Czech road toll prices frozen — no more annual price hikes

The Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament has passed an amendment to the law that scraps the automatic annual increase in road toll (vignette) prices. The annual sticker will remain at 2,570 crowns, the monthly one at 480 crowns, the ten-day version at 300 crowns, and the one-day pass at 230 crowns. Discounts for vehicles with alternative-fuel engines will also stay in place.

The change scraps the valorisation mechanism — tied to inflation and the length of newly built motorway sections — introduced by the previous government of Petr Fiala (ODS). The opposition in the Chamber of Deputies branded the scrapping of indexation as populism.

One separate change concerns the one-day vignette: it will now be valid for 24 hours from the moment of purchase, rather than until midnight of the same day as before. The amendment must now go to the Senate for review.

How vignette prices have changed over the years

For a long time, motorways in Czechoslovakia and later in the Czech Republic were free to use — unlike in many other European countries, where tolls on high-speed roads had been charged from the very beginning (for example, in Italy or the former Yugoslavia, via payment booths at exits). Czech authorities began preparing a temporary payment system modelled on Switzerland, where it has been in place since 1985, back in 1994.

An amendment to the Road Act was approved by the government in early 1994 and passed by parliament — still a single-chamber body at the time, since the Senate had not yet been formed — at the end of May that same year. Charges for using Czech motorways came into effect on 1 January 1995: 400 crowns for cars, 1,000 crowns for vehicles weighing between 3.5 and 12 tonnes, and 2,000 crowns for vehicles heavier than 12 tonnes.

The original price held until 1998, when the government, with parliament's approval, doubled it, while the law abolished the charge for motorcycles altogether. Afterwards, the price of the vignette for cars kept climbing: from 2004 the annual sticker cost 900 crowns, four years later it rose by another hundred crowns, and by 2010 it had reached 1,200 crowns.

From 2012 to 2023 the price stayed unchanged at 1,500 crowns a year. In 2023 it rose to 2,300 crowns, from January last year it stood at 2,440 crowns, and since the start of this year it has been 2,570 crowns — the level at which, under the new amendment, it will now remain.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz