Free tool · No account
Check what TfL owes you
Forget a tap out and TfL charges you the maximum fare for that journey. It is refundable, but only if you notice, and only for 8 weeks. Upload a payment statement and we will read every row, flag the ones charged wrong, and tell you what each is worth.
- 1
Open your TfL contactless account
Sign in at contactless.tfl.gov.uk with the account linked to the card you tap with. If you have never registered the card, you can do it there in a couple of minutes, and it is worth doing anyway: TfL only shows journey history to registered cards.
- 2
Download a payment statement
Go to Payments, pick a month, and choose the download. TfL gives you a PDF. Statements from the last 8 weeks are the ones worth checking, because that is the window TfL will still refund inside.
- 3
Drop it below
We read every row, work out which journeys were charged wrong, and tell you what each one is worth.
No account needed. We read the file, give you the answer, and keep none of it: not the statement, not the journeys, not your name off the top of the page.
Why this happens so often
A contactless journey needs two taps. Miss the second one, at a broken gate, on an unstaffed platform, or because you walked through an open barrier behind someone else, and TfL cannot tell where you got off. It charges the maximum fare for anywhere you might have gone.
It is not a rare event. A Freedom of Information response published by Transport for London covering 2023 records 30.9 million incomplete journeys, of which 22.2 million were charged a maximum fare, producing £164.7 million. The other 8.7 million were completed automatically and cost the passenger nothing. The working is in The forgotten tap, and the figures with their sources are on our numbers page.
TfL corrects some of these automatically. Not all of them, and there is no notification when it does not, which is why the only reliable way to know is to read the statement.
What the check looks for
| What went wrong | How it looks on the statement | Usually worth |
|---|---|---|
| Missing tap out | A journey ending at Unknown, or a yellow warning marker next to the row | The gap between the maximum fare and the fare you should have paid |
| Missed Hopper fare | A second bus or tram charged in full within an hour of the first | The whole of the second fare |
| Already put right | TfL has adjusted the row itself | Nothing, and no action needed |
| Charged after an inspection | A maximum fare applied following a revenue check | Not refundable through this route |
What happens to your statement
It is read once and thrown away. We do not store the file, the journeys, the card details or the name printed at the top. The only thing written down is a one-way fingerprint of your network address, so the free check cannot be used as an open tap on our costs, and three counts: how many journeys we read, how many were claimable, and what they came to.
If you would rather we kept the history, so each new statement gets checked without you remembering to, that is what an account is for. It is free, and we take no percentage of anything you claim. Our privacy policy covers both cases.
Related
- TfL refunds, explained covers the rules, the deadlines and the edge cases.
- Incomplete journey charges is the detail on the single most common cause.
- The forgotten tap is our analysis of how much this costs Londoners in total.