Rail passengers have made more than 1.4 million journeys using the Transport for Wales Pay As You Go ticketing system supported by Unicard technology.

Transport for Wales (TfW) was the first train operator on the heavy rail network outside of London to launch a contactless EMV (cEMV) PAYG system. The project was completed in November 2024 and the tap in, tap out technology is now live at 95 railway stations across South-East Wales. It provides their customers with automatic daily and weekly capping, offering significant savings compared with standard anytime singles and 7-day season tickets.

The TfW PAYG scheme has grown rapidly since launch and the latest figures for September 2025 show that more than 1.4 million rail trips have now been made.

The scheme has also attracted more than 206,000 unique PAYG users since its launch.

More than a third of in-scope journeys have now transferred to cEMV PAYG, making PAYG TfW’s largest owned retail channel.

About one in five TfW PAYG journeys are currently capped at either a daily or weekly level (where there are at least 2 journeys in a single day or 7 journeys in a single week) – providing financial savings for passengers.

Journey frequencies on the TfW scheme have been very mixed, indicating that PAYG is not just a commuter product but is also being used for leisure purposes.

Unicard supplied TfW with our Ticketing Hub to enable cEMV services, which means travellers do not have to pre-purchase a paper or digital ticket for their journey. Instead, they can use a payment card or mobile device to tap in and out on ticket barriers at the start and end of every train journey.

Ticketing Hub receives and processes these taps, and the price of each trip is calculated based on each customer’s travel patterns and behaviour. Unicard then ensure that an accurate and secure payment is made based on their overall journey.

Importantly, unlike other cEMV solutions, Ticketing Hub is agnostic to the card reader used, so scheme administrators can mix equipment within a single deployment. The Unicard solution is also multi-modal and multi-operator, creating a future-proofed ticketing environment for developing more-integrated transport networks.

• You can watch Alexia Course from Transport for Wales talk about the successful rollout of the contactless Pay As You Go project in a video here: TfW hails success of contactless rail ticketing.