Amsterdam 🇳🇱

Yes, and you almost certainly already have the ticket. The scheme is OVpay: your own contactless bank card, phone or watch pays directly, with nothing to buy first and no balance to keep topped up. Visa, Mastercard, Maestro and V Pay are the accepted schemes, in plastic or in a wallet; American Express is not among them.

Every reader here is a two-tap reader. Touch in when you board and touch out when you get off — on GVB's metro, trams and buses, on NS trains, on Connexxion's buses south of the city and on EBS's buses to the north — and use the same card or device at both ends, because a check-out that does not match its check-in does not close the journey. On those services the fare is worked out from how far you went; GVB's night buses and Connexxion's Amsterdam Airport Express each charge a flat fare of their own instead. Missing the check-out costs money: €4 on a GVB tram, bus or metro, the €6.00 boarding hold on an EBS bus, and on NS a flat correction charge in place of the real fare, which NS will refund the difference on if you ask through OVpay.nl between 6 and 60 days after you travelled, up to three corrections a year.

Two places will not take a tap, for opposite reasons. Arriva's night trains between Schiphol and Amsterdam Centraal take no bank card at all; that ticket is bought beforehand in the glimble app or the 9292 app, which gives you a QR code that opens the gates. The IJ ferries behind Centraal — F1 to F7 and F9 — are free for pedestrians and cyclists: no ticket of any kind is needed and none is sold. Everywhere else it is the same three things — tap on, tap off, same card.

Yes. The metro is GVB's, and a contactless bank card, phone or watch pays for it under OVpay — Visa, Mastercard, Maestro or V Pay, physical or in a wallet, with American Express the one common scheme not accepted. There is nothing to buy beforehand and no balance to load; what you spend is billed to your bank account the day after you travel.

Touch the gateline reader on the way in and again on the way out, with the same card or device both times. The fare is worked out from the distance you covered, so the check-out is what tells the system where you got off: miss it and you are charged the full €4 boarding fare instead, and that charge counts towards nothing. It can be put right afterwards through uitcheckgemist.nl, the official channel for a missed check-out — claim it there rather than writing the €4 off.

Stay on one card all day and the metro, tram and bus travel it pays for stops charging at €10.50 under GVB Max, which there is nothing to join. Mixing a phone and a plastic card during the day breaks that, so pick one and tap it every time.

Yes, on every bus in and around Amsterdam — but a bus here is a two-tap ride, not a one-tap one. Hold your contactless bank card, phone or watch to the reader as you board, and hold the same one there again as you get off. Visa, Mastercard, Maestro and V Pay are accepted; American Express is not.

Who is carrying you decides what the taps cost. On GVB's own city buses the fare goes by distance, and forgetting to check out costs you the full €4 boarding fare. GVB's night buses take the same tap but charge a flat night fare, and they sit outside GVB's €10.50 daily cap. Connexxion's buses south of the city, around Amstelveen, Aalsmeer and Uithoorn, also go by distance, and a missed check-out there is charged as a correction equal to the boarding fare, which you can put right yourself in your OVpay account or through uitcheckgemist.nl afterwards. EBS runs the buses north into Zaanstreek-Waterland, including routes 100, 104 and 112 to Amsterdam Noord; distance again, but a missed check-out there keeps the whole €6.00 boarding hold.

One bus is priced apart from all of that. Connexxion's Amsterdam Airport Express, bus 397, and the N97 Niteliner overnight take a contactless tap but charge their own flat fare — €6.50 single, €11.75 return — rather than the ordinary tariff. Whichever bus you are on, the tap that people forget is the second one: check out as you step off.

The OV-chipkaart is the Dutch travel smartcard: you load euros onto it and touch it at the reader instead of a bank card. You almost certainly do not need one. Your own contactless bank card, phone or watch does the same job under OVpay, with nothing to buy, no fee and no balance to keep alive — and the anonymous OV-chipkaart, the version a visitor could pick up and pass around, has not been sold since 1 July 2026. What remains is the personal card, which carries your name and photo and exists for subscriptions and age discounts.

It is also the weaker card of the two. GVB's €10.50 daily ceiling does not apply to it — GVB Max excludes it by name — and no other operator here caps it, so a heavy day on an OV-chipkaart costs full price all day. On an NS train you need €20 of credit on the card just to get through the gate, against €4 for tram, bus and metro. And it is refused outright on Connexxion's Amsterdam Airport Express and on Arriva's night trains to Schiphol.

If you already have one, top it up at a GVB ticket machine or a Service & Tickets counter, both of which take coins and notes; or order credit at ov-chipkaart.nl and collect it at a machine, which it will also load onto the card by itself the next time you check in for an NS train. Forget to check out and the boarding fare comes off the balance, and uitcheckgemist.nl is the official channel for claiming it back.

