Barcelona Transport Tickets and Travel Cards

By Joan. I have lived in Barcelona for 16 years and I still buy the same ticket everyone here buys, which is why it took me a long time to notice how badly it suits a couple on a short trip.

Barcelona sells a long list of transport tickets and a visitor needs to understand six of them. The machine in the metro station does not explain any of this, the fares changed in January, and two of the tickets have a rule about the airport that costs people real money. Here is the whole thing in the order I would decide it.

Quick answer: travelling alone, buy the T-casual, €13.00 for 10 journeys, which is €1.30 a ride against €2.90 for a single. Travelling as a couple or a family, buy one T-familiar, €11.50 for 8 journeys, because it is the only ticket here that several people can share, and for a couple making eight journeys or fewer it saves €14.50 against two T-casuals. If you are taking the metro to or from the airport, neither of those works there, so buy the Hola Barcelona Travel Card, from €12.50, one per person, sold by duration and priced only in the operator's own shop. Fares were revised on 15 January 2026 and they change, so check the current one at the machine.

The short version

• The T-familiar at €11.50 is the ticket almost nobody tells visitors about, and for two people making eight journeys or fewer it is the cheapest option in the city.
• The T-casual at €13.00 is the right answer if you are alone, and the wrong one if you are two, because it cannot be shared.
• Neither the T-casual nor the T-familiar works at the two airport metro stations. That journey has its own fare of €5.90 each way.
• The Hola Barcelona from €12.50 is the only visitor card that includes the airport metro, one journey in each direction, and it is personal and non-transferable.
• Single tickets at €2.90 stop making sense from the fifth journey, and on two days most people make between six and ten.

How I worked this out: cost per journey for a two day stay, using the fares published by TMB after the January revision, and counting the airport separately because that is how it is actually charged. I have not included the city passes, because a bundle priced on museum entries does not belong in the same sum as a ticket priced on journeys.

Every ticket, with the prices as they stand

The tickets, in the order I would buy them

1. T-familiar, if there are two or more of you

€11.50 for 8 journeys, valid 30 consecutive days from the first validation. This is a multi-person ticket, which makes it the exception to everything else on this page. Two of you validate it one after the other and it counts two journeys. Eight rides shared between a couple works out at about €1.44 a journey, and eight is a realistic two day total, because you will walk more than you think. Two T-casuals for the same trip cost €26.00 and leave you holding twelve journeys you never used. It is not valid at the airport stations, so it does not solve your arrival.

2. T-casual, if you are on your own

€13.00 for 10 journeys. A single-person ticket, and the standard answer for anybody travelling alone. Ten journeys is more than most visitors use in 48 hours, which is fine, because it is still cheaper than the rides you will actually take. Ten single tickets would be €29.00. It cannot be shared with your travelling companion, and that is the detail that quietly turns it into the wrong ticket for half the people who buy it.

3. Hola Barcelona, if the airport metro is in your plans

From €12.50. Unlimited travel on the metro, TMB buses, the NitBus, the tram, the Montjuic funicular, and FGC and Rodalies trains inside zone one, plus one metro journey from the airport and one back. That airport inclusion is the whole reason to consider it. It is sold in blocks of 24, 48, 72, 96 and 120 hours, and the operator only publishes the price of each duration in its own shop, so check yours there before you buy. The number it has to beat is €24.80, which is what a T-casual plus two airport tickets costs, and that is a subtraction to do in the shop rather than take from me. It is personal and non-transferable, so a couple buys two.

4. Single tickets, if you are barely going to use the metro

€2.90 each, valid on the metro, TMB buses and the Montjuic funicular. If you are sleeping in the old city and walking it, four rides might genuinely be your whole trip, and then singles win. Past the fifth journey they stop making sense. I mention them because the machine makes it very easy to buy one by accident when you meant to buy ten.

5. T-dia, which I would probably skip

€12.00 for unlimited travel in 24 hours, including one airport journey each way. On paper this looks like the bargain of the table and for a two day visit it usually is not, because your two airport journeys are two days apart and this ticket lasts one. It earns its place on a single very busy day, or on a long layover where you come into town and go back out again.

6. T-usual, which is not for you unless you are staying a month

€22.80 for unlimited travel over 30 days, and that price already has the discount inside it. A fifty per cent government reduction was applied in January, so €22.80 is what you pay and not what you pay before something is taken off. It is a resident ticket for a resident month, and on 48 hours you cannot get near earning it back. I include it because people see the price and assume they have found a loophole.

The two traps, both of which cost real money

The first is the airport. The T-casual and the T-familiar are simply not valid at Aeroport T1 and Aeroport T2 on line L9 Sud, so if you tap in there with one, you have not saved anything and you now have a problem at the barrier. Either buy the €5.90 airport ticket for that leg, or buy the Hola Barcelona, or come in on the Aerobus or a taxi instead. The five ways in are compared on my airport to city centre page.

The second is sharing. Everything except the T-familiar is single-person, and the barrier is where couples find that out, which is the worst possible moment and the most common one. If there are two of you, that is what the T-familiar is for.

Before you buy

• Count your group first. One person means T-casual, two or more means T-familiar, and the airport changes both answers.
• Buy at the machine when you land or on the first morning, not when you are already late for a timed entry.
• These are the published fares and they were revised in January. Check the current one on the machine rather than trusting this page.

Once you have the right card, the rest of the network is genuinely easy, and which lines to use for which sight is in my Barcelona metro guide. If you are wondering whether a bundled city pass beats all of this, that is a different question and not a transport one, because a pass is earned back on museum entries rather than on journeys, and nothing in the table above moves because you own one.

When a tour is the cheaper way to move

None of the tickets above take you to Montserrat or around the Gaudi sites in a useful order, and once you are paying for entry anyway the maths changes. A three hour bike tour, from €31.00 and rated 4.9 across 1,566 reviews, covers more ground in a morning than a metro card will, and it is the one I recommend to people who tell me they want to see the shape of the city before they start picking things off a list.

Buy one ticket, on the first morning, for the right number of people. It takes five minutes and it is the only part of Barcelona transport that anybody ever gets wrong.