Seoul Has Stopped Selling Its Unlimited Transit Pass — What Still Works for Visitors

If you have read anything in English about getting around Seoul in the last two years, you have been told to buy the Climate Card — 62,000 won, thirty days, unlimited subway and buses. That was good advice. Since 1 September 2026 it is wrong advice, and every page still giving it has not noticed.

Seoul stopped selling the 30-day top-up at the end of 31 August 2026. You can no longer buy one at any price. A pass topped up before the deadline still runs: the last day you can ride on a prepaid one is 29 September, 30 September if yours is the post-paid kind. On 1 October the 30-day pass is withdrawn entirely.

The short 1-to-7-day passes are not going anywhere, and the physical card is still on sale. That distinction is the whole article.

That is not a rumour or a proposal. It is a table on Seoul Metropolitan Government’s own transport site, with dates — and the row that now applies is the one that reads from 1 September, 30-day top-up suspended.

The dates, from Seoul’s page

(선불 기후동행카드) 30일권은 8월 31일까지 충전, 9월 29일까지 이용가능합니다.

(Prepaid Climate Card) The 30-day pass can be topped up until 31 August, and used until 29 September.

Seoul Metropolitan Government, Climate Card closure FAQ, Q3 서울특별시 「기후동행카드 운영종료 FAQ」 Q3 1 September 2026

Seoul’s stated reason is consolidation, not failure: the national government launched its own unlimited-fare product in January 2026 at the same price point, and running two identical schemes side by side confused people.

One caution about Seoul’s own notice page. The separate 30-day closure notice, revised 31 August, carries an AI-written summary box above the article. That summary gives the prepaid top-up deadline as 31 July and the post-paid one as 31 August. The body of the same page says 31 August and 30 September. Seoul labels the box as machine-generated and possibly inaccurate; the body and the FAQ table agree with each other, so those are the dates we have used. If you go and read that page yourself, read past the box.

The part that matters to a visitor: the short passes survive

Seoul repeats this in eight different answers of the closure FAQ, which is usually a sign that people kept asking.

'모두의 카드'와 결합이 불가능한 기후동행카드 단기권(1, 2, 3, 5, 7일권)은 기존과 같이 유지됩니다.

The short-term Climate Card passes (1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 days), which cannot be merged into the new national card, will be kept as they are.

Seoul Metropolitan Government, Climate Card closure FAQ, Q5 서울특별시 「기후동행카드 운영종료 FAQ」 Q5 1 September 2026

Because the short passes continue, so does the card itself. Seoul answers this directly in Q26: buying a new prepaid Climate Card is possible at any time — it is only the 30-day top-up that stopped. If you land in Seoul next week and find a Climate Card on a convenience-store shelf, it is not old stock.

The prices, from Seoul’s usage page:

Pass	Price
1 day	5,000 won
2 days	8,000 won
3 days	10,000 won
5 days	15,000 won
7 days	20,000 won

For a visitor this was always the better product. Seoul does not publish a break-even figure and we are not going to invent one; work it against what a subway, bus and taxi ride actually costs and decide for your own itinerary. What is certain is that a two-week trip never needed a thirty-day pass.

The catch, in Seoul’s words: short-term passes cannot be charged in advance. The clock starts on the day you top up, and a 1-day pass dies with that day’s last train — not twenty-four hours later. Buy it on the morning you intend to use it, not the night you land.

Short passes also do not include Ttareungi (the city bike share) or the Han River bus. The 30-day pass had versions that did. That difference disappears along with the 30-day pass.

And the short pass covers a smaller map. The 30-day pass reached into seven Gyeonggi cities on Seoul’s edge — Gimpo, Goyang, Gwacheon, Seongnam, Hanam, Namyangju and Guri. The short passes do not. Seoul puts the scope in a parenthesis, under the closure table:

기후동행카드 단기권은 지속 운영 예정(이용범위:서울시)

The short-term Climate Card passes are to continue (coverage: Seoul city).

