reasons.

The first is the area boundary. JR East divides Suica coverage into regions — the Tokyo metropolitan area, then Sendai, Niigata, Aomori, Morioka, Akita and parts of Hokkaido, Tokai, West Japan and Kyushu — and states on its own Suica page, checked on 20 September 2026, that you cannot use the card to travel between them. Its worked example is Tokyo to Sendai. The Welcome Suica pages put the same rule the other way round: a journey begun in one area must end in that area.

The fix is undramatic if you know it in advance. Crossing from one region into another means leaving the ticket gate and re-entering, or buying a paper ticket for the through journey before you start. Doing it by accident is the expensive version.

The accident has its own name in the system: the card goes “in progress” and stays there. Tap in, then exit somewhere outside the region, and you pay the whole fare in cash at the far end while the card sits unfinished, refusing new journeys until an attendant clears it. That has to happen at a station belonging to the company you last travelled with, which is rarely the one you are standing in.

The shinkansen is not a tap

A Suica is a local-fare instrument, and the bullet train is not a local fare. JR East states on the Welcome Suica pages that limited express trains, express trains and Green Cars all need their own ticket bought in advance; the IC card covers the basic fare portion and nothing else.

There is one narrow exception and it lives on a phone. The Welcome Suica Mobile app carries Touch de Go! Shinkansen, which lets you ride non-reserved seats on the Tohoku, Hokkaido, Akita, Yamagata, Joetsu and Hokuriku shinkansen without a paper ticket. Plastic cardholders do not get this.

Whether a rail pass beats paying fares for your particular route is a different calculation with different numbers, and it belongs in a guide about rail passes rather than one about IC cards.

Then there is the case nobody expects, because it breaks the national promise outright. On 16 November 2024, five bus and rail operators in Kumamoto Prefecture stopped accepting nationwide IC cards altogether — The Mainichi reported it as the first withdrawal from the nationwide system, driven by the cost of replacing the readers. In the year before they pulled out, 5.65 million journeys, 24% of the total, had been paid for with those cards.

The paper found a traveller living the consequence at a bus stop. A 67-year-old visitor from Hachioji, heading home after a trip, had to pay cash because she had not heard: “I had charged up (my nationwide IC card), but I have no choice (other than paying in cash) since this is a local situation.”

Treat that as the general lesson rather than a Kumamoto footnote. Acceptance is a commercial decision by each operator, it can change, and the further you travel from the big cities the more worthwhile it is to check before you rely on a tap. Carrying some cash is not a failure of planning.

None of which helps with the last problem of the trip, which is getting your own money back off the card before you fly.

Spending the Last Yen: The Departure-Day Endgame

The last day is arithmetic, and the answer is the same whichever card you are holding — though for two completely different reasons.

On a Welcome Suica, a TOURIST PASMO or the mobile app, whatever is left when you fly is simply the issuer’s. JR East says no refunds regardless of the validity status or the remaining balance, PASMO says value added will not be refunded and suggests you keep the card as a souvenir, and the app’s own store listing asks you to use up any remaining balance at airports, stations and other stores. Three products, one message.

On a Suica or an ICOCA you can get the money back, and it still costs you to do it. Return a card holding ¥1,000 and you walk away with ¥1,280: your deposit plus the balance minus the ¥220 handling fee. Spend that same ¥1,000 on things you actually wanted and then hand the empty card back, and you walk away with ¥1,000 of goods plus the full ¥500. The fee is the price of laziness, and it is the same ¥220 either way.

So the plan is identical for everyone. Arrive at the airport with the card as close to empty as you can manage, and treat the refund counter as a fallback rather than a strategy.

How to actually land on zero

Stop topping up in large amounts about two days out and switch to ¥1,000 at a time. The machines are everywhere, so the cost of running short is a minute at a screen, while the cost of overshooting on a no-deposit card is the money itself.

Let the gate handle the last leg. A traveller on Reddit described the move in 2024: do not top up before the run to the airport, and settle the shortfall at a fare adjustment machine before you exit, which charges only what the trip actually cost. That is a traveller’s technique rather than a published procedure, but fare adjustment machines exist precisely to settle underpaid journeys, and JR East points visitors to them when a card runs short.

Then spend the remainder on things you were going to buy anyway. Vending machines take IC cards and deal happily in small change — one reviewer’s advice after a March 2025 trip was to use the airport machines “to stay hydrated on your flight home”. Convenience stores, station kiosks and airport shops all take the same tap.

