Climate Card payback: foreign residents claim on paper by 31 August

If you are a foreign resident who charged a 30-day Climate Card between April and June, Seoul owes you money and you have until 31 August to ask for it. That is the whole answer. The interesting part is how the city counts it, because everything written about this in English counts it by the month and Seoul does not.

What the payback is

Seoul introduced this in June against fuel prices. Charge a 30-day Climate Card between 1 April and 30 June 2026, let it run to expiry without refunding it, and you get 30,000 won back, to a maximum of 90,000 won. It covers Seoul plus Gimpo, Gwacheon, Guri, Seongnam and Hanam, and every band of the pass qualifies.

The exclusions are refunding a pass before it expired, buying a short-term pass instead of a 30-day one, living outside those six areas, and never having registered on the T-money Card and Pay website. The online claim opened on 10 June and closes on 31 August.

It is counted per charge, not per month

Every English description of this scheme, including Seoul’s own, calls it a monthly refund of 30,000 won for three months. The city’s Korean FAQ says something different, and it is more generous.

The FAQ states the basis plainly: the payback is reckoned on the charging date. Two charges inside a single calendar month are two separate paybacks, and its own worked example runs a card charged on 30 April, nothing at all in May, a charge on 1 June and another on 30 June, and awards three paybacks.

Read that again. A month in which you charged nothing does not cost you a payback, and a month in which you charged twice pays you twice.

The cap is on the total, not the calendar: three paybacks, 90,000 won. So the question to answer before you claim is not “how many months did I hold a pass” but “how many times did I charge one and let it expire between 1 April and 30 June”. If the second number is bigger than the first, the monthly framing has been costing you.

On a postpaid card the amount is a calculation

The second thing the English pages leave out is that 30,000 won is not always the number.

On a postpaid Climate Card the city looks at what you actually spent on public transport in the 30 days from your first use that month. Clear a threshold and you get the full 30,000 won. Fall short of it and you get your spending minus a floor, capped at 30,000 won.

The FAQ works two of these through. A two-children band holder who first used the card on 7 April and spent 58,000 won over the next 30 days clears the 55,000 won threshold and receives the full 30,000 won. A three-children band holder who first used the card on 20 May and spent 29,000 won receives 29,000 minus 15,000, which the FAQ prints as 14,000 won.

Note where the threshold sits. It is the price of the pass, not the floor. An adult has to spend 62,000 won of transport in the 30 days to receive the full amount, and an adult who spent 45,000 won receives 13,000 won.

It is a ceiling, not a rate. If you carried a postpaid card through a quiet month, plan on less.

A prepaid card is not calculated this way at all. The FAQ says outright that a prepaid card has no threshold: charge it, do not refund it, let it expire, and the payback is yours. You may also register a prepaid card on the T-money website after the fact and still claim, where a postpaid card had to be registered before you used it. There is no registering a postpaid card now to rescue a claim.

Two city pages disagree about the untouched card

One question sits underneath all of that, and Seoul answers it twice, in opposite directions.

The FAQ says the payback does not depend on use, and that a card charged and never once tapped still qualifies. The city news page announcing the scheme puts people who did not spend the charged money on its list of the excluded, next to short-term pass holders and people who took a refund.

Both are Seoul, both are cited here, and neither mentions the other. The FAQ is the document written to answer this exact question and it is the more specific of the two, so it is the better reading. It is still a reading. If you rode the card at all this does not touch you. If you charged one and left it in a drawer, treat the money as arguable rather than owed, and phone 1644-0088 before you count on it.

Why a foreign resident is sent to a paper form

Seoul states eligibility as a residency test, and the wording is doing work. The FAQ says the payback goes to people whose resident registration address is in one of the six areas, and that an address outside them does not qualify.

A registered foreign resident does have a legally registered address in Korea. It sits under foreigner registration rather than resident registration, and the state issues a certificate of it. The obstacle is not the address. It is the check: the FAQ reveals, in an answer about a scheduled outage, that the online residence verification runs through the Government24 system, and that is the door a foreigner registration does not open in the same way. The same wall shows up under the scheme replacing this one, which the Modu Card article sets out in detail.

So a separate channel exists, and it is a paper form open during August. That channel was not built for foreigners. Seoul announced it in June for over-65s who struggle with online services, and foreigners were added to it alongside people who moved out of the city, people whose login broke after naturalisation or a registration number change, under-14s and 2G phone users. Those five categories matter to you for a practical reason covered below.

The pages do not agree on whether every foreigner may use it. Seoul’s own FAQ carries both versions: one answer says a foreigner registered on the T-money site and living in the eligible area can claim, with no further test, and another says the manual route is for foreigners whose residence cannot be verified. T-money’s page says foreigners with no qualifier. The Seoul Foreign Portal notice, the page actually addressed to you, adds the test back. The Korea Herald followed the narrower version.

