Paris 🇫🇷

On the buses, yes; on the metro, not yet. A contactless Visa, Mastercard or French bank card (CB), or the same card in a phone or watch, taps to ride at three kinds of reader: the card machine on board RATP's buses in Paris and the inner suburbs, the reader at the entrance to the Montmartre funicular, and the exit gates of the Aéroport d'Orly station on metro line 14. Those are the only three, and the last works on the way out of Orly, not on the way in.

Do not tap at a metro or RER gate anywhere else: the gates have no bank-card reader yet. Line 1 gets them in July 2027 and the rest of the network follows by 2030. Until then the metro, the RER (including the RER B to Charles de Gaulle), RATP's trams and the Orlyval shuttle all want a ticket bought first: on a Navigo Easy card or in the Île-de-France Mobilités app.

Where the card does work, each tap buys one direct trip and nothing more: no change of vehicle, no return. Except on the funicular, it also costs more than the same ticket bought in advance. A bus tap is €2,55, €0,50 above the app or Navigo Easy price; the funicular tap is €2,55, the same as its Navigo fare; the airport tap out of Orly is €14,80; and when the metro readers arrive, a metro tap will be €3,35, each of those last two €0,80 above the app price at 2026 tariffs. Île-de-France Mobilités describes the bank-card tap as a fallback for a forgotten ticket, not the way to get about.

Further out, in Seine-et-Marne, the Yvelines, the Essonne and the Val-d'Oise, most buses are run by the private companies of the Optile federation, and those buses have no bank-card machine yet. The Beauvais airport coaches are their own case: the Porte Maillot line sells its ticket at a counter or machine at either end, card or cash at Beauvais and card only at Porte Maillot, and you show that ticket to the staff at the coach station; the La Villette line sells nothing on the spot at all.

So buy a Navigo Easy card or load the app before you head for the metro, and keep the bank card for the bus you did not plan to catch.

No — with one exception so narrow it is easier to treat as no. A contactless bank card does not open a metro gate in Paris. Île-de-France Mobilités does not start fitting bank-card readers to the ordinary metro and RER gates until July 2027, beginning with line 1, and the network is not due to be finished until 2030.

The exception is at Aéroport d'Orly, the southern terminus of line 14, and it is on the EXIT gates only. Since June 2026 you can touch a CB, Visa or Mastercard card at the barrier on your way out of that station and pay the fare there. It does not work in the other direction, and it does not work anywhere else: tapping a card at a metro gate to get in, at Orly or anywhere in the city, pays for nothing and will not let you through. Orlyval, the automatic shuttle between Orly and Antony, takes no bank card either.

So buy a metro journey before you reach the barrier — a Navigo Easy card or the Île-de-France Mobilités app on your phone — and keep the bank card for RATP's buses and the Montmartre funicular, which are the two places in Paris where a tap really is the ticket.

On RATP's buses, yes; on the buses further out, no. RATP runs the bus network inside Paris and the petite couronne, and since November 2025 it has been fitting its vehicles with a small card machine that replaces the ticket the driver used to sell. Touch a CB, Visa or Mastercard contactless card, phone or watch on it as you board — one tap, no tap off — and the fare is €2,55.

That is fifty cents more than the same bus journey bought in advance in the Île-de-France Mobilités app or from a Navigo Easy card, and it buys strictly less: a bank-card ticket is one direct trip with no transfer, so changing bus means paying again, where the ticket you bought in advance would have carried you for an hour and a half.

Beyond the petite couronne the buses belong to the private companies represented by Optile — the operators running Île-de-France Mobilités' routes in Seine-et-Marne, the Yvelines, the Essonne and the Val-d'Oise — and the card machine was not part of their network. A tap buys nothing on one of those. So tap as you board inside Paris, and if your route runs out into the outer suburbs, buy the journey on a Navigo Easy card or in the app before you get to the stop.

Yes — in Paris this is the one thing you genuinely need. Navigo is Île-de-France Mobilités' own travel card, and since paper tickets stopped being sold on 1 November 2025 it is what a journey is loaded onto. A contactless bank card is taken on RATP buses, on the Montmartre funicular and at the exit gates of the Orly metro station, and nowhere else yet; the metro, the RER and suburban trains, the trams, Orlyval and the Noctilien night buses are all entered by touching a Navigo.

Navigo Easy is the visitor's version: anonymous, €2, handed to you at any transport counter on the spot, and reloaded as often as you like. It is not refundable and a lost card cannot be replaced, so whatever was loaded on it goes with it. Navigo Découverte costs €5 and needs your name and a photograph on the sleeve it comes in. Either way it is one card per person — it cannot be passed back through the gate to whoever is behind you.

