Getting from Washington Dulles International Airport to the city

The station

• Washington Dulles International Airport has its own Metro station on the Silver Line, opened on 15 November 2022 as part of the largest expansion of Metrorail since the system began.
• It is a short walk from the terminal, under five minutes from baggage claim along an underground tunnel, so there is no shuttle bus stage.
• The extension also serves Reston Town Center, Herndon, Innovation Center, Loudoun Gateway and Ashburn, which is worth knowing if you are staying in the Virginia suburbs rather than the city.
• The airport station is the busiest of the six, with nearly 5,000 customers on a typical weekday and more than 4,000 a day at weekends.

The fare, and when to travel

• Weekdays between 5am and 9:30pm the fare is between $2.25 and $6.75, worked out from how far you go and when.
• Dulles is the western extremity of the network, so a trip into central Washington in the middle of a weekday sits at the expensive end of that range.
• After 9:30pm on weekdays, and all day at weekends, every Metrorail fare is between $2.25 and $2.50. The same journey costs a fraction of the weekday price.
• Reduced fares for eligible riders are $1.10 to $3.35 in the weekday daytime and $1.10 to $1.25 the rest of the time.
• This is unusual and worth planning around. A Saturday arrival at Dulles is one of the cheapest big-airport rail journeys in the United States; a Tuesday at 5pm is not.

Paying

• Tap a SmarTrip card or a contactless bank card or phone at the faregates, on the way in and on the way out.
• Use the same payment at both ends. Metro works the fare out from the pair of taps, and mixing a card with its phone wallet will not do.
• Metrobus is a flat $2.25 on regular and limited-stop routes, and $4.80 on the four express routes.
• Transfers: bus to bus is free and unlimited within two hours; bus to rail or rail to bus carries a $2.25 discount within the same two hours.
• Fairfax Connector, the local bus network around Dulles, gives a $2.25 discount on a transfer from Metro Rail, which makes most of those rides free.

Is it worth it

• About 70 percent of the station's users told Metro they would otherwise have driven, which is the practical answer: Dulles is 26 miles from the city and the road alternatives are long and expensive.
• The train is not fast. It is a metro making every stop across northern Virginia, so allow the best part of an hour into the centre.
• It is reliable, which at an airport an hour from town in traffic matters more than raw speed.