Seoul Metropolitan Government, Climate Card closure FAQ, footnote under the Q3 table 서울특별시 「기후동행카드 운영종료 FAQ」 Q3 표 아래 각주 1 September 2026

If your hotel is in Goyang or Seongnam because it was cheaper, this is the line that decides whether the pass is worth buying at all.

What the pass does not cover — and the airport problem

This trips up more visitors than the end date will. The Climate Card covers Seoul’s subway, Seoul-licensed city and neighbourhood buses, and — on the 30-day pass only — some sections past the city border. It does not cover:

• Shinbundang Line, GTX
• Express buses, airport buses, buses licensed by other provinces
• Taxis

Incheon Airport is a special case, and it works in one direction only. On the Airport Railroad the ordinary coverage runs Gimpo Airport to Seoul Station. But Seoul lists an explicit exception: if you board inside the covered zone, you may tag out at Incheon Airport Terminal 1 or 2. You may not board there.

So the pass can take you to your departure flight, and cannot bring you in from your arrival one. Landing at Incheon, you are paying separately to reach the city — the train, bus and taxi options are here.

And the failure mode is unforgiving. Tap in inside the zone, ride out of it, and you cannot tap out:

서울지역 내에서 승차하였더라도 서울지역을 벗어난 역에서는 기후동행카드를 태그하여 하차할 수 없습니다.

Even if you boarded inside the Seoul zone, you cannot tag out with a Climate Card at a station outside it.

Seoul Metropolitan Government, Climate Card FAQ, Q15 서울특별시 「기후동행카드 FAQ」 Q15 16 August 2026

Seoul then spells out what happens instead: you call a station attendant at the exit, and pay the fare for the whole journey from where you boarded. It is also logged against you as a missed tap-out.

There is a small mercy for short-pass holders. Miss two tap-outs on a 30-day pass and the card is suspended for twenty-four hours. Seoul’s usage page states the penalty does not apply to short-term passes.

The refund rule nobody tells foreigners

This is the sentence we would put on a poster at the arrivals hall. It sits in a table cell on Seoul’s usage page, in Korean, with no English equivalent we could find:

국내계좌 미보유 외국인은 티머니 본사 방문하여 현금 환불

Foreigners without a Korean bank account must visit T-money head office in person for a cash refund.

Seoul Metropolitan Government, Climate Card usage page, refunds section 서울특별시 「기후동행카드 사용법 안내」 환불 항목 16 August 2026

Read that against how refunds normally work. Seoul offers two routes: a transfer to a Korean bank account within five days, or — if you topped up with a credit or debit card — a partial cancellation of that original charge after identity verification. The card-cancellation route may well be open to a visitor. The bank-transfer route is not, and that is the one the cash-at-head-office rule is about.

Four more things about refunds, all from the same page:

• There is a deadline. Refunds are only for balances on a pass that has not yet expired; once the period is over, Seoul says no refund at all. For a physical card you have until 15 days after the expiry date to file.
• A 500-won fee comes off whatever is left.
• The 3,000-won card itself is not refunded, only the balance on it — the exception is a faulty card.
• You must register the card at pay.tmoney.co.kr first. Seoul words this as a requirement — “physical card users must register” — and then states the consequence of not doing it: “without registration, refunds and the bike share are unavailable.” Being precise about what Seoul does and does not say: the only penalties it names are those two. It does not say an unregistered card will not open a gate. We are reading that as registration gates your money, not your ride, and we are telling you it is a reading, not a quotation.

That distinction resolves something we had recorded as contradictory testimony. In our comment tally, one traveller reported giving up on T-money registration entirely after a security-plugin install loop and getting a refund instead; another said topping up with cash at a convenience store was no trouble at all. Both are accurate — they were doing different things.

The practical conclusion for a short trip: buy the number of days you will actually use, and plan to walk away from whatever is left rather than budget a trip to a company office for a few thousand won.

Buying the physical card

An iPhone changes the answer here. Seoul’s usage page routes Android users to the mobile card and iPhone users to the physical card — the mobile Climate Card is Android only, and Seoul adds OS 12 or later, with some handsets unsupported.

