Lisbon 🇵🇹

Yes on the metro, on Carris's buses, trams, funiculars and Santa Justa lift, on Carris Metropolitana's regional buses, on MTS's south-bank trams and on Fertagus's trains. Each operator charges you separately, though: the tap that got you onto the metro does not get you onto a bus. The metro names Visa, V Pay and Mastercard, and the card can be in Apple Pay or Google Pay. Carris Metropolitana's page names Visa and Mastercard; the reader on board also shows Multibanco, the Portuguese bank-card network, and Apple Pay and Google Pay.

On the metro and Carris, every tap is a full fare and nothing caps what you pay. The metro's “fare optimisation” only groups your taps into fewer lines on your bank statement; it does not lower the price.

On the metro you touch in and out at the gates. It is €1,92 anywhere on the network, Aeroporto included. If you never touch out — a phone whose battery dies before the exit gate is the usual way — you can be treated as travelling with no ticket, and that is a fine of €120–€350.

On Carris you tap the small machine just inside the door, with no touch out. It is €2,30 on a bus and €3,30 on a tram, and there is no transfer, so every change of vehicle is a new fare. Carris Metropolitana's tap, branded Tap&Ride, works only on lines numbered 1, 2 or 3; lines beginning with 4 are not in it yet. MTS takes one tap as you board. On Fertagus, always tap in: tap out without having tapped in and you are charged the maximum fare from that station.

CP's urban trains do not take a bank card, and on the ferries only one gate does: the Algés pier on the Trafaria–Porto Brandão–Belém route, a weekday trial running since July 2026.

So tap in and out with the same card on the metro, and tap again every time you change operator.

Yes, across the whole Metropolitano de Lisboa network. Tap a Visa, V Pay or Mastercard contactless card — or that card in Apple Pay or Google Pay — on the small machine at the entry gate, wait for the green light and the doors to open, and do the same at the exit gate on your way out. Both taps are compulsory, and they have to be the same card or device: start on the card and finish on the phone and the journey never closes. Nothing to buy first, nothing to register.

One fare covers the whole network, Aeroporto station included, at €1,92 a journey. It is worth knowing that a bank card is the dearer way to ride the metro: the same journey on a navegante card's zapping purse costs €1,72. There is no cap and nothing accrues, so a heavy day of metro travel stays at full price per journey.

The touch out is the part to get right. If you never touch out — most often because a phone runs out of battery before the exit gate — you can be treated as travelling without a valid ticket, which carries a fine of €120–€350, reduced to €60 if you pay within 15 working days of the notice. So keep the card you tapped in with to hand and charged, and touch out even when the gate is standing open.

Yes, on both bus networks, and the movement is the same on each: one tap on the machine on board as you get on, with no touch out. What differs is which buses are covered.

On a Carris bus you tap the small machine just inside the door. The fare is €2,30 and it buys that one vehicle: Carris gives no transfer, so the next bus is another €2,30.

Carris Metropolitana runs the regional buses out to the wider Lisbon area, and its tap is branded Tap&Ride. Its page names Visa and Mastercard; the reader on board also shows Multibanco, the Portuguese bank-card network, and Apple Pay and Google Pay. Tap&Ride runs on lines numbered 1, 2 or 3; lines beginning with 4 are not in it yet, so on those a bank card buys you nothing.

So look at the number on the front of the bus before you rely on a tap. If it starts with a 4, carry coins and pay the driver, who prints you a single-journey ticket for that bus; on anything else, tap as you board.

The navegante® personalizado is the named, personal version of Lisbon's navegante travel card, and unless you are staying a month you do not need it. Its point is the monthly Passe, which the anonymous ocasional card cannot hold — along with the Família products and Viva Go, a postpaid arrangement you enrol at a Multibanco cash machine that debits your bank account after you travel instead of being loaded in advance. Everything a short visit needs — single tickets, the 24-hour tickets, the shared pay-as-you-go purse — sits on the €0.50 ocasional card just as well.

It also costs more and takes longer. Issue is €7 if you can wait 10 working days, €12 same-day or within 24 hours, or €12 plus €2 postage for home delivery in 7 working days through the navegante app or a navegante shop. Some counters are quicker than that: an Espaço navegante Carris Metropolitana or a self-service Ponto navegante can issue one on the spot, while an operator's customer desk takes one working day urgent or ten standard.

It is personal in the way that matters to an inspector: travelling on somebody else's counts as a serious infraction, not a mix-up. It rides the whole region — the metro, Carris's buses, trams, hill funiculars (ascensores) and the Santa Justa lift, Carris Metropolitana, CP, Fertagus, MTS, the Transtejo/Soflusa ferries, TCB and MobiCascais — and you top it up in the navegante app, at any Multibanco cash machine, at operator counters or at the vending machines of CP, Metropolitano de Lisboa, MTS, Transtejo/Soflusa and Fertagus. If you are here for days rather than a month, buy the ocasional instead and spend the €7 on a ferry crossing.

