Getting around Valencia: metro, buses, trams and tickets

Valencia is easy to get around by public transport, and the network is not the problem. The fares are. The same bus ticket is listed at €1.50 in one place and €2.00 in another, and both figures are true.

The reason is that subsidised prices and reference prices coexist, with subsidies extended in stages that nobody gathers into a single document. This page gives both figures every time, with their year, rather than picking one and getting it wrong.

How much does an EMT city bus cost?

These are the tickets that work for a visitor. The concession and resident fares require local documents, so we leave them out except to explain why they appear in the official tables.

The subsidised Bonobús works out at €0.51 a journey, with an hour of transfers included. It is by far the best value in the city, and hardly any tourist leaflet mentions it.

Watch out for the hidden cost: the card itself costs €2 to €5 depending on the ticket and is paid separately. For tickets advertised as free, that card is the whole price.

How much do the metro and tram cost?

Metrovalencia works by zones, and the price jump between them is not proportional to distance. A one-zone journey costs €1.50, two zones €2.80 and three zones €4.80, according to the 2025 fare table.

The card costs €1.10 to €2.20 depending on where you buy it and which type. No official source explains that range: several cards coexist without a single table.

If you are going to make ten journeys or more, the SUMA ticket is the way: €4 on promotion, €8 without it for one zone, €6 on promotion, €12 without it for two. The monthly SUMA pass runs from €35 to €131 depending on the zones, and only makes sense if you are staying for weeks.

For most visitors the first ride is from the airport, which is on metro lines 3 and 5. The zone that journey falls in, and its price, are in the Metrovalencia zone map described in our transport map page.

Is the Valencia Tourist Card worth it?

Here the 2026 sources do not agree, and it is worth saying so rather than giving a false number. One puts it at €17 for 24 hours, €24 for 48 and €30 for 72. Another gives €20 for adults and €17 for children for the same 48 hours.

What is clear is the arithmetic. Three days of subsidised Bonobús cost less than €5 in transport. You have to win back the difference in museum discounts, and the municipal museums are already free on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.

Put simply: if your stay includes a weekend, the card loses much of its point. It is the one thing no official communication puts up front.

What time do the buses and metro run?

The EMT daytime service runs roughly from 5:30 to 22:30, with night lines called búhos ("owls") at weekends. Frequency on the main lines is around 7 to 15 minutes.

These time bands are approximate, and the vagueness is not ours. Neither the EMT nor Metrovalencia publishes a PDF with the first and last departure for each line: the timetables live inside the journey planner and the app, which makes a comparable table impossible to build.

What happens to public transport during the Fallas?

Metrovalencia and the EMT increase frequencies and extend their hours, on some nights almost around the clock. The exact timetable is published a few weeks beforehand and changes every year, so any fixed table you find in March has been copied from another year.

What does repeat: Xàtiva and Colón stations close from roughly 12:30 to 14:30 on mascletà days, to avoid overcrowding. Bikes and e-scooters are banned from the network throughout the festival.

And a warning the leaflets do not give: more services does not mean you can get on. At peak times around the mascletà and the Nit del Foc, trains and buses can be so full that you cannot board for several cycles. Plan on walking.

If you are coming in March, this matters more than the ticket price when choosing a neighbourhood to stay in. The closer your bed is to the centre, the less you depend on a saturated network.

How do you pay, and what should you sort out beforehand?

• On the bus: you can buy a single from the driver in cash. Contactless card payment is not documented as universal in any official source we reviewed.
• At stations: the machines take cards and cash, and let you load tickets onto a SUMA or Móbilis card.
• In the app: the EMT sells digital tickets and flags line diversions, which during the Fallas is worth as much as the ticket.

The known limitation, never officially acknowledged, is registration. Several local apps ask for details designed for residents, and some bank cards from outside the eurozone, including UK cards, may fail. The sensible plan B is to buy from a machine or a kiosk on your first day.

The figures nobody publishes

• The amount of the fine for travelling without a valid ticket does not appear on any EMT or Metrovalencia fares page.
• There is no public percentage of buses with ramps or of stations with working lifts. Accessibility is announced, not measured.
• There is no clear timeline of the 50% subsidies, which explains why two equally serious sources give different prices for the same ticket.
• Nobody publishes a comparison between the tourist card and local tickets. We had to build it from the raw fares.

The summary in three sentences

One day in the city: a single ticket or a Bonobús. Two or three days: the subsidised Bonobús, which is unbeatable. A week or more: a one-zone monthly SUMA, or MovimEMT if you will not tap in often.

A budget note: three days of transport cost less than €5 per person, while a night in a hotel is around a hundred. If anything deserves comparing before you book, it is where you stay, not the ticket.

If you are driving, the calculation changes completely and we explain it in parking in Valencia and in the park and ride car parks. The downloadable maps are on the transport map page.

Sources

EMT València, fares and tickets, and MovimEMT page, 2025. Metrovalencia, fares and SUMA zone map, 2025. Valencia City Council, EMT fares. Valencia Extra and Cadena SER, 2023 and 2024, for the approval and extension of the subsidies. Metrovalencia, Fallas service plan 2025. Las Provincias, 2024, for the special timetables. 2026 mobility guides for the tourist card prices, which do not agree with each other.