The physical card costs 3,000 won. Seoul lists two places to buy it: the newer ticket machines inside stations — line 1 only between Seoul Station and Cheongnyangni, plus lines 2 to 8 — and convenience stores near stations. Cash or a credit/debit card both work; corporate cards are refused.

Topping up is a wider list than buying. The in-station top-up machines are on line 1 (Seoul Station–Cheongnyangni), lines 2 to 9, the Ui-Sinseol, Sillim and Gimpo Gold lines. And since 25 November 2025 you can top up a physical card by holding it against the back of a phone running the Mobile T-money app — Seoul’s press release says both Android and iPhone, paying by credit or debit card or open banking.

What replaces it, and what we are not going to tell you

Seoul directs everyone to the national card — 모두의 카드 (mo-du-ui ka-deu, “everyone’s card”) — and its Seoul-flavoured tier, 기후동행패스 (gi-hu-dong-haeng-pae-seu), launched on 1 September 2026 as announced. Seoul answers the structural questions itself, but hands seven of the closure FAQ’s thirty-one answers — fares, coverage, eligibility, how to sign up — straight to the K-pass helpline. Those are precisely the ones a visitor would ask.

On one of them Seoul has now answered plainly, and the answer is no. Closure FAQ Q16 asks whether people living in the wider capital region get the 기후동행패스 benefits:

'기후동행패스' 출시 시 기후동행카드 플러스만의 할인 및 환급 혜택은 서울시민에게만 제공될 예정입니다

When 기후동행패스 launches, its discount and refund benefits will be provided to Seoul residents only.

Seoul Metropolitan Government, Climate Card closure FAQ, Q16 서울특별시 「기후동행카드 운영종료 FAQ」 Q16 1 September 2026

If residents of Goyang and Seongnam are outside it, a visitor on a tourist entry is not inside it either. Read that together with what the national card actually is — a refund scheme, not a pass, paying money back to a registered Korean account after you have travelled — and the replacement is not a product a short-stay visitor should be planning around at all.

We still have not been able to load the K-pass site ourselves, so we are not stating its registration requirements. What we can state is what Seoul states: the thing being handed to you instead of the 30-day pass is for residents. For a visitor, the answer is the short-term pass, and it always was.

There is also a wrinkle worth knowing if you go looking yourself: Seoul’s older Climate Card FAQ page still lists only the 62,000 and 65,000-won options and an out-of-date list of subway sections, while the usage page — revised 8 June 2026 — carries the short passes, the Han River bus and the payback event. The two official pages disagree. We used the more recently revised one and the closure FAQ, and we have linked both so you can see the discrepancy for yourself.

If you would rather not buy a pass at all

For a trip with a handful of subway rides, Seoul still sells a single-journey ticket at station machines: the fare plus a 500-won deposit, and you get the deposit back from a refund machine after you exit. No account, no registration, no refund paperwork. It is not glamorous, and for four rides across three days it is entirely rational.

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Bottom line. The 62,000-won 30-day Climate Card can no longer be bought by anyone, on any date, and every guide still recommending it is out of date as of 1 September 2026. If you already hold a topped-up one it runs to 29 September, or 30 September post-paid. For everyone else the answer is the 1-to-7-day pass: still sold, still cheaper for a trip of any normal length, no missed-tap penalty, and the physical card is still available at station machines and convenience stores. The national card replacing the 30-day pass is a resident product and not a substitute for you. Whatever you buy, file any refund before the pass expires, and do not count on a bank transfer unless you hold a Korean account.

What this article does not claim

We have not tested the K-pass or 기후동행패스 sign-up flow, and we do not say whether a short-stay visitor can complete it — only that Seoul restricts the Seoul-tier benefits to Seoul residents. Prices, dates and coverage above were re-read on Seoul’s own pages on 1 September 2026; the closure schedule is Seoul’s published one, not our forecast. Where Seoul’s own pages disagree with each other we have said so and named which one we followed.