Bulgaria vignette 2026 — prices & rules

For standard cars, choose between the 1-day, weekend, 1-week, 1-month, 3-month and annual products. The 1-day e-vignette covers one calendar day, while the weekend product runs from Friday 12:00 to Sunday 23:59. Pick the shortest period that covers every motorway, first-class road and paid second-class road on your route, then verify the plate and start date before payment.

€35.79 (BGN 70) compensatory fee for cars; €153.39 (BGN 300) administrative fine if it stays unpaid.

Bulgarian motorways and first-class roads are monitored by ANPR cameras that read licence plates and check them against the BGTOLL database. Foreign-registered vehicles are not exempt.

Foreign-registered vehicles can be stopped at internal checkpoints or border crossings on exit. The compensatory fee must typically be paid on the spot or settled before leaving the country.

Bulgaria has no grace period for entering a tolled road first and buying afterwards. What it has instead — introduced in 2019 and unique in this guide — is the compensatory charge (компенсаторна такса): a voluntary payment that closes the case without an administrative offence report and without the higher penalty. For a car up to 3.5 t it is €35.79 (BGN 70) instead of the €153.39 (BGN 300) fine.

Where and how you can pay it decides whether the option is open to you at all:

One detail catches drivers out at the roadside. A driver who refuses the compensatory charge and receives a violation report still cannot simply drive on: to continue the journey, a car must pay the price of the weekend vignette — €5.11 (BGN 10) — on the spot, by card.

Two aggravating cases are worth knowing. Driving without a vignette while the registration plate is unreadable or covered in any way raises the fine to €255.65 (BGN 500). And enforcement does not end when you leave: alongside the National Toll Administration and the Ministry of Interior, the Customs Agency checks vignette payment when a vehicle exits Bulgaria through a border crossing point.

Finally, treat the operator's own static price page with care. The bgtoll.bg e-vignette page still carries the tariff table introduced in 2019; the current amounts — and the euro figures that replaced the lev after Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026 — appear in the purchase portal at web.bgtoll.bg. The weekend vignette is also more narrowly defined than the name suggests: it runs from Friday 12:00 to Sunday 23:59.

Unlike most other vignette countries, Bulgaria’s e-vignette covers more than just motorways.

Roads requiring the e-vignette

The vignette is required on:

Free roads — no e-vignette needed

The following are free for vehicles up to 3.5 t:

Cross-country journeys in Bulgaria almost always use at least one Class I road or motorway, making a vignette practically unavoidable for most through routes.

Online, mobile app, terminal or petrol station — fully digital.

You enter your licence plate, country of registration, vehicle category and start date. Activation is usually immediate for short-duration products; longer products bought online may have a delayed start due to EU consumer withdrawal rules.

Driving through more than one country on this trip? The Europe vignette route planner works out, country by country, which vignettes your whole route needs.