Nottingham 🇬🇧

Yes — on the NET tram and on the buses of Nottingham City Transport, Stagecoach East Midlands, Diamond and trentbarton, with your own card, phone or watch and nothing to buy first. What changes from one to the next is where you tap, what a missed tap costs and whose cap you end up under.

On the NET tram you tap the reader on the platform before you board, not on the tram itself. Tapping off again is optional on an ordinary journey, but inside a Short Hop Zone it is the difference between two fares: tap off within 20 minutes and the hop is £1.50, and if you do not, you are charged the full £3.50 single instead.

On the buses the reader is on board. Nottingham City Transport and Stagecoach East Midlands take one tap as you get on and nothing more; Diamond Bus is the same single tap to pay. trentbarton is the exception — tap on and tap off — and forgetting the second tap charges you the maximum fare for that journey, which you can ask back from customer services within 8 weeks. Skills does not say which payments its Medilink drivers take, so ask the driver before you tap on a Medilink bus.

The caps are two separate schemes. Nottingham Contactless covers NCT buses and NET trams on the same card: £5.50 for a day in Zone A on NCT alone, £6.90 for a day in Zone A that includes a tram, and £8.00 on NCT out in zones B, C and D. trentbarton is not in that scheme and caps on its own buses instead, at £7.00 a day from 9am on a weekday or from 4am at a weekend, and £10.50 if you start before 9am on a weekday. Stagecoach and Diamond sit outside Nottingham Contactless; on Stagecoach what limits you is the national £3 ceiling on most single fares.

So pick one card and use only that one all day, because a cap builds on the card and not on you — tap the platform reader before you board a tram, and tap off when you leave a trentbarton bus.

Yes, on every bus company in the city, using your own bank card, phone or watch. There is nothing to buy and nothing to register.

Where they differ is the tap itself. Nottingham City Transport and Stagecoach East Midlands take one tap as you board and that is the whole transaction. Diamond Bus is a single tap to pay as well — on its em-9 Airway route to the airport that tap is a flat £4.00 adult single. trentbarton alone works tap on and tap off, and the second tap is the one that matters: forget it and you are charged the maximum fare for that journey, refundable only if you ask customer services within 8 weeks.

The caps do not pool. Nottingham Contactless is the scheme that covers Nottingham City Transport and the NET tram together on one card, and a day on it stops at £5.50 in Zone A, £8.00 out in zones B, C and D, or £6.90 if the same card also touched a tram. trentbarton caps separately on its own buses, at £7.00 a day from 9am on a weekday or from 4am at a weekend and £10.50 before 9am on a weekday. Stagecoach and Diamond cap nothing in Nottingham; on Stagecoach what protects you is the national £3 ceiling on a single fare.

So use one card for the whole day and no other, and tap off when you get off a trentbarton bus.

The Robin Hood card is the one card here that works across more than one company. What it covers depends on which kind you hold, and that is where visitors come unstuck.

The pay-as-you-go card is a bus and tram card. It works on Nottingham City Transport, the NET tram, trentbarton — though not on Skylink Express, Red Arrow or trentbarton night buses — plus Kinchbus, CentreBus and Skills' Medilink. It does not work on a train, and it does not cover Stagecoach or NottsBus Connect. It caps an adult day at £6.90 across operators, or lower if you stay on one operator all day. An adult pay-as-you-go card costs a one-off £3; there is no fee for the Under 19, Student or 19-21 versions.

Season cards are the ones that reach the railway, and only just. East Midlands Railway and CrossCountry travel is included, but only between six stations — Attenborough, Beeston, Nottingham, Netherfield, Carlton and Bulwell. Season cards also add Stagecoach's Pronto, Sherwood Arrow and route 141, and NottsBus Connect.

Buy any pay-as-you-go card online or at the Nottingham Travel Centre in Old Market Square; an adult one can also be bought from any tram ticket machine. Top it up at a tram machine, in the Robin Hood Ticketing app, online, or at the Travel Centre. The Under 19, Student and 19-21 cards need proof at the point of purchase — age and a photo, a Nottinghamshire address, or an in-date student ID — so leave time for it.

If your days here are buses and trams, buy the adult card and stop thinking about fares. If you were counting on it at a railway gateline, buy a train ticket instead: a pay-as-you-go Robin Hood card will not open one.

mango is trentbarton's own pay-as-you-go scheme, and despite sitting among the travel cards there is no card: it is an account on your phone and nothing else. You scan a QR code as you board and scan it again as you get off, and the fare comes out of the pair.

It covers trentbarton's own network and Kinchbus, and nothing beyond that — not Nottingham City Transport, not the NET tram, and explicitly not the Arriva X38. It is not part of Nottingham Contactless and it is not the Robin Hood network. Those are three separate schemes and nothing you spend on one counts towards another.

The fares roll rather than reset. An adult day caps at £6.30 after 9am on a weekday and £10.10 before it; beyond the day, the app looks back over a rolling 7-day window and caps at £35.00, and over a rolling 28-day window at £108.00. The week is the last seven days, in other words, not the calendar one.

To set it up, add a bank or debit card in the app, then top up by hand from £10.00 at a time or turn on auto top-up; the balance stops at £250.00. There is no shop, machine or kiosk that will do any of this for you.

And then scan off every time. Forget it and you are charged the single fare from where you got on all the way to that bus's final destination.

Easyrider is Nottingham City Transport's own smartcard, and it is the narrowest of the local cards: it is good on NCT buses and on nothing else — not the NET tram, not trentbarton, not Skills, not a train.

It comes in two coverage zones. The City Zone takes in the Greater Nottingham area and nearly all of NCT's services; the Outer Zone is reached by the 'Further' versions of the same cards. A separate Newark Zone has its own week and month tickets, sold through the NCTX Buses app rather than loaded on the card.

Your first Easyrider is free. A replacement costs £3 collected in person at the Travel Centre in Old Market Square, or £5 if it is posted to you. Order or pay for a new card online or at the Travel Centre; the Easyrider Purse, the pay-as-you-go version of the same card, can also be posted, and is topped up online or at the Travel Centre in multiples of £5. To check a balance, type the eight-digit number from the card into NCT's own website.

Do you need one? Only if you are here a while and riding NCT specifically. For a few days, tapping your own bank card on the same buses earns you the same capped day without buying anything at all.

Yes, but there are four separate capping schemes here and not one of them covers the whole city, so which cap you get depends entirely on what you tap and whose bus you are on.

Tap your own bank card on a Nottingham City Transport bus or a NET tram and Nottingham Contactless caps your day: £5.50 on NCT buses alone within Zone A, £6.90 if you use the trams as well, and £8.00 in Zones B, C and D on NCT alone. The capping day runs from 04:30 to 04:29 the next morning.

Tap the same bank card on a trentbarton bus and you are in a different scheme with different numbers. trentbarton caps its own buses at £7.00 a day from 9am on weekdays, and from 4am at weekends and on bank holidays; board before 9am on a weekday and the cap is £10.50 instead. Nothing spent on trentbarton counts towards the Nottingham Contactless cap, or the other way about.

The Robin Hood card is the one that crosses operators: £6.90 for an adult day across the participating operators, £4.60 for under-19s and £5.60 for students aged 19 to 21. Stay on a single operator all day and it caps lower still, at that operator's own rate, which for an adult starts at £5.50 and varies by company.

mango, trentbarton's app-based scheme, caps an adult at £6.30 a day after 9am on a weekday and £10.10 before it, then keeps going: £35.00 over a rolling 7-day window and £108.00 over a rolling 28-day one, both counted backwards from today rather than reset on a Monday.

So the choice is easy to state and easy to get wrong. If your day is NCT buses and trams inside the city, tap a bank card and take the Nottingham Contactless cap. If it mixes trentbarton with anything else, a Robin Hood card is the only thing that will add the two together.

The rule stated here is the open one: any card carrying the contactless symbol works. No card scheme is named as accepted and none is named as refused, so there is no list your card can fail to be on, and the symbol is genuinely the test. Nottingham City Transport's own contactless pages say nothing about cards issued outside the UK in either direction, so if yours is anything unusual, treat the reader as the test and carry a second way to pay.

Where the tap works is wide. Nottingham City Transport, Stagecoach East Midlands and Diamond East Midlands all take a contactless card or phone at a reader on the bus. trentbarton takes one on the way on and again on the way off. The NET tram reads it at a reader on the platform, where tapping out again is optional rather than required.

What is narrower is the capping, and this is the part that catches a visitor. Nottingham Contactless — the shared daily ceiling — counts only taps made on Nottingham City Transport buses and NET trams. trentbarton runs a separate contactless product of its own that sits outside it, and East Midlands Railway, CrossCountry and Northern trains are outside it altogether.

So use one card, or one device, for the whole day: the ceiling is built per card, and a morning paid on your phone and an afternoon paid on the plastic never add up. If a reader turns your card away, a Nottingham City Transport driver will sell you a paper ticket for cash — bring the exact fare, because they give no change and will not take a £20 or £50 note.

The tram is where a fine actually exists. On NET, travelling without a valid ticket brings a penalty fare of £120, halved to £60 if you pay within 14 days. Missing a tap off is not that, though: on a standard single journey there is no penalty for it. The one place it costs you is inside a Short Hop Zone, where the discounted £1.50 fare depends on tapping off within 20 minutes — miss that and you are charged the full £3.50 single instead.

