London tube zones, explained

Zone 1 is central London — roughly the area inside the main line termini, taking in the City, the West End, Westminster and Southwark's northern edge. Zone 2 is the ring around it, covering most of what people think of as inner London: Camden, Islington, Hackney, Brixton, Clapham, Shepherd's Bush.

Zones 3 to 6 work outwards from there, with Zone 6 reaching the edge of Greater London and Heathrow. Zones 7 to 9 cover a handful of stations beyond the boundary on lines that run into Hertfordshire, Essex and Buckinghamshire.

Some stations sit on a zone boundary and count as either — which is quietly useful, because it can make a journey cheaper than the map suggests.

The fare you pay depends on which zones you travel through, whether you travel at peak time, and how you pay. Contactless and Oyster pay-as-you-go are always cheaper than a paper single, and there is no meaningful difference between contactless and Oyster for adult fares.

The number that matters most for commuting is the daily cap: once your fares reach it, everything else that day is free. The Zone 1–2 cap is £8.90, and it is the same peak and off-peak. Caps run from 04:30 to 04:29 the following morning, so a late night out counts against the day it started.

Buses are separate and much cheaper, with their own lower daily cap, and a bus journey does not count towards your Tube zone cap. If your commute can be done partly by bus, it often should be.

The standard advice is that moving out a zone saves you rent. It does — the rent gradient across London is steep, and moving from Zone 2 to Zone 3 in the same corridor commonly saves £150 to £250 a month on a room.

But you pay for it twice: once in fares, and once in time. A Zone 1–3 daily cap is higher than Zone 1–2, so five days a week adds up over a month. And an extra fifteen minutes each way is two and a half hours a week, or roughly five full days a year spent on a train.

The arithmetic usually still favours moving out, at least as far as Zone 3, because the rent saving is larger than the fare increase. Past Zone 4 it gets less clear, and the time cost starts to dominate the money.

This is where people go wrong. Zone measures distance from the centre, not how long it takes to get anywhere. A Zone 3 station on the Victoria line can be faster into the West End than a Zone 2 station with one slow line and a change.

The Elizabeth line changed this substantially — it put parts of Zone 4 and 5 within genuinely quick reach of the City and the West End, and rents in those corridors have moved accordingly.

So check the actual journey, on the actual line, at the actual time you would travel. Zone tells you what the ticket costs; only the route tells you what your morning looks like.