Metro Stations No Longer Accept Cash

The Shanghai Metro officially stopped accepting cash for transportation card refills, or purchases at their service booths on December 25th of 2016. A few stations are still accepting cash for new card purchases, but the metro hasn’t released any official info about where. 

Notice announcing the termination of cash services for purchasing new cards and reflll

Metro users may have noticed the past couple weeks that there has been a drastic reduction of employees at all of the metro station’s customer assistance booths.

The move coincides with the addition of numerous alipay card refill machines (which accept alipay and bank cards, but not cash). You can also use still use the original temporary card machines, as well as the often elusive ‘add value’  cash machines that are not in every station.

The machines are simple to use and have an English language option. The machines accept Alipay, UnionPay bank cards, 99 bill and credit cards. Sadly though, it doesn’t take cash. If you want to use that you may be out of luck.