T-money is a rechargeable stored-value card, issued by Korea Smart Card Co., that pays for subway rides, buses, most taxis and a scattering of convenience-store purchases across Seoul. You buy the card once, load cash onto it, and tap it on a reader at the start and end of every journey — the tapping out is not optional, and skipping it is the single most common way visitors overpay.
What the card actually is
T-money is not a ticket and it has no fixed value printed on it. It is a balance, held on a chip, that the transit network debits each time you tap. The card itself is a separate, small, one-off cost from whatever cash you load onto it — buying the plastic and funding it are two different transactions, and neither figure is fixed by law, so this article does not print one. Korea Smart Card Co. publishes current card and fare structures on its own site, which is the place to check before travel.
Buying it
The card is sold at convenience stores carrying the T-money logo (CU, GS25, 7-Eleven and similar chains across the city), at machines inside subway station gate lines, and at some tourist information counters. You do not need a Korean bank account, a phone number or ID to buy or use a basic card — it is closer to prepaid cash than to a bank product. Themed and collector versions of the card exist alongside the plain plastic one; they work identically as far as the transit gates are concerned.
Topping it up
Top-ups are cash-in transactions, made at the same convenience-store counters and at station-side charging machines, most of which accept notes and coins directly. Some machines and some newer terminals also accept card payment for top-ups, but cash remains the universal option and the one that works everywhere the logo appears. There is no subscription and no expiry pressure on the balance sitting on the card — it simply waits until it is spent or refunded.
Tapping in, tapping out — and why missing it costs you
Seoul’s fares are distance-based, on the subway and on buses alike, which is the whole reason the card is tapped twice. The tap-in records where a trip started; the tap-out, at the destination gate or on the bus reader by the doors as you exit, calculates the actual distance traveled and closes the transaction. Miss the tap-out and the system has no way to know you got off early — it charges to the end of the line and, separately, cancels the free or discounted transfer to a connecting bus or subway line that a completed tap-out would have unlocked. Seoul Metro’s own guidance for riders sets out this fare logic in more detail. It is worth building the habit consciously on buses in particular, since the tap-out reader there is easy to walk past on the way out the door.
The practical corollary is the last train. Subway services stop around midnight, but the exact time varies by line, by direction and by day of the week — it is posted at the station and on the operator’s own journey planner, not fixed citywide. After that, the fallback is a taxi or one of the night bus routes, whose numbers all begin with the letter N.
The T-money app: Android and Samsung, not iPhone
A mobile version of T-money lets a phone stand in for the plastic card, tapped the same way at the same readers. It works through the phone’s own NFC hardware and, on current Samsung handsets, through Samsung Pay’s near-field payment layer — which is precisely why it does not work on an iPhone. Apple’s NFC chip is not opened to third-party transit systems in Korea the way Android’s is, so iPhone users cannot tap to pay with T-money through the phone itself and need the physical card, or a T-money-enabled phone case or sticker sold for exactly this purpose. This single compatibility gap trips up a large share of visiting travelers who assume “the app” is a universal substitute for the card — it is an Android and Samsung feature, not a platform-neutral one, and that is worth checking against your own handset before relying on it.
Getting your money back: refund mechanics
Unused balance on a T-money card is refundable, but the process branches depending on how much is on the card and whether it is a physical card or the phone-based version. T-money’s own published refund policy is the source to confirm before assuming your case qualifies for the simpler route, but the shape of it is this:
- Small balances, physical card: handled over the counter at almost any convenience store carrying the T-money logo, no ID required, with a flat service fee (on the order of a few hundred won) deducted from what is returned.
- Larger balances: convenience stores are capped at a threshold that T-money sets and can change; above it, the refund has to go through an issuing bank branch instead of a shop counter.
- The mobile app version: refunds for the phone-based T-money are routed through a bank branch rather than a convenience store regardless of the amount, and require passport identification.
In short: a small leftover balance on a plastic card is a two-minute transaction at any CU or GS25; a large balance, or anything tied to the app, means a bank visit with ID. Neither the fee nor the exact threshold is something this article will print as a fixed number, because Korea Smart Card Co. can and does revise both — check the current figures on the operator’s own site before your last day in the city, since the refund route you plan on may not be the one available to you.
Other cards on the same rails
Visitors sometimes encounter Cashbee, a competing stored-value card built on the same fare infrastructure and accepted at the same gates and bus readers — functionally interchangeable with T-money for a rider, though the two are issued and refunded by different companies. Some tourism-oriented passes bundle a stored-value card with attraction discounts; those are separate commercial products layered on top of the same tap-in, tap-out fare logic described above, and their own terms are the ones that govern any bundled discounts.
How this site sources and checks practical detail like fare structures and refund rules is set out on the About page, including what we do and do not verify firsthand. What the site collects about a visit while you’re reading pages like this one is covered on the privacy policy. Both pages exist because a transport article that can’t show its own working isn’t one worth trusting — the same standard this page tries to hold itself to when it hedges a fee rather than inventing one, a point expanded on in more detail here.
For readers weighing whether to bother with the card versus single tickets bought at the machine each ride, the honest answer is structural rather than a number: single paper tickets exist for the subway but require a small refundable deposit and are slower at the gate, while T-money removes both frictions and works identically on buses, where paper tickets are not sold at all. That structural difference, more than any specific fare, is why almost every resident and most repeat visitors end up carrying one. Further notes on how this site is funded and edited, and what that means for the reliability of a page like this, sit on the same About page, and the underlying data practices are listed on the privacy policy for anyone checking before they read further.
Access Seoul is an independent guide written from published, checkable sources. We have not visited the places described here and we do not publish personal recommendations or invented ‘local favorites’ — where something is singled out as notable, we say who says so. Opening times, fares, closures and prices change at short notice, so treat everything here as a starting point and confirm with the museum, operator or venue directly before building a day around it. We give no advice on visas, insurance, health or safety; use your own government’s official guidance for those.