One, and it belongs to GVB alone. Tap in and out with the same bank card, phone, watch or OV-pas all day on GVB's trams, buses and metro and the day stops charging at €10.50. The scheme is called GVB Max and there is nothing to join; it only asks that it is the same card or device every time, so swapping from your phone to the plastic card halfway through the day starts the count again. A missed check-in or check-out does not count towards it either, and putting that right is left to you.

What it does not cover matters more. GVB night buses sit outside it on their own fixed fare. An OV-chipkaart gets no cap at all here — GVB Max excludes it by name, and no other operator caps it either. And nothing outside GVB counts: an NS train, a Connexxion bus south of the city or an EBS bus to the north all bill separately, however much you spend on them.

Connexxion and EBS run discount schemes rather than caps, and neither is a visitor's instrument — Connexxion's free opt-in gives nothing back until you have spent over €20.01 in a rolling month on its Amstelland-Meerlanden buses, and EBS's needs a €19.60 monthly subscription before any discount starts. So if you want the ceiling, stay on GVB and stay on one card.

What decides it here is the scheme printed on the card, not the country that issued it. OVpay, the system you tap with in Amsterdam, names Visa, Mastercard, VPAY and Maestro as accepted, physical or in a wallet, and American Express is not among them. Nothing in the rules treats a card issued abroad differently from a Dutch one.

So you almost certainly need to buy nothing. Your own contactless bank card, phone or watch works on GVB's trams, buses and metro from the first tap, with no card to buy, no issuing fee and no balance to load, and the fares are billed to your bank account the day after you travel. Advice telling visitors to pick up an OV-chipkaart at Schiphol is out of date.

The thing that does catch people out is switching halfway. Check out with the exact same card or device you checked in with: a plastic card in the morning and the phone in the afternoon do not add up, and a check-out that does not match its check-in charges you the full boarding fare instead of the journey you made. Pick one and keep tapping that one. And if an American Express is the only card you have, buy a GVB ticket rather than tapping — from a machine at a stop or metro station, a GVB Service & Tickets counter or a Servicepunt, or from the tram conductor on board, who takes a card and never cash.

Two different things can go wrong here, and only one of them involves an inspector.

Forgetting to check out is the ordinary one, and it is automatic. Every GVB tram, bus and metro is check in at the start and check out at the end, and a missed check-out costs you the full boarding fare of €4 — taken from your linked bank account the day after travel if you tapped a bank card or phone, or straight off the balance if you used an OV-chipkaart. It is recoverable: uitcheckgemist.nl is the official channel for claiming it back. On an NS train the correction charge is not measured against what your journey should have cost either, and NS will refund the difference as a goodwill payment if you ask through OVpay.nl between 6 and 60 days after you travelled, up to three corrections a calendar year.

Being checked with no valid ticket is the other, and the operators do not agree on it. On GVB — the trams, buses and metro, and the network most visitors are on — it is a fine of €70 plus the fare itself — both are payable. GVB publishes no early-payment discount at all; the 14 days it gives you is the deadline for lodging an appeal, not a cheaper way to pay. NS charges €70 too, reduced to €50 on NS if you settle it by card on the train there and then, with administration costs added if it is still unpaid after 14 days. On EBS's buses in Zaanstreek-Waterland, north of the city, it is €70 plus the fare, or €55 settled on the spot by card with a Rituitrijkaart — which closes the matter and takes your right to appeal with it, an appeal otherwise having to be emailed within 5 days. On Arriva's Friday and Saturday night trains to Schiphol it is the fare plus €70, payable within 14 days. Connexxion, whose buses run south of the city, sets a fine policy of its own, and the figure it names is not one this page can give you — so check it with Connexxion rather than assuming it matches GVB's.

So check in when you board and check out when you get off, on every operator, every time. If a €4 charge you did not expect turns up on your statement, claim it at uitcheckgemist.nl instead of writing it off.

Take the train, unless you land in the small hours. NS Sprinters leave from the station directly beneath Schiphol Plaza — one level down, always from platform 3 — and reach Amsterdam Centraal in about 17 minutes. There is no airport supplement on it: you pay the ordinary national fare for the distance, which is why no fixed price is published for the trip. Touch in and out with a contactless bank card or phone, or buy a ticket in the hall before you go down. An OV-chipkaart works too, but only carrying at least €20 of credit — NS turns a thinner card away at the gate.

If you are staying around Museumplein or Leidseplein, the bus lands you closer. Connexxion's Amsterdam Airport Express, bus 397, goes from stop B17 immediately outside Schiphol Plaza — turn right as you come out — every 10 minutes, stopping at Museumplein, the Rijksmuseum and Leidseplein. It is a flat €6.50 single or €11.75 return on a ticket of its own rather than the ordinary tariff, and it takes a tap or an e-ticket but no OV-chipkaart and no cash from the driver. The N97 Niteliner runs the same route once an hour overnight at the same fare.

