Milan: New Transport Tariff System

Posted on December 7, 2019

I have previously written about getting around Milan. Although the premise that time-based tickets are good deals still stands, it’s not as dirt cheap as it was. Since July 2019, there have been a few changes and, unfortunately, a significant price increase for tourists. Below I highlight what changes in practice for you.

The new Milan tariff system considers the city as the center of reference. From there, the surrounding metropolitan territory was divided into concentric circles, each representing a tariff zone as shown on the map:

But what does it mean for you? It means that now the most basic ticket covers zones Mi1-Mi3 and that’s what you should choose at the vending machines.

ATM Tickets	Current Price as of July 2019	Old Price	Comments
Single Ticket biglietto ordinario	€ 2.00	€ 1.50	valid for 90 minutes, in any direction
Daily Ticket biglietto giornaliero	€ 7.00	€ 4.50	valid for 24h from first validation
2-Day Ticket biglietto bigiornaliero	discontinued	€ 8.25	valid for 48h from first validation
3-Day Ticket biglietto 3 giorni	€ 12.00	not available	valid for 3 consecutive days from the day of the first validation

You can see above that the daily or 3-day tickets are still good deals in comparison to the single. The difference is that it takes 3.5 instead of 3 trips to pay for itself 🙂

Contactless Payments

Another news with the system reorganization is that you can pay with a contactless card. The service is available on the entire metro network. As long as your journey starts on a metro station and continues within zones Mi1-Mi3 of the surface network, you can travel until the ticket’s expiration.

Attention! Be sure to always check-in and out with the same card or device, even at the few stations where the exit is free. By doing so, the correct journey will be calculated and there’s an automatic cap at the amount of the daily ticket from your 4th journey.

Since your card will be charged a few days after using the transport, it is useful (though not obligatory) to register at the ATM website to verify the amounts charged.

Final comment

As you can see, the new Milan tariff system introduced a 72h ticket that comes quite in handy for weekend visitors. It costs less than twice the daily tariff, so pay attention before mindlessly using the contactless payment option.