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Iceland road tax

I just got an email from Blue, who I reserved a car with in July. Evidently there is a new road tax that is going into effect as of January 1 and they informed me that they will need to collect it. Can someone explain it?

Here is the text from the email:

Please be advised that the Icelandic government has instituted a new Road Tax applicable for all cars, effective from January 1st 2026. According to government officials the fuel prices on pump for petrol and diesel will decrease overall at the same time because fuel taxes are being removed.

As the Road Tax was only applicable for electric cars, hydrogen cars, and plug-in hybrid cars when you booked your rental car Blue Car Rental needs to collect the Road Tax fee for the Icelandic government. The Road Tax fee is 7 ISK per kilometer or 1550 ISK per day for rental cars. We at Blue Car Rental will collect the 1550 ISK Road Tax in advance to ensure transparency and convenience for our customers.

Posted by
3075 posts

The information is up online. This is real, and it looks like other rental companies are also going to do the 1550 ISK charge per day, up front, rather than have to do the mileage computation and collect on return, especially as there are often quick drops needed at the airport. Some numbers are mentioned and I just spoke with my son who lives in Reykjavik. He reports significant drop in gas prices with this in effect, to the tune of effectively 400 ISK/gallon (doing a down and dirty conversion). So the 1550 ISK would be about 4 gallons per day of rental, seems fair, as you could use more.

Posted by
3715 posts

Yes the car rental companies are making it easy on us by having a flat fee for that per day. As already mentioned, gas prices have lowered but this sort of offsets that. For us, it really didn’t change what we would spend for the car/gas total.