T-money Refunds: What the Official Guide Actually Says
You are at the airport with ₩8,400 stranded on a plastic card and a queue behind you. The question is simple: where do you get it back, and how much of it?
Almost every English guide answers this the same way — go to a convenience store, they refund up to ₩20,000, there is a small fee. I went to look at Tmoney's own English guide for travellers on 2026-08-05 to check the numbers.
It does not say that. It says something more useful, and one thing that will annoy you.
What the official guide actually states
Three rules, quoted from Tmoney's own Foreigner Guide, verified 2026-08-05.
| Rule | Wording |
|---|---|
| Where | Any Tmoney card sales or top-up location |
| Card cost | "Refund does not include the cost of card" |
| Fee | "The service fee of ₩500 will be charged" |
You hand over the card, tell the staff how much you want back, and they give you cash in Korean won.
The card fee is gone and it is not coming back
That ₩2,500 to ₩4,000 you paid for the plastic is not a deposit. It bought you the card. Only the money you loaded on top comes back, minus ₩500.
So a card bought for ₩3,000 with ₩5,000 loaded returns ₩4,500, not ₩7,500. If you are choosing between buying a card for a two-day trip and just tapping a foreign card at a ticket machine, that ₩3,500 gap is the actual cost of the card.
Subway stations are listed as top-up only
This is the detail that sends people to the wrong place.
The guide lists three kinds of location. Convenience stores — GS25, CU, 7-Eleven, MINISTOP, Story Way, Emart24, 365PLUS. Subway stations, marked explicitly "Top-up Only", covering the top-up machines, ticket issuers and information centres. And Tmoney Town at Seoul Station Exit 10, Seoul City Tower 1F.
The subway machine that happily took your money on the way in is not where you get it back on the way out.
Partial refunds are a separate, stricter thing
There is a second mechanism most guides never mention, and it has hard limits.
Partial refunds — taking some money off and keeping the card — are available only at Tmoney Town and Tmoney service centres inside subway stations, only for amounts between ₩10,000 and ₩50,000, only in units of ₩10,000, and only for plate cards.
Read that as a practical rule: if you want to keep the card for a future trip and pull cash off it, you need at least ₩10,000 on there and you need to go to a service centre. Anything smaller and your only option is closing the card out entirely.
The ₩20,000 figure I could not confirm
Here is where I have to be straight with you.
The convenience-store cap of ₩20,000 appears in a large number of guides, in both English and Korean, stated with total confidence. It is probably operationally true — store staff work to a float limit.
But it is not in Tmoney's official English guide, and I could not find it on an official Tmoney page. The company's site put a session error in front of several of its own pages while I was checking.
So: widely reported, not verified here. If you are carrying a large balance, assume a convenience store may decline and plan on Tmoney Town at Seoul Station instead. That is the location the official guide names for larger transactions, and it is a five-minute walk from the AREX platforms you will be using anyway.
Why this kind of number drifts
A cap like that is a float limit, not a policy. It lives in an operations manual, it varies by franchise and by how much cash is in the till at 7am, and it never appears in the public guide because it was never meant to be a public rule.
Then one traveller has one experience, writes it down as a number, and it propagates. The figure is not invented. It is just not the thing it is being presented as.
Not overloading the card in the first place
The better fix is upstream. The guide gives the loading rules plainly.
The limits worth knowing
- Top-ups are in ₩1,000 units, from ₩1,000 to ₩90,000 per transaction
- The card can hold a maximum of ₩500,000
How much to actually put on
Seoul's base subway fare is ₩1,550, verified 2026-08-05 against the Seoul Metropolitan Government's fare page, with transfers free inside the window.
Most sightseeing days come to two or three separate journeys. Call it ₩5,000 a day and top up in small amounts as you go rather than loading ₩50,000 on arrival because the machine offered it. Convenience stores are everywhere and the reload takes fifteen seconds.
The traveller who ends up at Tmoney Town on departure day is almost always the one who loaded a round number at the airport on day one.
Quick summary
- Refunds are given at Tmoney sales and top-up locations, in cash, with a ₩500 service fee, verified 2026-08-05 against Tmoney's official English guide.
- The card purchase price is never refunded — only the loaded balance.
- Subway stations are top-up only. You cannot close out a card at the machine that filled it.
- Partial refunds exist but only at Tmoney Town or a subway Tmoney service centre, only for ₩10,000–₩50,000, in ₩10,000 units, plate cards only.
- The widely quoted ₩20,000 convenience-store cap is not in the official guide and is not verified here.
- Tmoney Town is at Seoul Station Exit 10, Seoul City Tower 1F — the named location for larger amounts.
- Top-ups run ₩1,000 to ₩90,000 at a time, with a ₩500,000 maximum balance.
- Budget roughly ₩5,000 a day and reload as you go rather than front-loading.
Before you go
The pattern here is one you will meet again in Korea. There is an official page, in English, with the real rules on it — and there is a much louder consensus in travel guides that is close but not the same, and that nobody re-checks.
The official page is usually shorter and less satisfying than the blog version. It is also the one the person behind the counter is working from.
Verified 2026-08-05. If a convenience store has refunded you an amount that contradicts any of this, the contact page is right there — that is exactly the correction worth having.
Sources and last verification
Prices, fares and hours in Korea change often. Everything above was checked against these sources on the dates shown. If you spot something out of date, please tell me via the contact page.
- Tmoney — Foreigner Guide (official English usage guide) — accessed 2026-08-05
- 서울시 교통정보 — 대중교통 요금 안내 (Seoul Metropolitan Government, transit fares) — accessed 2026-08-05
- VISITKOREA (Korea Tourism Organization) — Transportation cards — accessed 2026-08-05
I was born in Korea and still live here. Travelling abroad, I have been the person stuck at a ticket machine in a language I could not read, holding up the queue and guessing — and I know how small a thing it takes to ruin an afternoon. This site exists so that visitors to Korea do not have to guess. Every price, route and rule here is checked against an official source before it is published, and dated so you can see how current it is.
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