Tolls in South Africa: e-toll, N3, N4, what still charges with a rental car in 2026

Launched in December 2013 as part of the Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project (GFIP), the e-toll relied on gantries suspended over the freeways of Johannesburg and Pretoria, billing every pass via number-plate cameras or an electronic tag. The voluntary payment rate never exceeded 40% in the first six months before collapsing further: a study by Rennie Naidoo, published in 2013 in the African Journal of Information and Communication, analysed how project officials justified rolling it out despite near-unanimous opposition from civil society, through what the author calls "collective moral disengagement" (study available on Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Naidoo+2013+e-toll+roads+collective+moral+disengagement).

After years of boycotts and legal battles, the Gauteng provincial government officially ended e-toll billing in April 2024. In June 2026, the state went further and wrote off the accumulated e-toll debt of motorists who had never paid — without any refund, in turn, for those who had settled their bills. In practical terms for a visitor with a rental car: driving under the old Gauteng gantries (around Johannesburg, Pretoria, Sandton, OR Tambo airport) now costs nothing, and hasn't been billed to rental companies since the system was shut down.

Outside Gauteng, South Africa keeps a conventional toll motorway network, with physical barriers and payment booths, run by SANRAL (the state roads agency) and, for the N3, by the private concessionaire N3TC. Three zones are directly relevant to a touristic road trip.

This is the route most of our readers take for a Kruger self-drive from Johannesburg airport (OR Tambo): 392 km via the N12 then the N4, roughly 4 to 5 hours depending on traffic and stops. Along the way, a Class 1 vehicle (sedan, SUV — almost every rental car) passes through three toll plazas run by concessionaire TRAC — Diamond Hill, Middelburg, then Machadodorp — for a total of around R261 to Nelspruit, roughly €14 at 2026 rates.

Most travellers heading to the park's southern and central gates (Numbi, Phabeni, Paul Kruger, or the Skukuza entrance) leave the N4 at Nelspruit or White River and never reach the fourth plaza, Nkomazi, further toward the Mozambican border: that one only applies to routes heading straight for Malelane Gate or Komatipoort, at the park's south-eastern tip.

Used by travellers combining Johannesburg, the Drakensberg and the KwaZulu-Natal coast, the N3 is the country's main toll route, run by N3TC. Five plazas follow one another over the roughly 570 km between Johannesburg and Durban, for a one-way total of R222 since the tariff revision of 1 March 2026 — a 3.12% increase, index-linked to inflation as every year.

Good news for the many readers combining Cape Town and the Garden Route through to Port Elizabeth: over roughly 770 km of the coastal N2, only one toll plaza exists, at Tsitsikamma, at the Paul Sauer bridge spanning the Storms River gorge, right inside Tsitsikamma National Park. The Class 1 fee stands at R73 since 1 March 2026, for one of the most spectacular crossings on South Africa's road network.

At the main N3 and N4 plazas, the "automatic" lanes take Visa and Mastercard contactless directly, with no PIN or signature — nothing to book or activate before you leave. Cash (rand) payment is accepted everywhere too, but rarely needed.

Some rental companies fit their vehicles with an electronic tag (e-tag) that automatically triggers payment at equipped plazas, with the amount billed to your card when the car is returned, plus an admin fee. Others dropped this service once the Gauteng e-toll ended, and expect a card payment at every plaza. The simplest approach: ask explicitly at the rental counter, when you pick up the car, how N3, N4 or N2 tolls are billed under your contract — practice varies noticeably between agencies.

On a road trip combining Johannesburg, Kruger and Durban — crossing every plaza listed above — the total toll budget comes to around R483, just over €25, for the whole trip. A trivial sum next to fuel or the rental itself, but one worth carrying as backup cash for, rather than discovering at the last plaza that the rental card has hit its contactless payment limit.

Our "South Africa Self-Drive" guide breaks down, for each major itinerary (Cape Town and the Garden Route, Johannesburg and Kruger, crossing the Drakensberg), the tolls you'll actually encounter and their cumulative cost — enough to budget precisely for the motorway portion of a road trip that, on the whole, remains one of the most affordable in southern Africa.