[ GUIDE · THE DISPATCH ]

The Paris Metro Decoded: Tickets, Zones, and Which Lines to Avoid at Rush Hour

A Paris metro guide that finally explains Navigo vs carnet, the RER airport trap that gets everyone, and why Line 13 is a daily act of violence. I've ridden these tunnels for years. Let me save you the sweaty confusion.

For the full day-by-day version of everything below, read the perfect 3-day Paris itinerary.

This Paris metro guide is the one I wish someone had shoved into my hands the first time I stood at a Châtelet ticket machine, sweating, holding up a queue of unimpressed Parisians while I tried to work out whether I needed a “t+” ticket or a Navigo or a small miracle. The Paris metro is one of the great urban transit systems — fast, dense, gloriously easy once you crack it — and absolutely baffling for the first day. Let’s fix that.

For decades, the move was buying a carnet — a little bundle of ten paper tickets, cheaper per ride. That’s gone. RATP killed the paper carnet, and now you’ve got a few options that are honestly better:

• Navigo Easy — a reusable plastic card (small one-off cost, a couple of euros) that you load with single tickets or packs of ten at a discount. Tap to enter. This is what I’d get for a short trip.
• Navigo on your phone — load tickets straight into your phone wallet (Android’s had this a while; iPhone support has been rolling out). Tap your phone at the gate. No card needed.
• Navigo Découverte / weekly — if you’re in town Monday-to-Sunday and riding a lot, the weekly pass (loaded onto a Découverte card with a passport photo) covers all zones and pays for itself fast.

A single t+ ticket gets you anywhere on the metro with unlimited transfers between metro lines, but — and this matters — it does not let you transfer freely onto the RER for long trips, and it won’t cover the airport. More on that landmine in a second.

Paris transit runs on fare zones, 1 through 5, radiating out from the centre. Almost everything you’ll do as a tourist — the Louvre, Montmartre, the Marais, the Tower — sits in zones 1–2, and a normal metro ticket covers it.

Here’s the trap. Charles de Gaulle airport is in zone 5, and you reach it on the RER B, which is a regional express train, not the metro. A standard t+ metro ticket will let you in at the city end, but the gates at CDG will refuse to let you out, and you’ll be standing there with luggage looking like a confused tourist (because you are one) while the machine flashes red. You need a specific CDG ticket (around €11–12 one way), or a Navigo weekly that includes the zone. Same story for Orly. Buy the right ticket before you board. Please. I’ve watched too many people learn this the hard way at 6 a.m. with a flight to catch.

The Metro is the dense web of short lines (numbered 1–14) that stop every few hundred metres in the city. The RER (A, B, C, D, E) is the faster regional network that blasts across the centre with fewer stops and then keeps going out to the suburbs, the airports, Versailles, Disneyland. Inside zone 1, the RER can be a brilliant shortcut — RER A from Châtelet to La Défense skips a dozen metro stops. Just mind the zones once you head outward, because that’s where extra fares kick in.

Not all lines are equal, and some are a daily ordeal.

• Line 13 is the legend, and not in a good way. It’s overcrowded, it’s notorious, Parisians complain about it as a personality trait. At rush hour (roughly 8–9:30 a.m. and 5:30–7 p.m.) you will be pressed into strangers. If you can route around it, do.
• Line 1 (the driverless one along the Champs / Louvre / Bastille axis) is fantastic but heaving with tourists midday — it’s fine, just expect company.
• Châtelet–Les Halles, the world’s biggest underground station, is a transfer monster. Connections between lines there can mean a genuine ten-minute underground hike. Factor it in.

General rule: the central east–west and north–south spines fill up first. If you’ve got flexibility, travel mid-morning or early afternoon and the whole thing feels almost civilised.

Keep your card or phone handy before the turnstile, not fished out at the gate. Stand on the right on escalators, walk on the left, or face the silent fury of commuters. Watch out for pickpockets at the big tourist stations (Abbesses, the line 1 stretch, RER B to the airport especially) — bags in front, not on your back. And the metro mostly stops running around 1:15 a.m. on weeknights, a bit later Friday/Saturday; after that it’s Noctilien night buses or a taxi.

That’s the whole system, demystified. Get a Navigo Easy, buy the right airport ticket, dodge Line 13 at eight in the morning, and Paris opens up under your feet like it was built for you. Which, charmingly, it sort of was.

Tap card in hand before the gate, airport ticket bought in advance — do those two things and you’ll never sweat at a Châtelet machine like I did.

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