Lime Referral Code

Lime's referral is smaller than Forest's, but it wins on the thing that often matters more: reach. £4 each side is modest, yet Lime runs e-bikes and e-scooters in more UK cities than any other operator on our leaderboard, on a generous 60-day window — so for most riders outside central London, it is the offer that actually works where they live.

What you get, and the one-ride rule

The new rider gets a £4 single-ride coupon that lands under Wallet → Promos and auto-applies to the first ride; the referrer gets a matching £4 coupon once that first paid ride completes. The mechanic to understand is one coupon, one ride: if your ride costs under £4 it's free (including the unlock fee), but if it costs more you pay the difference, and any unused value is forfeited — it does not roll over to a second trip. So the way to extract full value is a single ride that lands near the £4 mark.

Both coupons expire 60 days after sign-up — much more breathing room than Forest's seven days — and the qualifying ride has no minimum duration.

Where Lime operates

This is Lime's trump card. It covers London, Greater Manchester, Oxford, Nottingham and Milton Keynes, and from 1 April 2026 added seven West Midlands cities — Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall and Wolverhampton — under a five-year Transport for West Midlands contract. Lime is the largest shared-mobility operator in the world by ridership, and that scale shows up as the broadest UK footprint here.

E-bike versus e-scooter: the licence difference

The rule that catches people out: a Lime e-bike is an Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle, so there is no licence requirement (14+, no helmet legally required). A rental e-scooter is different — you must be 18+ with a provisional UK driving licence (category Q), because scooters operate only under the Department for Transport's rental trial (extended to May 2028). Privately owned e-scooters remain illegal on public roads and pavements; only the rental trial fleets are legal to ride.

Pricing context

For reference, London pricing in early 2026 is around £1 to unlock plus 31p a minute pay-as-you-go, with LimePass bundles bringing the effective rate down to roughly 9–13p a minute and a LimePrime subscription offering cheaper short rides. Against that, a £4 coupon is roughly 9–10 minutes of peak London riding — useful, and free for a short hop.

What we checked

We verify this against Lime's own Help Centre, which documents the £4 figure, the 60-day expiry, the 40-referral cap and the one-coupon-per-ride mechanic, re-checking monthly with a daily link test. We keep the pricing context current because it is exactly the sort of figure that drifts when a city's rate changes.