How much a public transport ticket costs: 100 European cities compared

The transport ticket is the first price you meet in a city and one of the few you can know before leaving. But it changes from year to year, it changes if you buy on board or in the app, and in many cities the single ticket is a trap: the rechargeable card or the day pass pays off from the third ride.

Here are the 100 cities in our dossiers where the single ticket price was rechecked between 8 and 21 October 2026 against the operator's page, the price list or the act that sets it. In price order. For six cities (Nerja, Seville, Granada, Rhodes, Ksamil and Alberobello) there is no readable official fare: the Source column says so and the row explains where the figure comes from. For villages with no urban network, such as Alberobello, Polignano and the Cinque Terre, the row gives the price of the train that gets you there; in Taormina, the cable car to the sea; on Hydra there is nothing to pay because there are no vehicles, in Belgrade because transport has been free since 2025. All 100 destinations in the dossiers are here.

The table: from cheapest to dearest

Non-euro currencies are left as they were at the time of verification, with the euro equivalent only where the dossier gives it. The city name takes you to the dossier with all the notes on getting around. The "Source" column takes you to the operator's page, the price list or the act that sets the fare. Between 8 and 21 October 2026 we rechecked all 100 rows against those sources: 41 needed correcting, 28 because at least one figure was wrong (from Kraków and Zagreb to Oslo and Istanbul) and 13 because they held a claim no source supports, and we fixed them together with the dossiers.

Three things the table teaches

First: buying on board almost always costs more. Catania goes from €1.40 to €2, Chania from €1.30 to €2.30, Split from €1.50 to €3 from the driver, Lisbon from €1.90 to €2.30 on the bus and €3.30 on the tram, Budapest from 500 to 700 forints. In many cities the paper ticket bought from the driver does not even allow a transfer.

Second: the rechargeable card pays off even for a few days. Bilbao drops from €1.70 to €0.73 on the bus with the Barik, Dublin from €2.60 to €2 with the Leap, in Ljubljana you can only ride with the Urbana card and in Istanbul the disposable ticket costs 65 TL against 46.20 TL on the Istanbulkart. And where contactless has a daily cap, as in Brussels and Edinburgh, your bank card acts as a day pass on its own.

Third: the numbers that look high must be read with the duration. Bologna's €2.30 lasts 75 minutes with transfers, Genoa's €2 lasts 110 minutes, metro included, Venice's €9.50 is a vaporetto, and with more than one ride a day the 24-hour pass is the only sensible choice. And prices are rising: Vienna took the single ticket to €3.20 and Prague raised the paper ticket by 30% on 1 January 2026, in both cases nudging people towards the app; Berlin, Hamburg and Munich nudged prices up the same day, and Hamburg gives 7% off to those who buy in the app.