T-money refund at the airport: 30,000 won at CU, not 20,000

The leftover balance on a T-money card comes back in cash at a convenience store counter, minus a 500 won fee. That part every guide gets right.

What decides whether the counter will do it is a number, and the number depends on the logo over the door. T-money’s own Korean refund table sets three different ceilings for three groups of chains. Its English guide for foreigners sets none.

Can you refund a T-money card at a convenience store?

Yes, up to the chain’s limit. T-money writes these in Korean as 2만원 and 3만원, so 20,000 and 30,000 won , and the wording around each one is worth reading closely.

The difference between 미만 and 이하 is the difference between “under” and “up to”. A card holding exactly 20,000 won can be cashed out at 7-Eleven and cannot be cashed out at GS25.

The table states two more rules for every store row. The refund is the whole balance minus the fee, paid in cash, and the price of the card is not refunded. Nothing in it lets a store refund part of a balance. Partial refunds are listed separately, and only for T-money’s head office, which is T-money Town, and the customer service centres inside Seoul-area subway stations.

Put those together and the ceiling becomes a wall. A card holding more than 30,000 won is over every store’s limit, and since no store may refund part of it, no convenience store in the country can cash it out.

What the English guide leaves out

T-money publishes a guide for foreigners in English, linked from its Korean guide pages. Its refund section is short. It tells you to present the card at any place that sells or tops up T-money and tell the staff how much you want refunded, says the card price is not included and the fee is 500 won, and then adds a caution that partial refunds are only available at T-money Town and subway service centres, for 10,000 to 50,000 won in units of 10,000.

There is no ceiling anywhere in it. A visitor reading only the English page has no way to know that GS25 stops below 20,000 won, and the instruction to name an amount is one the stores on the Korean table are not set up to follow.

Read the Korean table, not the English page. When they differ, the Korean one is the operator’s actual rulebook and the English one is a summary of it.

T-money refund at Incheon Airport

The airport operator’s shop list for Terminal 1 returns seven convenience stores, all open 24 hours. The list came back short across every category, so it may not be complete. Five of the seven are marked 일반지역, the public area before security, and all five are CUs:

The two by the gates are on the departures floor next to gate numbers, which reads like the airside area, but the list does not say so. Treat everything past security as unconfirmed and cash out before you go through.

That the public-area stores are CUs is good news, because CU has the higher ceiling. What neither the airport nor T-money publishes is whether each airport branch actually performs refunds. The Korean table lists convenience stores as a refund point by chain, not by branch. Ask at the till before you queue for security, and have a second plan if the answer is no.

The Terminal 2 list on the same site is switched in by script and did not load as text, so this page has no Terminal 2 store list to give you.

Over 30,000 won: how to refund the rest

This is where most departing visitors actually get stuck, because the airport convenience store is the first place they try and it cannot take a balance this size.

T-money’s Korean page names three other routes:

• A subway station customer service centre in the Seoul area. It has no row in the table. It appears only in the notes, once as a refund point and once as one of the two places that do partial refunds, so its ceiling for a full refund is not stated.
• T-money Town at Seoul Station, covered in the next section.
• A bank ATM, at Shinhan, Woori, Hana, KB Kookmin, Shinhyup, Jeju Bank or the post office, which moves the balance into an account at that bank in your own name; Shinhyup and KB take only cards they issued themselves. That works for a foreign resident with a Korean account and not for a visitor.

The partial refund is the useful tool here. Take back 10,000 won at a time, up to 50,000 won, and leave on the card what you need for the airport train. The English guide limits it to plate T-money cards, the plain card-shaped ones, so a character or mini T-money may not qualify. T-money’s diagram for the service shows the 500 won fee taken before the requested amount is paid out.

If you are already at the airport with more than that on the card, the other honest option is to spend it down. Once the balance is at or below 30,000 won, it is inside CU’s limit, if that branch does refunds.

T-money refund at Seoul Station: T-money Town

T-money Town is the operator’s own counter, on the first floor of Seoul City Tower out of Seoul Station exit 10. The hours T-money prints for it, on its Mpass page, are 09:00 to 18:00, closed at weekends and on public holidays. A Saturday departure means the counter is closed on your last day.

The fee here is where T-money’s own page disagrees with itself. The T-money Town row of the Korean table charges nothing on up to 500,000 won a month and 1% above that, while the diagram for partial refunds, which only this counter and the subway centres do, shows 500 won taken first. Expect the 500 won on a partial refund and count it as a bonus if it is waived. The other rules at the counter:

That third row is the catch for a visitor. At 100,000 won or more the refund goes into an account, which in practice means a Korean one. Seoul’s own Climate Card page says a foreigner with no Korean account gets a cash refund by visiting T-money head office in person, but that line is written about Climate Cards. For a plain T-money card, the practical rule is to keep the balance under 100,000 won in the first place. T-money’s English guide caps a single top-up at 90,000 won, which helps.

Is the card itself refundable?

No. Both the English guide and the Korean table say so. The Tmoney Travel Card that T-money sells at Incheon Airport convenience stores and bus ticket offices costs 4,000 won, and that 4,000 won stays with the card.

Two exceptions are on T-money’s pages, and neither applies to most visitors:

• Mpass, the foreigner-only transport pass. Its price includes a 5,000 won deposit, and handing the card back returns 4,500 won, plus the T-money balance after the fee if 500 won or more is left on it. The only place T-money lists for returning it is T-money Town, so the airport is too late for an Mpass. What that does to its price against Seoul’s own day pass is on the Mpass page.
• A faulty card, where T-money’s faulty-card page pays the card price back for defective cards within a set period after the first top-up. A card that was physically damaged does not get its price back.

Keeping the card is a reasonable choice if you are coming back, since the card price is gone either way.

What I would do on the last day

Check the balance the evening before, on a subway top-up machine or at the counter of the store you plan to use.

Under 20,000 won, refund it at whatever store is nearest, including at the airport. Between 20,000 and 30,000 won, do it at a CU or an emart24, which at Incheon Terminal 1 means any of the public-area stores in the table above. Over 30,000 won, do it in Seoul, at a subway customer service centre or on a weekday at T-money Town, and keep back only the airport train fare. Those subway centres are a capital-area service, so if you are flying out of Busan instead, do the Seoul part before you go south; what is left in Busan is on the Busan and Gimhae refund page.

If you are coming back to Korea, keep the card and the balance. The Climate Card is a separate product with separate refund rules, and if you bought one of those the details are in the Climate Card shutdown page. For topping up in the first place, and why a foreign card will not always do it, see the top-up article.

What is not checked here yet

The limits, fees, partial-refund band and T-money Town rules are read off T-money’s Korean refund page and its Mpass page on 29 September 2026. That refund page carries no date of its own; the newest date in its notes is November 2018, when the mobile fee rule changed. So treat the store ceilings as T-money’s standing rule, not as a notice issued this year.

Three things below are unconfirmed, and here is what each one changes:

• Whether each Incheon airport branch does refunds. If one refuses, the next CU in the table is the fallback. If all refuse, the Seoul routes are the only ones left, which is why they come first for any large balance.
• The subway customer service centre’s ceiling for a full refund. T-money’s current table gives it no row. Its partial refunds stop at 50,000 won per request, so plan on that. An older city notice said 50,000 won at stations; that notice is dated 31 August 2011, so treat it as history rather than the rule.
• Terminal 2. The store list did not load as text.

If you have cashed out a card at the airport recently, at any of these stores, tell me which one and what happened, and this page will carry the answer with its date.