CPAY

In 2014, Transport for London became the first public transport provider in the world to accept payment from contactless bank cards.^[4] TfL first started accepting contactless debit and credit cards on London Buses on 13 December 2012,^[5] expanding to the Underground, Tram and the Docklands Light Railway in September 2014.^[6] Since 2016, contactless payment can also take place using contactless-enabled mobile devices such as phones and smartwatches, using Apple Pay,^[7] Google Pay and Samsung Pay.^[8]

TfL designed and coded the contactless payment system in-house, at a cost of £11 million, after realising existing commercial solutions were inflexible or too focused on retail use.^[4] Since the launch of contactless payment in 2012, over 500 million journeys have been made, using over 12 million contactless bank cards.^[9] Consequently, TfL is now one of Europe's largest contactless merchants, with around 1 in 10 contactless transactions in the UK taking place on the TfL network.^[9]

In 2016, TfL licensed their contactless payment system to Cubic, the original developers of the Oyster card, allowing the technology to be sold to other transport providers worldwide.^[9] In 2017, licensing deals were signed with New York City,^[10] New South Wales^[11] and Boston.^[12]

The same requirement to touch in and out on underground services applies to contactless cards. The same price capping that applies to the use of Oyster cards applies to the use of contactless cards (provided the same card is used for the day's journeys). The fare paid every day is settled with the bank and appears on the debit or credit card statement. Detailed usage data is written to Transport for London's systems and is available for customers who register their contactless cards with Transport for London. Unlike an Oyster card, a contactless card does not store credit (beyond the holder's credit limit) and there is no need or facility to add credit to the card.

Since August 2019, expansion to the pay as you go network around London has been done exclusively on contactless but not Oyster.

Although the use of a contactless payment card for travel is exactly the same as an Oyster card, as a contactless card cannot be written into, they work differently in the background.

An Oyster card stores the balance in the card itself, and records all the touches made in the card. It can also store discounts and season tickets as well. None of the above is possible with a contactless payment card, therefore all the fare calculations are done in batch on the back end, after all the touches in a day are aggregated from the readers.

The use of a contactless payment card by travellers is exactly the same as with an Oyster card. However, unlike an Oyster card, a contactless payment card can only be used for paying as you go at the adult rate. Season tickets and discounts cannot be associated with a contactless payment card.

CPAY (contactless pay as you go) is available everywhere an Oyster card is accepted. In addition, it is also available at the following National Rail stations, where Oyster card is not accepted:

As the Oyster card supports a maximum of 15 zones.,^[20] the stations above are listed as zone 16 in the fare data, indicating that they are outside the Oyster area.^[21] The contactless payment cap doesn't apply on a zonal basis, with caps applied on the basis of individual stations.

The contactless payment used on Luton DART is also CPAY, as evidenced by DART journeys showing up in TfL contactless history, but its fare is separate and not integrated into the remainder of rail network.^[22]

Since the launch of contactless payment in 2012 on buses, and in 2014 on rail, the usage has been steadily increasing apart during the period of COVID-19 pandemic. By October 2022, contactless payment is now used for 71% of tube, rail and bus journeys in London. Further analysis between July and August 2022 showed that 35% of contactless journeys were made using mobile devices, up from 26% before the pandemic.^[23]