Paper Travelcards are available in Anytime as well as Off-Peak variants. There is no 16-25 Railcard discount on inboundary Anytime Day Travelcards but there is on outboundary ones, subject to a £20.30 minimum fare.
If you want an Anytime Day Travelcard (ADT), there is no difference in price (as a 16-25 Railcard holder) between a Zones 1-6 and Zones 1-9 Travelcard - both will be available at the £20.30 minimum fare. So you may as well buy the latter, e.g.
from Watford Junction or somewhere else outwith the Zones, to get a bit of extra validity for free.
If you are prepared to wait until 9:30 to start your journeys, you can use an Off-Peak Day Travelcard (ODT). In this case, the general £12 minimum fare for 16-25 Railcard discounted tickets applies until 10am. So if you wanted to travel after 9:30 but before before 10am, you would need to buy an ODT 'capped' at the minimum fare of £12. Again, here there is no difference between a Zones 1-6 and Zones 1-9 Travelcard as both will be available at £12. So you may as well buy the latter, e.g.
from Amersham.
If you are prepared to wait until 10am to start your journeys, the £12 minimum fare no longer applies and so it is then cheapest to buy a fully discounted ODT. Within Zones 1-6 this would be £9.50; to add on Zones 7-9 would be an extra 60p.
Oyster fares work slightly differently and it may be worthwhile obtaining an Oyster card and having your Railcard added to it - though there is now a £5 'deposit' payable (this is non-refundable but is added as credit after 12 months). On Oyster, your Railcard will not give you any discount for "peak" fares or caps, however you will get the full discount from 9:30. The Oyster system will stop charging you once you hit the relevant daily cap.
The relevant daily Oyster caps are:
| Zones 1-6 | Zones 1-9 |
| Peak | £14.10 | £20.00 |
| Off-Peak | £9.30 | £9.30 |
Peak fares are charged for most journeys touching in between 16:00-19:00 (and so will not receive any Railcard discount), however any journeys made during this time will still count towards the Off-Peak cap (which is Railcard discounted as above).
So as you can see, in all cases it is cheaper to use Oyster, even if travelling at peak times. However, that does subject you to the maximum journey times. These can be fairly easily worked around by simply touching out and back in every time you change trains, but I appreciate that could be a bit of a hassle.
If you don't want to have to obtain an Oyster card and pay a deposit, you can always use a contactless card/device instead. Obviously you would not receive any Railcard discount, however, as calculations are done by the back office system rather than on-the-fly, you will sometimes be charged less than the above caps. For example, this would be if it found that it was cheaper to use a Zones 1-5 cap plus a Zones 6-9 extension fare, rather than a Zones 1-9 cap (even if you didn't stop or touch in/out in Zone 5). By contrast, Oyster only applies extension fares if you have a weekly/monthly/annual Travelcard already loaded - otherwise it just caps based on the Zones where you touch in and out.
