Check your EasyCard balance online, in English

1. Enter the 10-digit card number printed on the back of your EasyCard.
2. If a birthdate field appears, your card is a registered EasyCard. Enter the date it was registered with. Anonymous cards, the ones sold at MRT stations and convenience stores, never ask for this.
3. Solve the captcha. It's EasyCard's own captcha, relayed through this site.
4. Your balance and transaction history appear in English, covering up to the last year of activity.

Checking a Taiwan EasyCard (悠遊卡) balance online is supposed to be simple, and for residents it is. For tourists it's not that straightforward. The official Easy Wallet app requires a Taiwan phone number and is Mandarin-only. The official website balance enquiry tool is Mandarin-only too.

This site fills that gap. Your lookup is relayed through this site's server to EasyCard's official data (the same balance and trip information EasyCard exposes publicly) and shown back to you in English. No account, no download, no Mandarin required.

It's free, and it was built by an expat in Taiwan who got tired of squinting at a Mandarin-only interface every time he wanted to know whether his card had enough on it for the MRT home.

There are seven ways to check what's on an EasyCard.

The official Easy Wallet app (悠遊付) is the one everybody recommends, but it's the one most visitors can't use. It's published to the Taiwan App Store only, so if your Apple or Google account is set to any other region, the app is invisible to you. Even after you install it, activation needs a phone number that can receive a one-time password. It also requires identity verification: a Taiwanese national ID, or an ARC (居留證) for foreign residents, photographed front and back and reviewed by staff. Foreigners couldn't register at all until EasyCard added the ARC route in May 2020.

The online option for tourist then relies on the official EasyCard balance enquiry tool, but that one is in Mandarin only and the UI is very poor.

So a tourist visting Taiwan doesn't have a very user friendly way to simply check if they can jump on the bus or not with their remaining balance. This site is therefore the easiest way to check your balance online in English

Here's how the options compare.

The takeaway: one year is the maximal query period online, for the official website and for this site alike. Anything older has to be requested in person at EasyCard's offices. And every online method, including this one, starts its window three days before today. See the troubleshooting section for more details about that.

EasyCard returns each tap as a row with five pieces of information, and none of them are labelled in English anywhere official. Here's what each column means.

Date and time is when the transaction was processed, which isn't always the moment you tapped. Type tells you whether value left the card or went onto it: a top-up (加值) adds to the balance, everything else (fares, purchases, parking) subtracts from it. Merchant is where it happened. Amount is the value of that single transaction, and Balance is what was left on the card right after it. Rows are listed newest first.

The merchant column originally only returns the merchant names in English. This site keeps a dictionary of a few hundred of the most common operators and translates them for you. The toggle above the table switches between the English name and the original Chinese. Anything not in the dictionary yet stays in Chinese, in italics, rather than being guessed at.

These are the names you're most likely to see.

Taipei MRT stations come back as 台北捷運 followed by the station name, so 台北捷運西門 is Ximen and 台北捷運市政府 is Taipei City Hall. The same pattern holds for the Kaohsiung, Taichung and Taoyuan systems. Bus fares are listed under the operating company, not the route number, which is why a single trip across town can show up under a name you've never heard of.

One last thing before you go hunting for a missing trip: taps from the last few days won't be here yet. That's expected, and the next section explains why.

Most of the confusion around online EasyCard lookups comes down to one of these.

1. I used the card an hour ago and the trip isn't listed

That's the three-day reporting lag above. The balance you see reflects transactions EasyCard has already processed, so a very recent tap can be missing from the list even though the money has left the card. Check back in a couple of days and it'll be there.

2. There are no transactions at all

Online records reach back one year and no further. A card that's been sitting in a drawer since your last trip will look empty even though it has plenty of older history. Records between one and two years old can be requested in person at EasyCard's offices with the card and your ID; records between two and five years old need a phone request first and take about seven working days to prepare.

3. It asked for a birthday and rejected the one I entered

That means your card is a registered EasyCard, and the birthday has to match the one used when it was registered, not simply your date of birth if someone else registered the card for you. Anonymous cards, the ones you buy off the shelf at an MRT station or convenience store, are never asked for a birthday.

4. It says the card is expired

EasyCards have a physical lifespan of about twenty years, after which readers report them as expired. Your balance is not gone. It stays on the card, and the card can be renewed for another five years free of charge at any 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, Hi-Life or OK Mart, at Taipei MRT add-value machines and information counters, or at an EasyCard service centre. Transaction history on an expired card is still queryable, here and officially.

5. The card isn't recognised at all

The most likely explanation is that it's not an EasyCard. iPass (一卡通) and iCash are separate cards run by different companies, and although all three work on the same buses and trains nationwide, each has its own balance lookup. Check the logo on the card: this site reads 悠遊卡 / EasyCard only.

6. The balance doesn't match what the gate showed me

The reader at the gate is instant and this lookup isn't. What you see here is the balance after the transactions EasyCard has finished processing, so on a busy travel day the two can drift apart by a fare or two before catching up.

This isn't a general guide to Taiwan travel cards. Plenty of those exist and several are very good. These are just the things that come up constantly when people are looking at their balance.

Cards last about twenty years, and balances never expire

The twenty-year limit is about the physical card: the antenna inside it ages. It's not a deadline on your money. When a reader finally calls a card expired, the stored value is still there, and you can have the card renewed for another five years at no cost. Convenience stores, MRT machines and counters, or an EasyCard service centre will all do it, and you don't need to have registered the card. You can also check a card's expiry date on EasyCard's own site; this site shows it to you automatically after a lookup.

Registered and anonymous cards behave differently

An anonymous card is the default, the one sold off the shelf at MRT stations and convenience stores. It works like cash. That's fine until you lose it, at which point whoever picks it up can spend the balance, and there's no way to get it back even if you know the card number.

A registered card is tied to a person, which historically has required a Taiwan phone number and ID. The benefit is 掉卡不掉錢: lose the card, not the money. You report it lost on EasyCard's website and the remaining balance comes back to you about three hours later, with EasyCard covering anything spent in the meantime. Registration is free and optional, and it makes no difference to whether the card works.

This is also why the birthday field on this site is conditional. Registered cards need a birthday to authenticate the lookup. Anonymous ones don't, because there's no identity attached to them. If you're visiting and can't register a card, the practical advice is just don't load a large amount onto it.

Getting your balance back before you leave

You can refund the stored value at any Taipei MRT customer service counter, at the Taoyuan Airport MRT service booth on your way out, or at an EasyCard service centre. What comes back is the remaining balance. The NT$100 you paid for the card itself is a non-refundable purchase fee, not a deposit. That changed on 1 August 2016, and the older "you get your NT$100 back" advice you'll still find online is out of date. A small handling fee can also apply to cards that were barely used before being refunded.

Two limits matter if you're leaving the country. Refunds up to NT$1,000 are paid in cash on the spot, but anything over NT$3,000 can't legally be paid in cash and has to go to a Taiwanese bank account, which most visitors don't have. So don't over-top-up before your last week. For most travellers the easiest option is not to refund at all: spend the balance down at 7-Eleven on the way to the airport, or keep the card. It'll still work on your next trip.

EasyCard is not iPass

EasyCard (悠遊卡) started in Taipei and iPass (一卡通) started in Kaohsiung, and they're run by two different companies. Since 2017 both have been accepted for public transport nationwide, so travellers often end up with one without knowing which. They aren't interchangeable for balance lookups: this site reads EasyCards only, and an iPass has its own separate system. The name is printed on the card.