Commuter pass or IC card on a 60-day Tokyo stay

A one-month Tokyo Metro commuter pass between Meguro and Shirokane-takanawa costs ¥6,980. Tapping a PASMO between those same two stations costs ¥178 a ride, so ¥356 there and back. Divide one number by the other and the pass starts paying for itself on the twentieth round trip of the month.

Twenty is not hard to reach. A five-day office week gets you there with days to spare. The catch is what counts: only rides between Meguro and Shirokane-takanawa count toward that twenty. Every other ride you take that month is priced as if you owned no pass at all.

The thing you are buying is a 定期券 (teiki-ken — "fixed-period ticket"). You name a starting station, a destination, and a route, and you ride that section as often as you like until the pass expires. Tokyo Metro sells it in three lengths and no others. Its own English page is blunt: "Select from one of three types: 1 month, 3 months or 6 months." There is no two-month teiki. There is no 45-day teiki. A 60-day stay has to be built out of the three terms on offer, and you pick the start date yourself. New passes go on sale 14 days before that date, at a pass office or a multi-function ticket machine.

The route is fixed at the moment you buy. Metro's English wording: "The routes that the Student/Commuter Railway Pass covers are specified upon application, and cannot be used on other routes." The Japanese operating guide says it the same way, and lists a short set of named exceptions where two parallel routes are both allowed. Your section is your section.

This is where a 30-to-90 day guest stops resembling the person the teiki was designed for. Someone on a two-year lease rides the same two stations twice a day, about 20 days a month, for years. That rider is not deciding anything. The pass is obviously correct for them, and the pricing was set with them in mind.

A guest on a 60-day stay rides differently. You go to a coworking desk four days a week, and then you ride somewhere else entirely most evenings. Run the four-day week at the Meguro numbers. Four days a week over a month is about 17 round trips, or ¥6,052 of tapping. The pass is ¥6,980. You are ¥928 short of the point where it was worth buying. Go to five days a week and you get about 21 round trips, ¥7,476 of tapping, and the pass saves you ¥496 for the month.

Look at those two numbers together. A five-day week saves about ¥500. A four-day week loses about ¥900. Neither figure is large enough to plan a stay around, and that is the actual finding: on price alone, the teiki barely matters. What matters is that the ¥496 only exists if you keep going to the same station. Change your desk, change your gym, change your mind about the neighborhood, and the saving does not shrink. It goes to zero, and the pass keeps charging.

Metro does sell one pass with no route attached. The 全線定期券 (zensen teiki-ken — the all-line pass) is good on all nine Tokyo Metro lines, in any direction, for the whole term. It costs ¥17,670 for one month, ¥50,360 for three months, and ¥95,420 for six.

Price that against actual riding. At the ¥178 minimum fare you need about 100 rides in the month to clear ¥17,670, which is 50 round trips. At ¥252, the fare for a 12-to-19 kilometer crossing, you need 71 rides, call it 36 round trips. Two rides a day for 30 days is 60. So the pass that solves the route problem is priced for someone taking more than three subway rides every single day of the month, holidays included. That is not a visitor. That is a courier.

The three terms are not priced evenly, and the gap is published. Tokyo Metro's operating guide gives the arithmetic for its through passes with Toei: three months is the one-month price times three, then cut by 5 percent; six months is times six, then cut by 10 percent, each rounded up to the nearest ¥10. The all-line pass follows the same shape. ¥17,670 a month works out to ¥589 a day. Three months at ¥50,360 is ¥560 a day. Six months at ¥95,420 is ¥530 a day.

The best daily rate a 30-to-90 day guest can even reach is the three-month one, and you only collect it by riding on all 90 days. Buy three months for a 60-day stay and you have paid ¥50,360 for 60 days of use. That is ¥839 a day. Two one-month passes would have cost ¥35,340, or ¥589 a day. The cheaper daily rate is the more expensive purchase. Operators price stay length with the same trick, and it is worth reading how the 30-versus-90-night discount is built next to this.

You can hand a teiki back before it expires, and this is where the calendar does real damage. Metro's 営業のご案内 (eigyō no goannai — the operating guide it reissues every March, current edition dated 14 March 2026) sets the refund at the price you paid, minus the pass fare for the months you used, minus a ¥220 handling fee. Then it adds the line that decides everything: "使用月数については、1か月未満の日数は1か月に切り上げます" ("for the number of months used, any period shorter than one month is rounded up to one month").

Run it on the three-month all-line pass. You pay ¥50,360 and hand it back at exactly two months. Two months used, at the one-month price of ¥17,670 each, is ¥35,340. Subtract that and the ¥220 fee and you get ¥14,800 back. Your 60 days cost ¥35,560, which is ¥220 worse than simply buying two one-month passes. Small loss.

Now hand it back one day later. Two months and one day rounds up to three months used. Three months used on a three-month pass means the deduction is the entire pass fare, so the refund is ¥50,360 minus ¥50,360 minus ¥220. There is nothing left to return, and the guide states the outcome directly: "払戻金額がない場合もあります" ("there are also cases where there is no refund amount"). One day of overrun costs ¥14,800. Stays slip by a day all the time. Flights move.

One more thing, because most comparisons of this get the shape backwards. You are not choosing between a pass and an IC card. The pass lives on the card. A commuter pass on PASMO is a 記名PASMO (kimei PASMO — a PASMO registered to your name, date of birth, and phone number) with the teiki added on top, and the money you load stays on the same card. Ride outside your section and the gate settles the difference automatically. PASMO publishes the calculation: "定期券区間外の駅相互間を乗車した場合は、「全区間をSFで乗車した場合の運賃」と「定期券区間外の合計運賃」を比較し、安い方の運賃をSFから減額します" ("when you ride between two stations outside your pass section, the system compares the fare for the whole trip against the total fare for the parts outside the pass, and takes the cheaper of the two from your balance").

Buying a teiki removes nothing. It prepays one leg and leaves the rest of the city priced exactly as before. Which means the question was never "pass or card." It was only ever whether one specific pair of stations is going to carry enough of your month.

Two conditions, and you need both. One pair of stations has to carry more than twenty round trips a month, in every month you hold the pass. And your last day in Tokyo has to land inside a month you have already paid for, because the day after that is worth ¥14,800. Fail either one and the ¥178 tap is both the cheaper way to ride and the only one that lets you change your mind about where you are going.

— HalfKey runs furnished Tokyo apartments for stays of 30 days to 12 months. Browse listings for your dates.