Apply anyway. Every route into the online form runs through the verification that the narrow wording describes failing, so the two versions land on substantially the same people, and the operator that receives the envelope is the one using the unqualified wording. If your own residence check did go through online, you did not need this article.

That is worth settling rather than guessing at, because T-money attaches a penalty. It says applications from outside the eligible categories cannot be accepted and that the documents sent in are destroyed. Name that plainly: the body deciding whether you belong to a category is the body that shreds your registration certificate and your bank details if it decides you do not, and its city does not define the category the same way twice.

What goes in the envelope

Two places carry the form. T-money’s manual-application page has a print link for it, which is where Seoul’s English announcement said it would be. The Seoul Foreign Portal posted it on 3 August as a PDF and a HWP file, in Korean.

Three items go in:

1. The completed application form with its personal-data consent section.
2. A certificate of alien registration facts. This is the printed certificate stating your registered address, not a photocopy of the plastic residence card. Sending the card instead is the mistake this route punishes.
3. A copy of a bank passbook or account document in your own name. An account belonging to somebody else is refused outright.

The account has to be an ordinary one you can pay in and out of. Between them the FAQ and the Foreign Portal rule out seizure-protected accounts, suspended and closed accounts, savings bank accounts, securities accounts and virtual accounts.

The reason in that subject line is why the five categories above are worth knowing. Yours is that you are a foreign resident.

Two more conditions. The details on the documents have to match your T-money membership, and the operator lists a mismatch as a reason to refuse. And the Korea Herald’s English write-up says the certificate has to have been issued within the past month, which the city’s own notice does not say. A fresh certificate costs nothing, so get one dated this month rather than betting on the looser reading being the one applied.

The deadline, and which version of it binds

The window is 1 to 31 August. For post, T-money accepts a postmark up to and including Monday 31 August, so the envelope has to leave your hands by that day rather than arrive by it. Its general caution elsewhere on the page, that a claim cannot be paid if documents arrive after the application period, is the catch-all that the postal sentence carves an exception out of.

Email sidesteps the question entirely and confirms itself, which is the reason to use it unless you have none.

On payment, the published schedule belongs to the online route: claims filed between 21 July and 20 August are paid from 31 August, and claims filed between 21 and 31 August are paid from 30 September. No date has been published for the paper route, so treat the money as arriving in late September and do not plan around it.

This is the last money this card pays out

The Climate Card is being switched off. Seoul extended it by a month in July, so the last day to charge a prepaid 30-day pass is 31 August, a prepaid card works until 29 September and a postpaid one until 30 September. From 1 September the city’s version of the national Modu Card scheme takes over.

Which settles one thing: charging a pass today earns no payback. Only 1 April to 30 June charges count. The last charge date and the last claim date landing together on 31 August is a scheduling coincidence rather than a rule, and it means there is one date to write down.

If you are moving onto the replacement scheme, the registration check that sent you to this paper form is waiting there too, and the Modu Card article covers what its sign-up flow asks for. If you are working out whether any pass beats paying per journey once the Climate Card is gone, the T-money article has the arithmetic.

What is not checked here

The amounts, the formula, the charging-date rule, the documents, the channels and the dates above come from the city’s, the operator’s and the Seoul Foreign Portal’s own pages, read today.

I have not read the application form itself. It is a PDF and a HWP attachment and neither opens to text here, which is a limitation this site has run into on government attachments before. Everything above about the documents comes from the notice the form hangs off. If the form asks for something else, the form wins.

I have not confirmed that a foreign resident can complete T-money website membership in the first place. Both the FAQ answer and the operator’s mismatch rule assume you are already a member, and the paper route replaces the payback application rather than the membership behind it. The sign-up verification page returns nothing readable, so if you have never registered, treat that as the step to settle first and phone 1644-0088 about it rather than posting a form and hoping. The verification methods are the same family of Korean bank and phone checks that the connectivity article covers, and a data-only eSIM does not satisfy them.

The FAQ’s table of postpaid spending floors omits the adolescent band, which appears in the charge table earlier on the same page at 25,000 won. That is unverified for postpaid purposes, so a 13 to 18-year-old cardholder should ask rather than assume the floor carries across.

The 13,000 won figure above is my arithmetic on the city’s rule, not a number Seoul prints. The two examples the FAQ works through are the ones quoted before it.

If you send this in and something here turns out to be wrong at the receiving end, tell me what happened. This route opened on 1 August and almost nothing about how it behaves in practice is public yet. And if you have just arrived and none of it applies, start here.