Two warnings before you plan around it. JR East states that coin-locker payments made with a Welcome Suica cannot be partly covered with cash, so a locker is a poor place to dump an awkward balance. And while some tills will let you pay part on the card and part in cash, no published rule says they must — treat a split payment as a courtesy, not a right.

If your card lives on an iPhone, you have a precision tool the plastic crowd does not. One traveller described checking the price of a last airport meal and topping up by exactly that amount, walking away with a balance of zero. It only works when you can add money to the second, which is the one clear advantage of the mobile route at the end of a trip.

All of this assumes the card in your hand is working. Sometimes it is not, and sometimes there is no card to be had in the first place.

If Your Card Is Sold Out, Broken or Expired Mid-Trip

Three different things go wrong with these cards, and they have almost nothing in common except the panic. Sold out is a supply problem, expired is a calendar problem, and broken is a procedure problem with a documented answer that hardly anyone prints.

Start with supply, because the old advice is stale. The chip shortage that emptied the racks is over and ordinary Suica sales resumed in March 2025, so the blanket claim that visitors can only get a Welcome Suica has expired along with it. JR East’s own sales list, checked on 20 September 2026, still shows Welcome Suica sales temporarily halted at several city Travel Service Centers, among them Kashiwa, Kawasaki, Tachikawa, Ōmiya, Funabashi, Fukushima and Niigata, while the airport counters and the big Tokyo stations continue to sell.

If you reach a counter with nothing on it, work down a short list rather than hunting for another Welcome Suica. An ordinary Suica from a ticket machine does the same job for a ¥500 deposit you get back. A TOURIST PASMO from Keikyu or Keisei is the same no-deposit deal from a different company. And an eligible iPhone does not need a counter at all.

Expiry is less forgiving because nothing can be done afterwards. A Welcome Suica dies on the 29th day, the balance is not refunded, and JR East notes that in principle only one Welcome Suica is sold to each individual — so replacing it with an identical card is not a plan you should count on. If you are staying longer than four weeks, the deposit card was always the right answer, and it still is on day 29.

There is a six-month version, and you cannot buy it. JR East sells a long-term Welcome Suica valid for up to six months, but only in bulk to travel agents, and states it is not sold at ticket offices such as Travel Service Centers. If a tour operator hands you one, that is where it came from.

If the card itself stops working

Before assuming a malfunction, check the three things JR East checks. Something in your card holder may be blocking the reader, the card may not have processed properly at the last gate you used, or you may have travelled through a station outside the Suica area and left the card needing adjustment. A station attendant inside a Suica area can resolve all three.

If it really is the card, there is a formal malfunction refund, and the detail that decides it is on the back. Staff read the 17-digit card number beginning “JE” to establish your balance, and JR East states that it cannot under any circumstances refund you if that number cannot be read. Protect the back of the card the way you would protect a boarding pass.

The timing surprises people. You apply, you are issued a refund certificate, and you cannot collect on the same day — the money is paid out at any JR East ticket office inside a Suica area from the day after your application, up to 14 days after your card’s validity period ends. That window is the reason to start the process the moment the card fails rather than on the way to the airport.

The other issuers are terser. PASMO says only that if a TOURIST PASMO stops working you should talk to station staff, and warns that a card being used improperly will be voided and confiscated. On the mobile side, a lost or broken phone that cannot be reissued routes you to the Suica support centre, which returns the balance through a Suica Pocket.

One rule survives all three failures unchanged: none of these cards can be reissued if you simply lose it.

Checklist Antes de Sair de Casa

Four facts about your trip decide this, and none of them is which card is objectively best: the airport you land at, the phone in your pocket, whether your stay runs past 28 days, and whether you expect to come back. Settle all four at home, because every one of them is harder to answer in an arrivals hall with a queue building behind you. Get them right and buying the card is a two-minute stop at a machine on the way to the train; get them wrong and the cost turns up later, as a balance nobody will refund or a deposit waiting at a ticket office in the wrong half of the country.

Frequently asked questions

Do children need their own IC card?

Children need their own card. JR East and PASMO both sell child versions, valid until 31 March of the year the child turns 12, and JR East asks to see the child’s passport when you buy one.

Will my Suica still work if my iPhone battery dies?

A Suica in Apple Wallet may still open a gate on a flat battery, within limits. Apple says Express Mode power reserve lasts up to five hours, covers only some cards, and is unavailable if you switch the phone off yourself. JR East warns you pay cash if the device dies inside the gates.

Can two of us share one card?

Two people cannot share one card on a train. The gate records an entry against the card and will not accept a second one until that journey is closed at an exit, so the second traveller is stuck at the barrier. Buy one card per traveller, including children.