The navegante® ocasional is the anonymous plastic card that carries Lisbon's single tickets, and for a visitor the answer to whether you need one is yes. It costs €0.50, keeps taking loads for a year from the day it is issued, and asks for no name or ID. Almost every occasional ticket in the region is sold onto it rather than printed: the single journey, the combined 60-minute Carris and Metro ticket, MTS's Bilhete Simples, the Bilhete 24 horas — a day ticket pairing Carris and Metro with Transtejo or with CP — bundles of 5 or 10 journeys, and the shared navegante pay-as-you-go purse (zapping) that any of the operators can draw from.

It is not just cheaper than tapping a bank card, it goes further. A bank card pays on the Metro, Carris, Carris Metropolitana, Fertagus and MTS and nowhere else; the ocasional card also carries you on CP's trains, the Transtejo/Soflusa ferries, TCB in Barreiro and MobiCascais. And the tap costs more: the Metro charges €1.92 to a bank card against €1.72 on zapping, and Carris's on-board card fare is €2.30 on a bus and €3.30 on a tram.

What it cannot hold is a monthly Passe, the Família products or Viva Go — those need the personalised card instead. Buy it at any operator's ticket counter, at the vending machines of CP, Metropolitano de Lisboa, MTS, Transtejo/Soflusa and Fertagus, at an Espaço navegante, or from the navegante Payshop, CTT and lojas MOB agents. Buy it with the first fare on it at the machine in the airport metro station, and the rest of the trip is loading, not queueing.

For most of Lisbon, yes - and what restricts you is the brand on the card rather than the country that issued it. Metropolitano de Lisboa, the city's metro, publishes a closed list of three: VISA, VPAY and Mastercard. An American Express is not on it and will not open the gates. The metro publishes no position on where a card was issued, so a Visa from your own bank at home is judged on the Visa and nothing else. Apple Pay and Google Pay work provided the wallet was set up with one of those cards.

Off the metro the same three schemes carry you further. Fertagus's trains and the trams of MTS - Metro, Transportes do Sul - both name VISA, VPAY, Electron and Mastercard, physical or in a phone wallet. Carris, which runs Lisbon's city buses, trams, funiculars and the Santa Justa lift, takes a contactless bank card at the small machine you tap on board, and Carris Metropolitana takes one on the wider metropolitan bus network under the name Tap&Ride, where the brands named are Visa and Mastercard and no others. Tap&Ride runs only on Carris Metropolitana lines numbered 1, 2 or 3; lines beginning with 4 are not in the scheme yet, so on those buy a ticket another way. Carris names no brand for its machines, so treat a Visa or a Mastercard as the safe card when you board.

One thing on that machine looks like a card and is not. MB Way is a Portuguese interbank app rather than a card scheme, and without a Portuguese account behind it a visitor cannot use it at all - it is listed beside contactless among the ways to pay, which is exactly what makes it easy to mistake for the same thing.

CP, the national railway, runs the Lisbon urban trains on two supports only: a rechargeable Viva Viagem card, or a personalised Lisboa Viva or CP card. The ferries of Transtejo Soflusa take a navegante card at the turnstile, with a single exception - the pilot pier at Algés on the Trafaria-Porto Brandão-Belém route, where a contactless bank card is one of the listed ways to validate. So tap your own card for the metro, Fertagus, MTS, Carris's buses, trams and lifts and Carris Metropolitana's Tap&Ride lines, and pick up a navegante card as well if a CP train or a ferry is in your plans.

Most of Lisbon runs on one national band: travelling without a valid, validated ticket is a fine with a minimum of €120 and a maximum of €350. That is the band Metropolitano de Lisboa applies on the metro, Fertagus and CP on the trains, MTS on the south-bank trams and TCB on its buses in Barreiro. Metro, Fertagus and MTS all publish the same way out — pay voluntarily within 15 working days of being notified and the minimum is halved to €60. The maximum is not halved, and CP and TCB publish no reduced figure at all.

Carris is the exception you are most likely to meet, because Carris runs buses and trams as well as the Glória, Bica and Lavra funiculars and the Santa Justa lift. It grades what you did: a simple infraction is €30–€87.50 and a serious one €120–€350, halved to €15 or €60 respectively if you pay within 15 days. Carris's own page does not say which conduct falls into which tier. The Transtejo/Soflusa ferries start lower still, at €30, halved to €15 if you pay within 15 days. Carris Metropolitana and MobiCascais say a fine applies but publish no figure for it.

The commonest way a visitor gets caught is not fare-dodging. On the metro you tap in and tap out, and if you never tap out — a flat phone battery at the exit gate will do it — you can be treated as travelling without a ticket and fined on that band. On Fertagus, tapping out without having tapped in charges you the maximum single fare from that station and still counts as travelling irregularly, and travelling on somebody else's personal navegante pass is itself a serious infraction. On Carris you validate on board every single time. On the ferries you validate at the gate and keep the card on you until you are out through the terminal exit.

