One-day vignette will be valid from March 2024 and the annual vignette will become more expensive af

One-day vignette will be valid from March 2024 and the annual vignette will become more expensive af
12/5/2023Press releases

Motorway tolls will change from March 2024. It will now be possible to pay for a one-day vignette for CZK 200, the ten-day vignette will cost CZK 270 and the monthly vignette will cost CZK 430. The annual fee will cost CZK 2300 from March next year. This follows from the draft amendment to the Act on Roads, which includes the mandatory proportionality of prices for individual types of vignettes according to the European Directive.
 

One-day vignette will be valid from March 2024 and the annual vignette will become more expensive af
"The National Economic Council of the Government has proposed in its recommendations to raise the price of the vignette from CZK 1500 to CZK 3000. The government finally decided to increase the price of the annual stamp to CZK 2300 from March 2024, which corresponds to inflation over the ten years since the fee has not changed," transport minister Martin Kupka explained: "We put all the money from the tolls back into motorway construction and maintenance."

Under the rules of the Eurovignette Directive, EU member states are obliged from March 2024 to follow a mandatory cap, calculated as a percentage of the annual charge, when setting the price of time-based charges. This means that the monthly stamp must be up to 19% of the annual fee, the ten-day stamp up to 12% and the daily stamp will now also be 9% of the annual fee.

"We will not only make the tolls more expensive. Drivers who use the motorway only exceptionally will be pleased that, like other European countries where tolls are required, we will only allow them to pay for using the motorway on a specific day. According to the mandatory capped ratios, the one-day fee must be CZK 200. The ten-day fee will drop by CZK 40 to CZK 270 and the monthly fee will drop by CZK 10 to CZK 430. If we wanted to maintain the current prices of short-term fees, we would have had to raise the annual rate even higher, but we have not done so," the minister points out.
 
Only electric cars will use the motorway free of charge

The European Directive also allows only zero-emission electric or hydrogen vehicles to be exempted from the time-based charges for using motorways. However, hybrid vehicles with combined emissions of up to 50 g CO2/km, which are still fully exempt, will continue to benefit significantly. A 25% time fee rate will apply. For vehicles fuelled by natural gas or biomethane, the current rate of benefit will remain unaffected, i.e. at 50% of the time-based rate.

The draft act also envisages that the State Fund for Transport Infrastructure will be provided with the data necessary for determining the amount of the time-based fee from the register of road vehicles, which will be useful for verifying whether vehicles registered by their user are entitled to the lower rate in the time-based toll system.

Comparison of motorway tolls in 2023 and from March 2024
2023 2024* 2024 eco 2024 e-hybrid 2024 elektro
Yearly 1 500 2 300 1 150 570 0
Monthly 440 430 210 100 0
10 day 310 270 130 60 0
Daily - 200 100 50 0

*Note..: The vignette values are calculated as a percentage of the annual vignette according to the Eurovignette guidelines and every number is rounded down to the nearest ten CZK after the calculation.
 
The stamp price will indexed from 2025

Beyond the European Directive, the law will introduce a mechanism for automatic indexation of all time-based fees, which may lead to an increase or decrease in rates according to two fixed criteria. The first criterion is the year-on-year percentage change in consumer prices as determined by the Czech Statistical Office and the second is the year-on-year percentage change in the length of motorways in operation as recorded by the Ministry of Transport. This will be the first time the price will be adjusted from 1 January 2025. If the favourable macroeconomic forecast materialises, inflation will continue to slow down significantly and no major year-on-year increases in time fee rates can be expected.

Currently, the Czech motorway network has 1365 kilometres, of which 226 kilometres are currently exempt from toll. Between 2012 and 2022, a total of 226.5 km of “greenfield” motorways were added to the motorway network, while the D1 motorway between Prague and Brno was modernised at the same time, which is an additional 160 kilometres. In 2022 the motorway network grew by 21.2 kilometres and in 2023 a total of 15.4 kilometres will be opened. A record of 118.1 kilometres are planned to be operational in 2024. However, only a part of them opened by the summer 2024 will actually translate into the time-based charge rate for 2025. The rest opened in the second half of the year will be reflected in the price only in 2026.
 
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