Moscow Metro - Fares

Fares

From the 1970s to the 1990s, the cost of a ride was five kopecks (1/20 of a Soviet ruble). The fare has been steadily rising since 1991, hastened by inflation (taking into account the 1998 revaluation of the ruble by a factor of 1000). Effective January 2011, one ride (or one item of oversize luggage) costs 28 rubles (85 US cents). Discounts (up to 40 percent) are available when buying a multiple-trip ticket (starting with five-trip cards), and children under age seven can travel free with their parents.

Tickets are available for a fixed number of trips, regardless of distance traveled or number of transfers. Monthly and yearly passes are also available. Fare enforcement takes place at the points of entry. Once a passenger has entered the Metro system, there are no further ticket checks – one can ride to any number of stations and make transfers within the system freely. Transfers to other public-transport systems (such as bus, tram, trolleybus, or monorail) are not covered by the ticket.

Before 1991, turnstiles accepted coins; however, with the start of hyperinflation plastic tokens of various design were used. Disposable magnetic stripe cards were introduced in 1993 on a trial basis, and used as unlimited monthly tickets between 1996 and 1998. The sale of tokens ended on 1 January 1999, and they stopped being accepted in February 1999; from that time, magnetic cards were used as tickets with a fixed number of trips.

On 1 September 1998, the Moscow Metro became the first metro system in Europe to fully implement plastic smart cards, known as Transport Cards. The card has an unlimited number of trips and may be programmed for 30, 90 or 365 days. The first purchase includes a one-time cost of 50 rubles, and its active lifetime is projected as 3½ years; defective cards are exchanged at no cost. Unlimited cards are also available for students at reduced price (as of 2011, 321 rubles—or about $US10—for a calendar month of unlimited usage) for a one-time cost of 70 rubles. Transport Cards impose a delay for each consecutive use; i.e. the card can not be used for seven minutes after the user has passed through the turnstile.

In January 2007, Moscow Metro began replacing magnetic cards with contactless disposable tickets based on NXP's MIFARE Ultralight technology. Ultralight tickets are available for a fixed number of trips in 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 60-trip denominations (valid for 5 or 45 days from the day of purchase) and as a monthly ticket, only valid for a selected calendar month and limited to 70 trips. The sale of magnetic cards stopped January 16, 2008 and magnetic cards stopped being accepted in late 2008, making the Moscow metro the world's first major public-transport system to run exclusively on a contact-less automatic fare-collection system.

In August 2004, the city government launched the Muscovite's Social Card program. Social Cards are free smart cards issued for the elderly and other groups of citizens officially registered as residents of Moscow or the Moscow region; they offer discounts in shops and pharmacies, and double as credit cards issued by the Bank of Moscow. Social Cards can be used for unlimited free access to the city's public-transport system, including the Moscow Metro; while they do not feature the time delay, they include a photograph and are non-transferable.

Since 2006, several banks have issued credit cards which double as ultralight cards and are accepted at turnstiles. The fare is passed to the bank and the payment is withdrawn from the owner's bank account at the end of the calendar month, using a discount rate based on the number of trips that month (for up to 70 trips, the cost of each trip is prorated from current ultralight rates; each additional trip costs 24.14 rubles). Partner banks include the Bank of Moscow, CitiBank, Rosbank, Alfa-Bank and Avangard Bank. In fall 2010, Moscow Metro and Mobile TeleSystems(MTS) launched a mobile ticketing service using near field communication-enabled SIM cards.