JR East and six other railways will swap paper magnetic tickets for QR tickets from spring 2027

East Japan Railway Company (JR East) said October 13 that it and six other operators -- Keisei Electric Railway, Keikyu Corporation, Sendai Airport Railway, Tokyo Monorail, Tobu Railway and Hokuso Railway -- will begin replacing paper magnetic tickets with QR-code tickets from spring 2027, across all of the seven companies' lines and stations.

The new tickets issued from vending machines will be a larger format, 57.5mm by 85mm, versus today's 30mm-by-57.5mm magnetic ticket, with some exceptions, the companies said. Passengers will hold the QR ticket to a reader at the gate on entry, then insert it into a collection box on exit; stations whose gates are not yet compatible will handle QR tickets through staffed windows instead, with details to follow.

The companies said other operators due to adopt QR ticketing from 2027 or later will announce their own start dates separately, and that further rules on usage and on changes to magnetic-ticket services will come in a later announcement; they are also coordinating the rollout with other railways, including through-service partners whose trains run onto each other's lines. The move, alongside continued promotion of the Suica and PASMO IC cards and their mobile versions, is meant to keep the rail network's ticketing sustainable over the long term, the companies said.

The announcement puts a firm date on a changeover first flagged in May 2024, when JR East and seven other operators said they intended to move from magnetic to QR ticketing. For a Japan reader, the detail that matters most is less the ticket stock than the gates it passes through: JR East runs the country's largest station-retail network, spanning brands such as LUMINE, atre, GRANSTA and ecute, and any change to how passengers move through the gates that feed those shops touches the footfall underneath them -- even though the companies gave no date for when every station's hardware will be ready.