MRT Cost Calculator

How a Singapore train fare is charged

Singapore does not price the train by station or by line. It prices the journey by distance. Tap in at one station and out at another and the system adds up the kilometres you covered, then looks up a fare band for that total. A 3 km hop costs the same whether you ride one line or three, which is the point of the system: changing lines mid trip does not add a fare.

The same total distance also covers transfers to buses. The Public Transport Council states that commuters travelling the same distance on the same type of service pay the same fare, whether they travel direct or make transfers (PTC fare rules, updated January 2026). One journey is one charge, no matter how many legs it takes.

Three inputs decide what leaves your card:

• Total distance in kilometres. Fares rise in roughly 1 km steps up to about 40 km, then flatten.
• Fare type. Adult card, concession card, or cash. Cash is the expensive one.
• Time of tap in. A weekday tap before 7.45am takes 50 cents off a card fare.

Fares moved on 27 December 2025 and the tables on this page use that schedule. The Public Transport Council keeps the current numbers on its fares and passes page, and the same schedule is published as open data on data.gov.sg.

The fare bands, and where they stop rising

Adult card fares start at $1.28 for anything up to 3.2 km. From there each 1 km band adds 4 to 11 cents, and the increments shrink as the trip gets longer. By 20 km the bands add 3 cents or less, and past 40.2 km the fare stops moving at all.

Two things fall out of that table. First, the whole range from short hop to cross-island trip spans $1.29, so distance matters less than people expect: a 40 km ride costs twice a 3 km ride, not ten times. Second, cash flattens early. The cash fare reaches its $3.20 ceiling at 23.3 km, while the card keeps creeping up to $2.57.

Senior card fares flatten even faster. Past 7.2 km a senior pays $1.07 whether the trip is 8 km or 40 km, per the PTC table effective 27 December 2025. A retiree riding from Jurong to Tampines pays the same as one riding three stops.

Card versus cash: the 64 percent surcharge

Paying cash on the train costs far more than tapping a card, and the gap is widest on short trips. Up to 3.2 km the adult cash fare is $2.10 against $1.28 on a card, which is 64 percent more for the same ride. On the 16.6 km Jurong East to Bishan example the PTC publishes, cash is $3.00 against $2.15, a 40 percent premium.

Cash also loses the transfer protection. A journey paid in cash is charged per ride, so a trip that needs a bus and two train lines costs three cash fares. On a card the same trip is one distance fare. For anyone commuting daily, the card is not a convenience, it is roughly a third off the annual transport bill.

SimplyGo contactless bank cards work the same way as a stored value card for fare purposes: tap the card or phone, and the system charges the adult card fare. The fare is not lower because it is a bank card, and the concession rates need a registered concession card, not a bank card.

Who pays less: concession fares and monthly passes

Concession fares cover children, students, seniors, persons with disabilities, full time national servicemen and Workfare Transport Concession Card holders. The per ride discount is large: a senior pays $0.69 for a trip up to 3.2 km against $1.28 for an adult, and $1.07 past 7.2 km against $2.15 at 16.6 km.

Heavy users can also buy a monthly pass with unlimited rides on basic bus and train services. Prices below are the PTC schedule, unchanged for the 2026 fare review.

Passes are not automatically a saving. An adult paying the highest card fare of $2.57 for 44 rides a month spends $113.08, which is still under the $122 pass. The pass only wins when the trip count climbs past roughly 48 rides, or when the commute includes enough bus legs that the card total passes $122.

Transfers: five legs, one fare

The transfer rules are what make a single fare cover a multi leg trip, and they have hard limits. Under the distance fare rules published by the PTC, a journey can include up to five transfers, and the time from the first boarding to the last boarding must be two hours or less.

The clock between legs is tighter:

• 15 minutes between two train stations. A slower change of lines is charged as two journeys.
• 45 minutes between a train and a bus, or between two different bus services.
• No exit and re entry at the same station, and no riding the same bus service number twice in a row.

Distance is cumulative across the legs, not reset. Ride 4 km on the North East line, change to a bus for 6 km, and you pay the band for 10 km, not two separate fares. That is why a feeder bus at the start of a trip costs little: the first 3.2 km band covers a lot of ground, so 2 km of bus moves the fare by one band at most, often less than a dollar.

Two common ways to lose the protection: tapping out and back in at the same station to use a toilet or buy a drink, and a transfer that takes longer than 15 minutes because of a missed connection. Both turn one fare into two.

Two commutes worked out

Jurong East to Bishan, 16.6 km. This is the PTC's own worked example. The adult card fare is $2.15. Tap in before 7.45am on a weekday and the morning pre peak discount takes 50 cents off, so the ride costs $1.65. A senior pays $1.07, or $0.57 with the same early tap. Cash would be $3.00.

Monthly, at two rides a day and 22 working days, that is 44 rides:

• Adult card at $2.15: 44 x 2.15 = $94.60
• Adult card before 7.45am at $1.65: 44 x 1.65 = $72.60
• Cash at $3.00: 44 x 3.00 = $132.00
• Senior card at $1.07: 44 x 1.07 = $47.08

The early tap alone saves $22.00 a month on this commute, which is $264 a year for shifting the alarm 20 minutes earlier.

Jalan Besar to Chinatown, 2.9 km. The PTC lists this as 2.9 km, which lands in the first band. Adult card fare: $1.28. Senior: $0.69. Cash: $2.10. Before 7.45am: $0.78 for an adult, $0.19 for a senior, because the 50 cent discount applies to a fare that small.

Monthly at 44 rides: $56.32 on an adult card, $30.36 for a senior, $92.40 in cash. This is the commuter the monthly pass never helps. Even at the full 44 rides the card spend sits at $56.32, well under $122, and a senior at $30.36 is nowhere near $55.

The monthly number, and when a pass pays

Monthly spend = single fare x 2 x working days. That is the whole formula, and it holds as long as both directions cost the same, which distance fares guarantee on a symmetric commute.

The ceiling matters here. Because the highest adult card fare is $2.57, 44 rides can never cost more than $113.08, so the $122 adult pass cannot pay for itself on a five day commute with two rides a day. The pass wins when the month has more than about 48 rides: a sixth day at work, a daily bus leg on top of the train, or regular evening trips. At 60 rides the same $2.57 commute would cost $154.20 on a card, and the pass saves $32.20.

For seniors the arithmetic is harsher. At $1.07 a ride, 44 rides cost $47.08 against a $55 pass, and the break even sits at 52 rides. A senior pass only makes sense for someone riding most days plus weekends.

Measuring the distance when you cannot look it up

Fares depend on track distance, and the published station mileage is the number the fare system uses. The LTA fare calculator gives the fare for a station pair directly, and the PTC fare table lists the bands themselves. When neither is handy, a straight line estimate from coordinates gets you close enough to pick the right band.

Haversine distance between two points: d = 2R x asin(sqrt(sin squared of half the latitude gap + cos(lat1) x cos(lat2) x sin squared of half the longitude gap)), with R = 6,371 km.

Two stations 0.05 degrees of latitude apart, at the same longitude, sit about 5.6 km apart on a straight line. Rail track bends, so the real distance and the fare band can sit higher, sometimes by a band or two on a route that swings around a reservoir. Treat a coordinate estimate as a floor: if it lands at 15.8 km, the fare may well be the 16.3 to 17.2 km band.

The calculator on this page does the haversine step for you, or you can type the mileage from a journey planner. It then applies the 27 December 2025 fare bands, the senior rates, the cash rates and the pre 7.45am discount, and shows the monthly total against the pass price for your rider type.