Iloilo Transport Costs: Jeepney, Grab and the Guimaras Boat (2026)

Three things decide what getting around Iloilo City costs you, and the fare is not one of them. The fare is a national number, set in Manila, and PHP 13 on every dated record we could open between October 2023 and July 2026. What is local is geography: whether your day fits inside a core small enough to walk, whether it crosses the city, or whether it crosses water.

Start with the number everything hangs off. The traditional jeepney minimum is PHP 13 for the first four kilometres, then PHP 1.80 per succeeding kilometre. It is not PHP 14. LTFRB approved that rise on 17 March 2026 to take effect on the 19th, and the President deferred it indefinitely on 18 March, the day before it landed. GMA News reported on 22 July 2026 that the minimum PUJ fare is still PHP 13, and on 7 August 2026 Transportation Secretary Giovanni Lopez said fare increases across all public utility vehicles remain suspended.

That is the fare question answered. The rest of this page branches on your constraint, and each branch ends in its own failure mode.

Which Branch You Are On

Whether your week fits inside the walkable core, crosses the city, or crosses the Iloilo Strait to Guimaras decides more than the fare does. The cost difference between the three is smaller than the reliability difference.

Branch One: Your Day Fits Inside the Core

If home, work and groceries sit inside City Proper, Molo or the Mandurriao business district, your transport line is near zero and the numbers that matter are infrastructure, not fares.

What is solid: a 4-kilometre protected bike lane on Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. Avenue, the Diversion Road, which Republic Act 10662 fixes at 16.6153 kilometres from the General Luna junction to the airport gate, traversing Pavia, Santa Barbara and Cabatuan as well as Iloilo City, so the corridor is not wholly inside the city. The Iloilo River Esplanade runs 9.035 kilometres as a project, of which DPWH reported 6.385 kilometres complete between 2016 and 2021. Two city ordinances back the lanes: Regulation Ordinance No. 2016-299 fines a motorist PHP 2,000 for using the Aquino Avenue bike lane, and No. 2014-193 requires buildings with parking to allocate bicycle space. A PHP 74.021 million package of Department of Transportation active-mobility facilities runs a 280-day programme that a site billboard dates from 21 January 2026 to 27 October 2026, with the city’s formal groundbreaking on 11 May 2026, making Iloilo City the second recipient after Marikina (Daily Guardian, 12 May 2026, named secondary).

The counterweight is in the same reporting. The 2025 Bilang Siklista count recorded 4,716 cyclists across 11 locations in Iloilo City, down 33.3 percent on 2024. Infrastructure spending rose and counted ridership fell by a third.

Two gaps belong on this branch. First, no current bike-lane network total exists: four dated, named sources give 11, 23, 32.86 and 42 kilometres, the mayor hedged his own 11-kilometre figure in 2022, and we pick none. Second, the city publishes no inter-district distance or travel-time matrix, which is why the estimates in our neighbourhood guide stay labelled observation rather than measurement.

A walkable radius drawn around the wrong anchor mall costs you a jeepney ride each way. SM City Iloilo is on Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. Avenue in Mandurriao District, per SM’s own mall page, and Robinsons Place Iloilo sits in City Proper at the corner of De Leon and Quezon.

Branch Two: You Cross the City Every Day

Two jeepney rides a day at the PHP 13 minimum is the base case, and it is cheap. What varies is which kind of jeepney stops for you and whether the driver is charging a fare that exists, because none of it is set in Iloilo.

The four-kilometre question is settled by the regulator, not by an outlet. LTFRB Region 6 legal counsel Salvador Altura told Panay News in October 2023 that the increase applied “only to the first four kilometers or the base fare”, and the same office restated the structure in June 2025: the minimum remains PHP 13 traditional and PHP 15 modernised for the first four kilometres. One national motoring outlet still prints “first 1km” for both.

There is no Western Visayas rate. Region 6 has issued rate-specific orders before, including a PHP 8.50 minimum in 2018, but Altura told Panay News in June 2025 that national petitions are consolidated centrally and “once approved, any fare increase will be implemented uniformly across the country, including in Western Visayas. It applies to all.” What Region 6 does issue is the fare matrix document itself, priced at PHP 550 to PHP 570 per unit, plate-specific, collected in person in Iloilo City and displayed inside the vehicle. Without it a driver may only collect the existing rate. One caveat from the same office in 2023: a provisional adjustment gets a notice rather than a new matrix, so the matrix is not a universal check.