On Friday and Saturday nights there is also Arriva's Nachttrein, €5 between Amsterdam Centraal and Schiphol, sold in the app only: no contactless card and no OV-chipkaart can check in on it, and buying from the steward on board adds €2.50. Otherwise every taxi on the rank is metered and takes cards.

Decide which one you want before you leave the building. The train is down the escalator from Schiphol Plaza and the bus is out of the door and to the right, and the two are sold in completely different ways.

Under 4, yes, and with nothing to do at all. A child under 4 travels free network-wide, on any medium, and does not even need to check in or out.

From 4 to 11 there are three different things going on, and none of them is automatic. GVB sells a child version of its Day ticket — unlimited GVB tram, bus and metro for a day — at €5.00 against €10.00 for the adult version; it is a separate product bought a separate way, issued as a paper chip card rather than the adult's e-ticket. Nationally, OVpay's age discount takes 34% off bus, tram and metro fares for children aged 4 through 11 inclusive, but it has to be added to one specific card through a free OVpay account and verified with the child's date of birth and a photo, so it earns its keep only on a longer stay. And on Connexxion's buses in the Amstelland-Meerlanden concession south of the city — Amstelveen, Aalsmeer, Uithoorn — children up to and including 11 travel free alongside a paying adult, up to four children per adult, since 1 April 2026; you ask the driver for the child ticket on board, with nothing bought in advance.

Do not count on anything for a teenager. That age discount does have a 12-to-18 band, but it applies only to travel in Noord-Brabant and not in the Amsterdam region. So for a day in the city with a child of 4 through 11, buy the €5.00 GVB child Day ticket at a ticket machine or a GVB counter before you board, and for a child under 4 buy nothing and tap nothing.

Yes, but never on the vehicle. GVB's ticket machines at tram stops and metro stations take coins and notes, and what they sell — paper tickets, and credit on an OV-chipkaart — carries you on the tram and the bus as much as on the metro. GVB's Service & Tickets counters take coins and notes as well, and Primera shops sell GVB paper tickets and the OV-pas straight off the shelf for cash and top the OV-pas up at the till. NS's own station machines take coins.

On board, cash buys nothing anywhere. The GVB tram conductor is the only person selling tickets on a GVB vehicle at all, and takes cards only; bus and night-bus drivers sell nothing whatsoever. Connexxion's driver on the Amsterdam Airport Express will sell you a ticket but not for coins or notes, and the steward on Arriva's night train to Schiphol is the same. Ordering OV-chipkaart credit at ov-chipkaart.nl is a Dutch bank payment by iDEAL, which cash does not reach either.

So spend the cash before you board: a GVB machine at the stop, a Service & Tickets counter or a Primera, and get on with the ticket already in your hand.

No, and on a GVB bus there is nothing to buy either — GVB's bus and night-bus drivers sell no ticket of any kind and take no coins or notes. The reader by the door is the whole transaction: touch in with a contactless bank card, phone or OV-chipkaart as you board, and touch out again as you get off, or you are charged the full €4 boarding fare instead of the fare you earned.

Connexxion's Amsterdam Airport Express is the one bus here whose driver will still sell you a ticket, and even that is card only.

If cash is what you are carrying, buy before the bus. GVB's machines at tram stops and metro stations take coins and notes, as do its Service & Tickets counters and Primera shops, and a GVB paper ticket is valid on the bus.

Yes, and which app you want depends entirely on who is carrying you.

GVB sells its own tickets in the Gappie app as a barcode — hour tickets, multi-day tickets up to 120 hours, and a group day ticket — and there is a GVB Day Ticket you can drop into Apple or Google Wallet from the buy button on GVB's own day-ticket page. These are GVB tickets and GVB says so plainly: they are not valid on Connexxion, EBS or NS. You still check in and out with them at the reader, and that matters more than it sounds — the money is already paid, but a barcode that misses a check-out stops working for the next check-in, and with it goes the 60 minutes of free transfers the ticket would have given you.

The other operators sell their own. NS's train e-ticket is show-and-scan at the gate with no check-out step at all. Arriva's night train to Schiphol is app-ticket only, sold through the glimble app or the 9292 app — neither a contactless bank card nor an OV-chipkaart can check in on it. Connexxion sells the Amsterdam Airport Express as an e-ticket too.

If your day crosses operators, the phone in your pocket is still the simplest answer, but as a wallet rather than an app store: tap the bank card on it in and out and it pays on GVB, Connexxion, EBS and NS alike. Arriva's night train is the one place that will not work.

Fares yes; journey times only for airports. Fares, caps and penalties are printed where an operator publishes them, with the source beside each figure. Journey times appear only on the airport pages, as the rough time from the airport to the centre where one is published; there are no timetables here. For a live departure or a door-to-door route, use the operator's own journey planner.