Next summer, Puget Sound area transit agencies will offer a new three-day regional pass as another option for ORCA card fare payment. The new three-day regional pass option will cost $18.00 for a regular adult fare and $6.00 for reduced fare riders, such as seniors and ORCA Lift passholders.
On December 9, the ORCA pod’s joint board approved the three-day pass as a three-month pilot program, running from June 1 through August 31. A major impetus for the pass is the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup events in June and July when hundreds of thousands of visitors will descend upon the city for soccer. Instead of having to buy individual daily transit passes, many visitors would be able to buy one pass to cover their stay at an affordable price.
“The FIFA MWC 2026 Local Organizing Committee requested that the ORCA Agencies offer a multi-day pass for visitors during the FIFA World Cup in Seattle,” the joint board memo said. “The ORCA Agencies agreed to consider a temporary multi-day pass that will be evaluated for permanent product offering.”
Riders should note the three-day pass does not cover a full 72 hours.
“It’s a three-day pass that turns on the day it’s tapped and is good for two full service days after that,” said Matt Hansen, a King County Metro planning manager, at the ORCA Joint Board meeting. “So unless you tap it early in the morning on Day One, you’re really getting a two-and-a-half-day pass. But that’s how we define our one-day pass.”
A service day, for the purposes of the passes, ends at 3:00am the following day, so riders don’t just lose pass benefits after midnight when seeking Night Owl service.
ORCA currently offers an unlimited ride one-day regional pass product, which costs $6.00 for regular adult fares on local transit services, and $3.00 for reduced fare riders (i.e., limited to riders pre-registered for ORCA LIFT or the Reduced Regional Fare Permit). In Washington state, kids 18 and under ride transit for free on most services.
The new three-day regional pass option mirrors that pricing, at $18.00 for a regular adult — though reduced fare riders get a slightly better deal at $6.00 for three days. The passes can be loaded on a physical or digital ORCA card, just like normal monthly PugetPasses and extra E-purse money.
Exclusions to the forthcoming three-day regional pass exist, just like the current one-day pass. The pass won’t cover rides on Washington State Ferries, Kitsap Transit Fast Ferries, and King County Metro Access. And for services with higher standard fares, such as Sounder, King County Water Taxi, and Seattle Monorail, riders will have to pay the fare difference through ORCA E-purse.
To explain the exceptions and added charges, Hansen told his ORCA Joint Board colleagues they’d have to do a customer education push.
The ORCA Joint Board opted to extend the pilot beyond Seattle’s World Cup schedule to offer more opportunity to evaluate the program’s efficacy for possible adoption as a permanent offering.
“We didn’t limit it to just FIFA, because we wanted to collect enough data to be able to make a meaningful evaluation of it,” Hansen told the ORCA Joint Board. “We’ll be collecting data on the numbers of products sold, boarding by product, activated by agency, and the number of customer service calls related to the product, and also tracking ridership trends: Are customers who buy this product doing significant intersystem transfer activity? How is the value of the trips they actually took in a day relative to the pass price covered?”
The three-day regional pass won’t be the only new ORCA feature to come online in time for the World Cup. ORCA is also set to roll out “open payments” — a type of contactless fare payment allowing riders to use credit and debit cards, in both physical and digital wallet forms, to tap on to ORCA card readers at transit stations.
“The local organizing committee [for the World Cup] had […] a handful of things that they really wanted to see the transit agencies do beyond service, and a lot of that had to do with fare payment,” Hansen told the ORCA Joint Board. “The local organizing committee is extremely excited that we’ll be rolling out open payments well in advance of the World Cup, and they’re happy to help promote that to visitors. Every visitor who goes to a match will be interacting with the local organizing committee app to access their tickets and the FIFA app, so we’ll be able to raise awareness that way for open payments.”
The ORCA Joint Board expects deployment of open payments in the first quarter of 2026.
Under newly approved business rules, when a rider uses a form of open payment, the rider will automatically be charged the applicable single fare for a regular adult trip. Using the same open payment on another leg of a trip during a two-hour window will allow for a normal free transfer, like when using ORCA E-purse. Exclusions to free transfers, however, will apply to Washington State Ferries, Kitsap Transit Fast Ferries, and Seattle Monorail.
Open payments have been a long-awaited feature of ORCA Next Generation, which launched three years ago. The three-day regional pass could also become a welcome addition, as some riders have complained of the region’s dearth of multi-day pass options compared to peer systems.
Adding both options during the World Cup period should help encourage transit use during a time when the regional road network will be pressed to its limit. Open payments are a great option for riders making a limited number of trips and not in need of a permanent ORCA card (which costs an additional $3.00 to purchase), while the three-day regional pass provides longer-staying visitors a simple unlimited ride option.
Stephen is a professional urban planner in Puget Sound with a passion for sustainable, livable, and diverse cities. He is especially interested in how policies, regulations, and programs can promote positive outcomes for communities. With stints in great cities like Bellingham and Cork, Stephen currently lives in Seattle. He primarily covers land use and transportation issues and has been with The Urbanist since 2014.