The variational technique for calculating all the neoclassical transport processes in the banana regime, developed by Rosenbluth, Hazeltine, and Hinton for the case of tokamak with small rotational transform and large aspect ratio, is generalized to arbitrary axisymmetric toroidal systems with a small fraction of trapped particles. The use of the scalar magnetic potential as a coordinate, as in Rutherford's treatment of the Lorentz model, is eliminated by the use of a coordinate‐free solution procedure, allowing the treatment of nonvacuum fields. As an example, results are given for doublet II.