The Western Visayas Transport Cooperative ran 95 modernised units against more than 1,700 traditional ones in March 2026, split 30 each at the Tagbak and Mohon terminals, 20 on the Jaro to Central Philippine University route and 15 on Ungka to Diversion Road. So the modernisation premium is exactly PHP 2 at the minimum and you will rarely pay it. Iloilo City adopted its route plan into law as City Regulation Ordinance No. 2022-027, later amended to 25 routes. LTFRB does number them, in Memorandum Circular No. 2023-036, the operational guidelines for the city’s route plan: Route 3 is Ungka to City Proper via CPU, Route 4 is Ungka to City Proper via Aquino Avenue and Festive Walk, Route 12 is Mandurriao to City Proper, Route 15 is the Molo Baluarte loop. Two things to know before you use a number. The circular numbers within sections rather than across the city, so its 1 to 17 are the rationalised routes and the eight newer ones restart at 1, which means the publicly quoted routes 18 to 25 are not numbered by it. And ltfrb.gov.ph refuses automated requests, so we read LTFRB’s own scan from a mirror rather than from the agency.

Three statutes set the discounts, and they stack with nothing. Republic Act 9994 grants senior citizens 20 percent off actual fare in public utility jeepneys, plus VAT exemption. Republic Act 10754 grants persons with disability at least 20 percent on the same basis. Republic Act 11314, the Student Fare Discount Act, grants students 20 percent on domestic regular fares on presentation of a school ID or validated enrolment form, and its section 4 runs the entitlement through the whole enrolment period including weekends and holidays. Reporting on the March 2026 order described it as applying on school days; the statute is broader.

Taxis run on the meter and Grab publishes nothing. LTFRB Region 6’s legal officer has twice gone on record that a fixed, unmetered fare is improper. Iloilo City has no published taxi flagdown of its own, no Region 6 taxi fare table loaded on 20 August 2026, and we are not importing a national figure to fill it. Grab lists Iloilo under Visayas on its own coverage page, and its GrabCar page, under the heading “What are the GrabCar fares?”, answers only that the app computes the fare and that rush-hour rates run to 1.5 or twice the standard.

What to budget. A daily cross-city commute at the jeepney minimum both ways, plus a handful of ride-hailing trips a month, sits inside the PHP 2,500 to PHP 5,000 transport band in our Iloilo cost of living guide. That band is a LiveInPH editorial estimate. It stays an estimate rather than arithmetic because the ride-hailing half of it has no published tariff to compute from. One reason local fares have not moved despite the March 2026 fuel spike: Iloilo City pays jeepney drivers and operators PHP 1,500 a month in fuel assistance through their cooperatives, and tricycle drivers PHP 500.

Branch Three: You Cross the Strait to Guimaras

The Guimaras crossing is the one commute on LiveInPH where the price is fully published and the reliability is not. Guimaras is a separate province, and its provincial government gives the crossing as 15 to 20 minutes; the same site’s Jordan municipal profile puts the town 1.5 nautical miles across the strait from Iloilo City.

Two announcements, two dates. The Guimaras provincial government, MARINA and the operators set PHP 40 from 24 March 2026 on the Jordan and Buenavista routes alike, and the Guimaras Island Transport Multipurpose Cooperative’s own MARINA-approved matrix on the Jordan route ran from 7 April. MARINA’s March 2026 release names Parola Wharf on the Iloilo side and Jordan and Buenavista on the Guimaras side, all three now running tap-and-go electronic manifests. The provincial pages name Ortiz Street alongside Parola as the Iloilo-side pumpboat points, but they are undated and MARINA’s release does not mention Ortiz at all. Ortiz’s present operating status could not be confirmed from any 2025 or 2026 source.

The Philippine Ports Authority counted 3,264,738 non-RoRo passengers through Jordan and 7,078,924 through the Iloilo River Wharf in calendar year 2024, and its December 2025 release ranks Iloilo and Jordan first and third nationally by passenger traffic. Two of the country’s five busiest passenger ports sit on opposite banks of the same strait. Guimaras Governor Ma. Lucille Nava and all five Guimaras mayors described the route in a February 2026 letter to MARINA as “an essential daily lifeline” for workers, students, traders and patients.

The Rule That Decides Whether It Sails

The threshold for when the boats stop is published, numeric and checkable, and it sits in Philippine Coast Guard Memorandum Circular 02-13 of 5 June 2013 rather than anywhere a commuter would look.