No bus company here issues a flat fine, and what happens instead differs by operator. trentbarton reads a tap on and a tap off: forget the tap off and you are charged the maximum fare for that journey, and you can ask for it back by contacting customer services within 8 weeks. mango works the same way but charges differently — fail to scan off and you pay the single fare from where you scanned on to the final destination of that bus. Nottingham City Transport reads a tap on only, so on NCT there is nothing to miss. On Diamond, a mobile ticket you cannot display, because the phone is flat or the screen unreadable, means paying the full fare over again.

The trains are the expensive ones. East Midlands Railway issues a penalty fare of £100, reduced to £50 if you pay within 21 days. CrossCountry runs no fixed penalty scheme of its own: a passenger without a valid ticket is asked for a name and address and issued an unpaid fares notice, settled at the single fare plus reasonable administrative costs within 21 days.

So the one habit worth forming is a tram habit. Inside a Short Hop Zone, tap off before the twenty minutes are up; everywhere else, keep hold of the ticket or the tap you started with, because that is what an inspector asks to see.

East Midlands Airport has a single terminal, and two trentbarton bus routes run from it into Nottingham. Skylink Express is the quicker at about 31 minutes; Skylink Nottingham takes about 46. Both leave from the terminal and both take a contactless bank card, mango or cash.

The difference between them is the ticket, and it is worth settling before you board. A Robin Hood card is valid on Skylink Nottingham but not on Skylink Express: trentbarton names Skylink Express on its exclusion list, so a Robin Hood cardholder who takes the faster bus has to buy a trentbarton ticket for it. It runs the other way for trentbarton's own zigzag day ticket, which covers Skylink Express at no extra charge, while whether it covers Skylink Nottingham is not stated.

For a car, Arrow Cars is the airport's own private hire partner, with pick-up and drop-off points right outside the terminal and a booking desk in the arrivals hall; its airport fares are fixed and paid in advance, with no supplements added on top. Uber and Bolt both operate here, and both send you to a pick-up point through the app rather than a marked bay. Bolt says an airport fee applies to these trips without publishing the amount, so check the price in the app before you request the ride.

So decide by what is already in your pocket. With a Robin Hood card, walk to Skylink Nottingham. Bank card, mango or cash, and in a hurry: Skylink Express.

Yes. Coins pay the driver on Nottingham City Transport, trentbarton, Stagecoach East Midlands and Diamond buses; coins also go into the platform ticket machines at every NET tram stop, and into the machines at Nottingham station for East Midlands Railway, CrossCountry and Northern.

Cash buys a ticket rather than opening a gate. Pay as you board a bus and take what the driver gives you, or buy at a machine on the tram platform before you get on.

Change is where the operators part company, and it is worth knowing which is which before you are standing at the door. trentbarton drivers give change. Stagecoach East Midlands gives it on some services and not on others. Nottingham City Transport drivers give none at all, and will not take a £20 or a £50 note either, so an NCT fare has to be counted out exactly. No change policy is recorded for Diamond.

The machines are more forgiving than the drivers. The tram and station machines take coins, and the machines that issue Easyrider cards take coins, some notes, and do give change. So if all you have is a note, buy at a machine rather than at the door.

Yes, on every bus company here. Nottingham City Transport, trentbarton, Stagecoach East Midlands and Diamond all take coins from the driver, and the driver issues you a paper ticket for the journey.

Change is the thing that differs, and the answer is different for each of them. trentbarton drivers give change. Stagecoach East Midlands gives it on some of its services and not on others. Nottingham City Transport gives none at all and will not accept a £20 or a £50 note either, so an NCT fare has to be exact. Diamond records no change policy, so treat it as exact too.

If counting coins at the door is a nuisance, all of these buses take a contactless bank card or a phone on the reader as you board instead. One thing to watch when you do: trentbarton expects a tap off at the end of the journey as well, while Nottingham City Transport does not — on NCT the one tap is the whole transaction.

Yes, but there is no single Nottingham ticket app. Each operator sells its own and they do not overlap, so the app you want is the one belonging to whoever is driving.

For Nottingham City Transport buses it is the NCTX Buses app, free on iOS or Android, paid with a debit or credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. The tickets it sells are valid on NCT buses only, priced by City, Outer or Newark zone. Stagecoach East Midlands sells tickets in the Stagecoach Bus app. The NET tram accepts a ticket shown on a phone, and East Midlands Railway sells e-tickets through its own app or its website.

trentbarton is the odd one out: it sells no buy-and-show app ticket at all. What it has instead is mango, which is smartphone-only and works the other way round — you scan a QR code as you board and scan again as you get off, and the fare is calculated from the pair.

Two things to do before you are at the door rather than at it. Charge the phone: on Diamond, a mobile ticket you cannot display clearly means paying the full fare a second time. And if you are carrying a Robin Hood card, the Robin Hood Ticketing app is what tops it up and shows the balance — it does not replace the card, so the card still has to be in your hand when you board.

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.