Load it at a station ticket machine, at an approved neighbourhood shop, or in the Île-de-France Mobilités app, which can also carry the same journeys on the phone itself. A day costs €12,30 as a Navigo Jour. The weekly Navigo Semaine is €32,40 for zones 1 to 5, but it runs a fixed Monday-to-Sunday week rather than seven days from purchase, so arriving on a Thursday buys you four days for the price of seven — count the nights before you pick it.

There is one, and a visitor almost certainly cannot use it. Paris has exactly one automatic daily cap, Navigo Liberté+: once the day's pay-as-you-go trips add up to €12,30 it stops charging and the rest of that day is free, across the whole Île-de-France network — RATP, SNCF Transilien and the Optile suburban operators all count towards the same ceiling.

The obstacle is the contract rather than the fare. Liberté+ is free to hold but can only be paid by SEPA direct debit, which means a French bank account, and a short-stay visitor cannot get one. Airport journeys are carved out of it too: Orly on metro Line 14 and Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle on the RER B are billed at €14 every time and never count towards the ceiling or benefit from it. And nothing else in Paris caps at all — a contactless bank card touched on a bus has no ceiling of any kind, because each touch buys one direct trip and stops there.

What a visitor can reach is the same number bought up front: a Navigo Jour day pass costs €12,30 and puts a ceiling on the day with no contract at all. Load one onto a Navigo Easy card at a station machine on your first morning.

For buying tickets, yes. For tapping your way onto the network, hardly anywhere yet. Île-de-France Mobilités sets its condition on the brand of card and says nothing at all about the country that issued it: a card machine takes a contactless CB — the French Carte Bancaire scheme — Visa or Mastercard, and refuses everything else, naming a French meal-voucher card as the sort of thing it turns down.

Where a bank card tap works at all is the part to plan around. It is live in three places and no others: on RATP buses in Paris and the petite couronne, the inner ring of suburbs; on the Montmartre funicular; and at the exit gates of the Orly station on Metro Line 14. The Beauvais airport coach takes a bank card as well, but never as a tap — Aérobus sells its Porte Maillot line at a counter or a machine at either end and you show the printed ticket to the agents at the coach station, while the same operator's La Villette route sells nothing on the spot at all. A tap is not live on the Metro or the RER generally, which start with Line 1 in July 2027 and are not fully covered until 2030, nor on the trams, nor on the Optile suburban buses. A tap on a bus or the funicular also costs €2,55, more than the same ticket costs loaded onto a card or bought in the app, and it buys one direct trip: no transfer, no return.

Your phone is no help around the edges either, because the SMS bus ticket is billed to a French mobile plan on Bouygues Telecom, Orange, SFR or Free, and a foreign SIM cannot buy one. So use the card to buy rather than to travel: a Navigo Easy card costs €2 at any transporter counter, takes the ordinary cheaper tickets, and the Île-de-France Mobilités app sells the same tickets straight to your phone.

It depends whose vehicle you are standing in, and the gap between the figures is wide. On RATP's metro and RER, travelling with no valid ticket is a fine of €70 if you pay on the spot; leave it unpaid and the amount rises. On RATP buses and trams the charge most visitors actually meet is a narrower one: €15 for holding a Navigo pass and not touching it to the small machine that checks your ticket when you board, and that goes for RATP's Noctilien night buses too.

SNCF Transilien, which runs the suburban trains, prices it differently again. A Navigo pass you failed to validate is €5 and no ticket at all is €50, both paid there and then; choose to pay later instead and a processing fee is added on top. Transilien also has the trap a visitor is most likely to fall into: at gated RER and train stations the pass has to be validated on the way OUT as well as on the way in, and skipping the exit tap puts you in breach even though you had paid for the journey.

So touch that machine every single time you board, whatever you are holding and however short the ride — a pass in your pocket is not a validated pass. And on the RER, touch the gate again on your way out before you leave the station.

RER B is the quick way in and the expensive one: about 32 minutes to central Paris, but a journey between Paris and its airports is charged a flat airport fare of €14 rather than the €2,55 an ordinary train ride costs, and that fare never counts towards a daily ceiling. A toutes-zones monthly or annual Navigo pass covers the trip at no extra charge; whether a day pass or a weekly pass does is not stated anywhere, so buy the airport ticket rather than assume.

The buses charge an ordinary fare and take longer. Bus 351 runs to Nation in about 70 minutes for €2,05, the flat bus-and-tram fare, with no airport premium on it at all. Bus 350 to Porte de la Chapelle costs the same but leaves you to buy a second ticket for the metro onward, and so does the Express 9517, which despite replacing the old direct Roissybus now ends at Saint-Denis-Pleyel — the bus ticket does not carry through to the metro. The Noctilien N140 and N143 cost €2,05 too, but they are night services only: the N143 leaves the airport between 00:02 and 05:52, and neither runs in the daytime.