Philippine Coast Guard Memorandum Circular No. 02-13 bars any vessel, of any type or tonnage, from sailing, except to take shelter, when storm warning signal number 1 or higher is hoisted “within its point of origin, the intended route, and point of destination”. But the same circular writes the Iloilo Strait into its list of Special Areas by coordinate, one of only six routes in the country named individually, with the west edge of Ortiz Wharf as a boundary marker, and grants short-distance voyages inside it a carve-out. A short-distance voyage is defined there as one not exceeding four kilometres, or completable within thirty minutes, or wholly within line of sight. Boats meeting both tests may sail at signal number 1 only if nine conditions all hold at once: sunrise to sunset with arrival 30 minutes before sunset, wind no more than 30 kph or 16 knots, rainfall from trace to 2.5 mm an hour, the route and the area of destination seen by the naked eye from the origin, no more than half the authorised passenger capacity, lifejackets worn on open decks, cargo lashed, a designated look-out and a standby emergency boat, and a reliable communications link to that boat and the Coast Guard.

The useful part for a commuter is the fourth condition. On 9 March 2026 the boats stopped for visibility alone, in a report that records zero visibility at sea under the trough of a low-pressure area east of Northeastern Mindanao and outside the Philippine Area of Responsibility, names no storm signal, and has passengers told to avoid the Jordan, Buenavista and Ortiz and Parola wharves until conditions improved. The other worked case is 18 July 2025, when the Philippine Coast Guard Iloilo Station suspended fiber-boat voyages from 8 a.m. under the southwest monsoon enhanced by a tropical depression, and explicitly did not suspend the roll-on roll-off vessels. The asymmetry matters: the small boats stop first and the RoRo often keeps running, so a suspension notice is a question about which vessel class, not a closed strait.

Two caveats. The circular is written in the old Public Storm Warning Signal vocabulary, and PAGASA has since renamed the system to Tropical Cyclone Wind Signals and revised the wind bands. And coastguard.gov.ph served a bot challenge to every method on 20 August 2026, so we could not confirm from the agency’s own issuance index that 02-13 is still the latest instrument. It is the latest version in the Supreme Court E-Library, which is the strongest statement available.

Nobody publishes a count of how many days a year the crossing is suspended. We are not estimating one. State the rule, watch the forecast against the 30 kph and naked-eye conditions, and treat a Guimaras address as a commute with a weather dependency.

The Airport Is a Fourth Trip, and Its Own Price

Iloilo International Airport is not in Iloilo City. It sits in four barangays of Cabatuan, per the Iloilo provincial government, which also gives Cabatuan town as about 24 kilometres from the city. That 24 kilometres is the distance to the town, not to the terminal. No primary source we could reach publishes a terminal-to-city road distance. The only measured trip figure in named reporting is 17 kilometres, from Zuri Hotel in Mandurriao. DPWH Region 6’s regional director put the city-to-airport run at 40 to 45 minutes before the Ungka flyover, with 20 minutes as the design target; Ungka sank and closed and the Aganan flyover is still unfinished, so 40 to 45 minutes stands.

The mechanism behind the spread is a permit rule. A taxi taking you out to the airport cannot pick up a return passenger there without a permit from the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, so it drives back empty and prices the round trip into your one-way. LTFRB Region 6 has said twice that this is improper unless the meter runs, and the LTO issued a show-cause order to one operator over it in January 2025. Ask for the meter; a flat number is a negotiation, not a tariff.

What Nobody Publishes

Every fare figure on this page comes from a named outlet or a regulator quoted in one. Not one comes from a document the regulator itself served us.

The Bottom Line

Iloilo City is cheap to move around and the cheapness is not an Iloilo achievement. The jeepney minimum is PHP 13 because a national increase was suspended the day before it took effect, and it will change the day LTFRB resolves the Manibela and PISTON petitions rather than the day anything changes here.

What is local is the shape of the map. A compact core rewards walking and cycling that the city has funded and the counted ridership has not followed. A cross-city commute is two minimum fares and a fare matrix you are entitled to look at. And on a Guimaras commute price stops being the question: PHP 40 each way is trivial, and whether the boat runs is a nine-condition test in a 2013 Coast Guard circular that names your strait by coordinate.

Our methodology sets the rule this page follows: a figure that no source publishes stays absent rather than being estimated into place. The Cebu transport page covers a different network entirely: a bus rapid transit line, a city bus operator and a habal-habal ordinance, none of which exists here. And the first month checklist sequences the setup that lands in the same fortnight.