At Schiphol you can board any train or bus by tapping a contactless Visa, Mastercard, Maestro or V PAY card, or the same card in Apple Pay or Google Pay, at the yellow OVpay post or gate. No registration, no app, no Dutch bank account. You pay the standard second-class fare (€5.50 to Amsterdam Centraal), the money leaves your account the next day, and the one rule that costs tourists real money is forgetting to tap out: NS then charges €33.30, refundable but only if you claim it.
Checked in September 2026 against NS, which sets the train fares and the correction fees, and against the NS list of accepted cards. Sources at the end.
What is OVpay and does it work for foreign cards?
OVpay is the Dutch public-transport payment system that lets a contactless bank card act as a ticket. It replaced the old requirement to buy an OV-chipkaart and works on every train, bus, tram and metro in the country, including NS trains from Schiphol Airport station and the Connexxion 397 airport bus. You tap the same card in at the start and out at the end, and the fare for the distance is calculated afterwards.
Foreign cards are accepted: NS lists contactless debit and credit cards from Maestro, V PAY, Mastercard and Visa, whether physical or loaded into a phone or watch. A handful are excluded, among them Revolut virtual cards, Vivid and Paysafe, so carry a physical card from a mainstream bank as a fallback. American Express is not on the accepted list for tapping in, although you can buy an e-ticket with it.
How much does a tap cost from Schiphol?
With a bank card you always pay the full second-class fare with no discount, and you cannot travel first class this way. For NS that means the same price as an undiscounted e-ticket: €5.50 from Schiphol Airport to Amsterdam Centraal, checked September 2026, with no machine surcharge and nothing to print. Longer trips scale by distance; the NS network caps a second-class single at €33.30 in 2026. On the 397 bus a single is €6.50.
You will not see the price on the post when you tap. It appears in your bank app the next day, when all journeys of that calendar day are debited together as one line from Trans Link Systems, usually with an NLOV reference number. If you want the breakdown per trip, look it up on the OVpay travel overview site with that reference, or link the card in the NS app.
| Situation | What you pay |
|---|---|
| Tap in and out correctly, Schiphol – Amsterdam Centraal | €5.50 (2nd class, no discount) |
| Forgot to tap out of an NS train | €33.30 correction fee, refundable on request |
| Forgot to tap in (tapped out only) | the tap-out is registered as a tap-in; missed check-out fee applies |
| Tapped in with phone, out with the physical card | treated as two incomplete journeys: €20 plus €33.30 |
| Two people, one card | not allowed; each traveller needs their own card |
Where exactly do you tap at Schiphol?
For the train, the yellow posts and the gate readers are at the entrances to the station under Schiphol Plaza, next to the yellow NS ticket machines. Hold the card flat on the reader until the screen shows a green check-in confirmation; the message reads “IN Debit Card” or the credit-card equivalent. At your destination station tap out on the gate or post the same way. At Amsterdam Centraal you must pass a gate to leave, which forces the tap-out; at smaller open stations it is easy to walk past the post and forget.
For the 397 and N97 buses, the reader is beside the driver and at the other doors. Tap when you board and tap again when you get off. On the train, the conductor scans your card the same way as an OV-chipkaart and sees only whether and where you checked in, not your name or balance. See our train page for platforms and the bus page for stop B17.
What happens if you forget to check out?
NS charges a fixed correction fee because it does not know where your journey ended: €33.30 for a missed check-out and €20 for a missed check-in when you pay by bank card. The amount is refundable. From six hours after the journey, open the OVpay travel overview, find the trip by its NLOV reference and the amount debited, enter the station where you actually got off, and the difference is returned to your account within about five days. NS conditions allow this correction up to three times per calendar year.
The same fee applies if your phone battery dies before you can tap out, and if you check in with one form of the card and out with another: the gate treats the physical card and the card in your phone wallet as two different cards. Pick one and use it for both taps.
When is a ticket better than tapping?
Tapping is the right default for one or two people making single trips. A ticket wins in four cases. Children aged 4 to 11 travel on a €2.50 Railrunner ticket that OVpay cannot give you. Groups of two or more travelling off-peak can be cheaper on the NS group ticket; our cheapest-way guide runs the numbers. Anyone wanting first class needs a ticket, since bank-card taps are second class only. And if you will use trams and buses in Amsterdam for several days, the Amsterdam & Region Travel Ticket (€23, €34 or €44 for one to three days) covers the airport train and city transport together, which a string of individual taps will not beat.
One more practical point: the €50 limit that some banks put on contactless payments without a PIN does not apply to public transport, so a long trip will not be refused at the post. What does get a card blocked for transport is an earlier fare that could not be collected; tap it at any post once the account has funds and it clears within about fifteen minutes.
Sources
Accepted cards, the second-class-only rule, the same-card requirement, next-day debiting and the €50 exemption come from the NS FAQ on travelling with a debit card. The €33.30 and €20 correction amounts are on the NS correction fee page; the three-corrections-per-year limit is in the NS refund conditions valid from 1 January 2025. The €5.50 and €2.50 fares are the published NS prices for Schiphol Airport – Amsterdam Centraal; the travel-ticket prices are GVB's 2026 list.
Fees and fares are the figures most likely to move at the January tariff change, which is why they are dated here. The mechanics of tapping in and out have been stable since OVpay replaced the chipcard as the default.
