TuLlave: Bogotá's concession-run fare card & preloaded free trips
TuLlave, issued since 2012 by the private concessionaire Recaudo Bogotá under a contract running to 2028, is the single card for TransMilenio's trunk buses, the zonal SITP fleet and the TransMiCable gondolas, with free transfers inside a 125-minute window — on personalised cards only. On 1 February 2025 the city abolished the discounted fare for poor, elderly and disabled riders and instead began preloading their cards with free trips, 1 to 12 a month depending on Sisbén band. Bank cards are read at just two stations, at the full COP 3,550 fare and with no transfer, so the open loop costs more than the card. Three arbitration tribunals have ruled for the concessionaire, one of them placing responsibility for fare-evasion control on TransMilenio S.A. rather than on the collector; evasion cost the system about 295 billion pesos in 2025.
More than 636,000 people received preloaded free trips in 2025 — 294,000 aged over 62, 106,000 with disabilities and 236,000 living in poverty (city figures).
🎓 Lesson
Outsourcing collection is not the same as outsourcing the risk: three tribunals kept the concessionaire's revenue whole while leaving the fare-evasion loss with the public agency.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingFare revenue under concession contract 001 of 2011; free trips funded from the district budget
Sources
↗ TuLlave (Recaudo Bogotá / TransMilenio) — card benefitsOperator page. Carries the 125-minute transfer window ("habilitando la ventana de tiempo de los 125 minutos"), the two-trip credit facility, balance protection after blocking, and the list of covered services: troncal, zonal (urban/complementary/special), dual and TransMiCable.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — 2026 fare adjustment (Abecé)City source for the single COP 3,550 fare across TransMilenio, TransMiZonal and TransMiCable from 14 January 2026 (+10.9%), for the unchanged 125-minute transfer, and for the 2025 free-trip take-up: more than 636,000 people (294,000 over 62; 106,000 with disabilities; 236,000 in poverty), with a February 2026 extension to residents of temporary housing, transitional care centres and shelters at a projected ~COP 60bn.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — new transport subsidy scheme, 2025Carries the start date ("a partir del 1 de febrero de 2025"), the monthly free-trip bands (1–12 for people with disabilities, 1–8 for over-62s, 5–7 for poor households, by Sisbén IV level A1–B7), the abolition of the previous discount ("Los descuentos en tarifas actuales serán reemplazados por los pasajes gratuitos") and the projection of "aproximadamente 820.000 personas" — a projection the 2026 notice does not confirm; delivery reached 636,000.
↗ TuLlave — Mastercard and Visa digital payments in the systemOperator announcement of the open-loop pilot: three readers at Portal Norte from December 2024, fare then COP 3,200, and the explicit condition "tarifa plena y no aplican transbordos" — the transfer benefit is reserved for personalised TuLlave cards.
↗ El Tiempo — bank cards and phones enabled at TransMilenio stations (19 Jan 2026)Establishes the current footprint of the open loop: validators at Portal Norte–Unicervantes and El Tiempo–Cámara de Comercio only, charging the full COP 3,550 fare from 14 January 2026, with free transfers lost. Confirms TuLlave remains the only route to a transfer.
↗ El Tiempo — why TransMilenio has lost three tribunal rulings to Recaudo Bogotá (June 2023)Load-bearing for the ownership question: concession signed August 2011 and running to 2028; December 2016 award of COP 6,511m (COP 25,092m with interest); May 2021 tribunal awarding no money but holding TransMilenio responsible for evasion control; 2023 award of COP 76,417m. El Espectador reported the same 2023 award at about COP 74bn (headline verified by search; the article itself was not fetched), so the entry states the finding, not a single exact figure.
↗ Noticias RCN — fare evasion losses reach COP 295bn a year (10 Jul 2026)Counterweight, citing Concejo de Bogotá data: 83 million fare evasions in 2025, losses close to COP 295,000 millones, about 227,000 people entering without paying each day, and full-height turnstiles installed at 21 stations.
↗ Concejo de Bogotá — evasion cost the city more than COP 265bn in 2025Fetch failed with HTTP 503 on 26 July 2026. Search indexing shows a 13% evasion rate for 2025 (15.19% in the second half during metro works) and anti-evasion doors at only 40 of 129 stations; because the page could not be read, neither figure is used in the entry.
↗ Semana — the plan to integrate metro and TransMilenio payment (4 Mar 2026)Currency check: the Secretaría Distrital de Movilidad opened tender LP-10-2026 for a Sistema Interoperable de Recaudo, targeted for October 2027, to cover the metro and Regiotram de Occidente alongside the existing system. The article does not state who will own the new system or its data.
↗ El Tiempo — how TransMilenio cards were cloned (5 Jul 2016)Corrects the obvious assumption: the fraud of more than COP 27,000 millones hit the legacy red and blue Angelcom cards (Cliente Frecuente and Monedero), roughly 15 million of which were still circulating, not TuLlave; officials described the green card as using banking-grade technology. Cloned cards were finished with green stickers to pass as TuLlave.
↗ Datos Abiertos Bogotá — TransMilenio S.A. datasetsOpen-data check, fetched 26 July 2026: 34 datasets, licensed CC BY 4.0 (20), CC BY-SA 4.0 (12) and CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (2) — the first non-commercial licence encountered in this atlas's licence series. The catalogue covers routes, stations, cable pylons and operational zones. A "Validaciones Tarjeta Tullave – SITP" dataset (search index: last modified 2022) returned HTTP 404 at https://datosabiertos.bogota.gov.co/dataset/validaciones-tarjeta-tullave-sitp and is absent from the current listing, so fare-card boarding data is not published today.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “TuLlave: Bogotá's concession-run fare card & preloaded free trips” — Bogotá, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bogota-tullave-fare-card/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