The Metro's Red Line starts inside Terminal 1 — the station is in the arrivals hall — and reaches the centre in about 20 minutes with no airport supplement of any kind. You pay the ordinary Metro fare: €1.90 for a single ticket loaded onto a navegante card, €1.72 on the navegante pay-as-you-go purse, or €1.92 tapping a bank card. Terminal 2 has no station of its own; the free inter-terminal shuttle takes you to Terminal 1 first.

Four ordinary Carris bus routes also call at Terminal 1, and each one goes somewhere the Red Line does not: 208 to Cais do Sodré, 722 and 744 to Restauradores, and 783 to Amoreiras. They charge the ordinary Carris urban fare, €1.90 bought on board, and take cash, a contactless tap, a navegante card or the printed on-board ticket. Lisbon has no airport coach and no airport-priced product at all, so nothing here is a premium service in disguise.

A taxi from the rank outside arrivals costs between 10 and 15 euros to the centre, luggage included. Uber and Bolt collect from the marked platform on P2, level 2 of the arrivals level, and both show the price in the app before you order. Book a taxi or a ride at the rank or in the app, and never with somebody who approaches you inside the terminal. If you have landed at Terminal 2, take the shuttle to Terminal 1 and pick up the metro there.

Yes — to a driver on some networks and at a machine on others. On board a Carris bus, a classic tram, the Glória, Bica or Lavra ascensor or the Santa Justa lift you hand coins or notes to the driver or the brakeman and are given a printed on-board ticket (bilhete de bordo). On a bus or a tram it covers only the journey you bought it on, so a change of vehicle is a second fare. Two Carris services take no cash at all, and they are ones a visitor walks straight into: the articulated trams — cars 501 to 505, 507, 510 and 601 to 615 — and the Funicular da Graça, which want a card or MB WAY.

On the Metro, CP's trains, Fertagus, MTS and the ferries, cash buys a card rather than a ticket. The Metro's machines take coins and notes and hand you a navegante card with the fare loaded on it instead of a paper ticket — but the Metro does not guarantee that its machines hold change, so feed them something close to the fare. Transtejo and Soflusa take coins and notes at every ferry terminal, at the staffed counter and at the machine alike; only the counter at Porto Brandão has no card machine, which makes cash the thing to arrive with there. The machines at CP, Fertagus and MTS all take coins. Fertagus's and MTS's take banknotes as well, but each will only sell you a ticket it can give the change back on — MTS allows a bigger note than Fertagus does — so a large note against a cheap fare is refused at both. Whether CP's machines take a note is not published. There is no printed ticket anywhere on those networks. A navegante ocasional card is €0.50 and holds tickets for a year, so buying one is the ordinary first move rather than a fallback.

Carris Metropolitana's drivers take coins on board too and print you the same kind of on-board ticket, with notes again unpublished. Transtejo and Soflusa are the opposite: their cash sale is at the terminal, so buy before you walk down to the boat. Change is the thing to plan for: the Metro does not guarantee its machines hold any, and Fertagus and MTS cap how much they will hand back, so carry small coins — and if the Graça funicular or an articulated tram is your plan, have a card in your hand before you board.

Yes on Carris and Carris Metropolitana, the two main bus networks, with one difference: the Carris driver takes coins and notes, while on Carris Metropolitana carry coins. Either way the driver prints you an on-board ticket. On TCB's buses in Barreiro and MobiCascais's in Cascais, ask the driver before you rely on cash, or board with a card already loaded.

The paper ticket the driver prints is good for that one bus and stops being valid when you get off, so changing buses, or moving between a bus and the metro, is a second fare. If you will change vehicle in the city, buy a navegante ocasional card for €0.50 at a Metro, CP, Fertagus, MTS or Transtejo/Soflusa ticket machine and load the combined Carris and Metro ticket onto it.

Two operators sell a ticket inside an app, and neither of them is the metro. MTS, the tram network on the south bank, sells a ticket through MB WAY: each one buys a single journey and is valid for an hour from the moment you buy it, so buy it on the platform rather than over breakfast. MobiCascais sells one in its own app, a QR code you travel on without needing the physical card. Metropolitano de Lisboa, Carris, Carris Metropolitana, CP, Fertagus and the Transtejo/Soflusa ferries sell no app ticket.

Your phone is still useful, just not as a ticket shop. A phone carrying a bank card taps exactly as the card does, and on a Carris bus or tram MB WAY pays the on-board fare at the small machine you tap on board. The navegante app issues and tops up a navegante personalizado card, and that card can also live on the phone as an NFC card; the phone version launched on Carris Metropolitana alone, with the other operators planned to join through early 2026. Fertagus lists an NFC phone as one of the supports its trains accept; for the rest, check locally which take it now, and carry the plastic card as well.

One catch decides this for most visitors: MB WAY is a Portuguese interbank app, not a card scheme, and without a Portuguese bank behind it you cannot use it. So plan on the phone in your pocket being a contactless card, and buy everything else onto a navegante card at a machine.

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.