Metro fare study
Cheapest Metro in India Per Kilometre: All 22 Networks Ranked
We divided smart-card fares by real route distances across every Indian metro. Ahmedabad is the cheapest ride at ₹0.99/km; Bhopal costs over 8 times more.
On paper, metro fares across India look alike — most start at ₹10 and top out somewhere between ₹40 and ₹60. But what you actually pay per kilometre varies wildly, because a ₹20 ticket buys 12 km in one city and barely 3 km in another.
We took the smart-card fare of every rank-1 route in our database and divided it by the real distance travelled, giving a like-for-like cost per kilometre. The result: Ahmedabad's metro is the cheapest ride in the country at about ₹0.99 per km, while Bhopal's newer line works out to ₹8.39 per km — 8.5 times as much.
Cheapest
₹0.99/km
Ahmedabad
Most expensive
₹8.39/km
Bhopal
National spread
8.5×
cheapest to priciest
Networks compared
17
real route data
Smart-card fare per km (cheapest first)
Ahmedabad
Kolkata
Delhi
Chennai
Pune
Delhi–Meerut RRTS
Nagpur
Lucknow
Mumbai
Bengaluru
Navi Mumbai
Kochi
Jaipur
Kanpur
Hyderabad
Agra
Bhopal
How we measured this
Full ranking
| # | City | ₹/km (smart) | ₹/km (token) | Avg trip |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ahmedabad | ₹0.99 | ₹1.10 | 15.9 km |
| 2 | Kolkata | ₹1.34 | ₹1.34 | 13.2 km |
| 3 | Delhi | ₹1.88 | ₹2.07 | 25.7 km |
| 4 | Chennai | ₹2.26 | ₹2.82 | 11.7 km |
| 5 | Pune | ₹2.82 | ₹2.82 | 7.3 km |
| 6 | Delhi–Meerut RRTS | ₹2.96 | ₹2.96 | 28.5 km |
| 7 | Nagpur | ₹3.00 | ₹3.33 | 7.6 km |
| 8 | Lucknow | ₹3.06 | ₹3.40 | 8.3 km |
| 9 | Mumbai | ₹3.22 | ₹3.22 | 12 km |
| 10 | Bengaluru | ₹3.36 | ₹3.54 | 17.7 km |
| 11 | Navi Mumbai | ₹3.47 | ₹3.86 | 4.1 km |
| 12 | Kochi | ₹3.48 | ₹3.48 | 9.4 km |
| 13 | Jaipur | ₹3.56 | ₹3.95 | 4.1 km |
| 14 | Kanpur | ₹3.62 | ₹4.02 | 5.5 km |
| 15 | Hyderabad | ₹3.98 | ₹3.98 | 10.6 km |
| 16 | Agra | ₹5.78 | ₹6.42 | 2.4 km |
| 17 | Bhopal | ₹8.39 | ₹8.39 | 3.2 km |
Key findings
- 1
Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Delhi are the only networks under ₹2/km — big, mature systems where longer average trips spread the fare out.
- 2
The newest, shortest lines (Bhopal, Agra, Kanpur, Jaipur) sit at the expensive end, but that's mostly a distance artefact: a ₹10 minimum fare over a 2–3 km hop always looks pricey per km.
- 3
On most networks a smart card is 10–15% cheaper than a paper token — worth it if you ride more than a couple of times.
- 4
The Delhi–Meerut RRTS is premium-priced overall, yet only ₹2.96/km because trips are so long — cheaper per km than 11 city metros.