A taxi is a fixed price set by prefectural decree, one rate for a Right Bank address and another for the Left Bank, and it does not move with the traffic even when the traffic does — between 35 and 60 minutes. Which terminal each of these leaves from is set out on the Aéroport Charles de Gaulle (CDG) page. Whichever you pick, buy the fare before you reach the platform or the door: with paper tickets gone, that means putting it on a Navigo card or your phone first.

Under 4, yes, and completely. A child under 4 travels free on every Île-de-France network without a ticket of any kind; the one service named as an exception is Fileo, the on-demand service. Carry proof of the child's age, which the rule asks for without naming a document, and take the child through the metro, RER or express-tram barriers in your arms, or through the side gate if there is a pushchair.

From 4 up to 10 the child pays, but at half. A single Métro-Train-RER or Bus-Tram ticket costs €1,30 instead of €2,55, the Paris Region to Airports ticket costs €7 instead of €14, and a one-day Forfait Paris Visite costs €15,30 instead of €30,60 at 1 January 2026 tariffs. Navigo Liberté+ charges a reduced per-trip rate too. This is a fare you ask for when you buy, not something the child's presence applies on its own.

At 10 the reductions run out. The only child product recorded beyond that age is the imagine R Junior annual pass, and it is for children who live in Île-de-France, so a visiting ten-year-old buys the adult ticket. Buy the younger ones their reduced tickets at the same machine or counter as your own, and take nothing at all for a child under 4.

On the metro, the RER and the city buses, cash no longer pays for a ride itself, because the thing it used to buy no longer exists: the paper ticket was withdrawn across the network on 1 November 2025. What your cash buys there now is the card. A Navigo Easy costs €2 over the counter and you load journeys onto it, and it is the card that opens the gate.

Where the coins go in: the ticket machines at metro, RER and SNCF stations and the staffed counters beside them both sell and reload a Navigo card, and you can pay at either in cash. Transilien's own ticket machines take coins, with a ceiling on how much cash one payment can be. Out in the outer suburbs an Optile bus driver still sells a ticket for coins. So does the ticket desk at Beauvais airport for the Aérobus A01 coach to Porte Maillot; the desk at the Porte Maillot end takes cards only.

Two places to stop counting on cash. RATP has been taking cash off its buses in Paris and the inner suburbs, a change due to be complete by 1 November 2026; what they carry on board instead is a contactless bank-card machine. And the Aérobus A04 coach to La Villette takes no cash at all. So buy a Navigo Easy with your coins at the first staffed counter you pass, load a few journeys onto it, and stop thinking about cash.

On the outer-suburban ones yes; on RATP's buses in Paris and the inner suburbs, cash is on its way out. Optile, the network of operators running buses in the outer suburbs, still lets you buy a ticket from the driver with coins, so have coins ready.

RATP has been taking cash off its buses in Paris and the inner suburbs, a change due to be complete by 1 November 2026, so do not plan on paying the driver. What an RATP bus has instead is a card machine on board: touch a contactless Visa, Mastercard or French bank card (CB) and it charges €2,55 for one direct trip, with no transfer onto another vehicle and no return leg. That is €0,50 more than the same trip costs bought in advance, and it is meant as a rescue rather than as the way to travel.

So on a Paris bus, touch the bank card in your pocket if you are caught out, and otherwise load journeys onto a Navigo Easy card first and touch that.

Yes, and the app to install is Île-de-France Mobilités' own. It does not sell you a barcode to hold up: it loads the same Navigo journeys onto the phone itself, and you touch the phone to the reader exactly as you would touch the card. It needs an Android phone with NFC running 6.0 or later, or an iPhone 7 or newer on iOS 13 or later. An older handset cannot carry it, and there is no show-the-screen fallback. The Bonjour RATP app sells the same journeys.

The SMS boarding ticket is the one to leave alone. You buy it by texting the bus line to 93100 — the line number on RATP's network, the keyword shown at the stop or in the vehicle on an Optile route — and you show the message to the driver rather than tapping it; it cannot be validated on the readers inside the bus. It costs €2,55 and lasts one hour with no transfer, and it works only on a French mobile plan with Bouygues, Orange, SFR or Free. A foreign SIM cannot buy one, whatever the stop sign says.

The Beauvais airport coach is the other ticket that lives on a phone, and this one a visitor can use. Aérobus sells both its runs into Paris on aerobus.fr and aeroportparisbeauvais.com and emails a QR code back: on the La Villette line that booking is the only way to travel at all, since nothing is sold at the roadside, and you show the code to the driver; on the Porte Maillot line you show it to the agents at the coach station instead, and you may buy at the counter there if you prefer.

So check your phone against those versions before you fly, install the Île-de-France Mobilités app while you still have your home wifi, and buy the first journey before you reach the gate.

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.