Tolls in Canada: the 407 ETR and the Confederation Bridge, what a rental car actually pays

Nearly the entire Canadian road network is free, including major transcontinental routes like the Trans-Canada Highway or the Icefields Parkway between Banff and Jasper covered in our country guide. That comes from a historical choice to fund roads through general taxation rather than tolls, unlike the United States, where turnpikes and toll roads crisscross many states. On a road trip through the Rockies, Vancouver Island or the Yukon's far north, tolls simply never come up.

Two exceptions account for almost every case where a rental-car traveller can get billed: Highway 407 ETR in the greater Toronto area, Ontario, and the Confederation Bridge linking New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island, on the classic Maritimes route. Add to that two toll bridges near Montreal, the A25 and A30 — more of a footnote for a visitor, but real enough for anyone driving through the city.

Opened in 1997, the 407 ETR was the world's first fully electronic, barrier-free toll highway: no booth, no stopping, just overhead gantries reading a transponder — or, failing that, the licence plate — above each lane. The rate depends on which of its twelve zones you're in, the time of day and the day of the week, with sharp peaks during office hours. The 2026 rate schedule, effective 1 January, pushed the toll on zone 8 (between Highway 400 and Yonge Street) to 108.79 cents per kilometre westbound on a weekday at 3:30 p.m., up from 77.72 cents in 2025 — a targeted hike on the sections and time slots that were already the most congested, while lighter-traffic zones stayed largely unchanged at rush hour.

For a tourist driving a rental car, the real trap isn't the rate so much as the total absence of a barrier: you can end up on it without even realizing, via a GPS shortcut meant to dodge a jam on Highway 401, the free highway that runs parallel to the 407 for much of its length. Without a transponder fitted — true of the vast majority of standard rental cars — the crossing is billed as "video tolling": a camera photographs the plate, and the per-kilometre rate charged is noticeably higher than what transponder holders pay, on top of a per-trip processing charge.

The company that operates the 407 ETR bills the rental company directly, as the vehicle's legal owner, which then passes the charge on to the customer — usually weeks after the car is returned, charged to the card on file with the rental contract. On top of the base toll, rental companies routinely add their own fee, and it varies widely between brands according to traveller reports on North American forums: Hertz commonly charges a flat administrative fee of around $14 to $16 CAD per recorded crossing (roughly €9 to €10), while Enterprise runs a service called TollPass, billed at $5.35 CAD per day of actual use and capped at $35 CAD for the whole rental (about €3.30 a day, capped around €22). Other brands charge processing fees of around $5 CAD per trip on top of the toll itself.

Two habits are enough. First, ask explicitly at the rental counter — at Toronto Pearson Airport in particular — whether a toll package such as TollPass is available and at what rate: better to know the capped amount upfront than to find a surprise charge in your inbox a month later. Second, switch on the "avoid tolls" setting in Google Maps or Waze before driving around the greater Toronto area: the free Highway 401 serves the same destinations as the 407, with more traffic at rush hour but no risk of a delayed bill. That precaution alone rules out almost every accidental crossing travellers report.

On the Maritimes leg that closes out a Canadian road trip through the Gaspé Peninsula and Prince Edward Island, the Confederation Bridge — 12.9 km long, Canada's longest bridge, spanning waters that ice over part of the year — used to cost more than $50 CAD per light vehicle. On 28 July 2025, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a dramatic cut to a flat $20 CAD, effective from 1 August 2025, funded by a federal subsidy covering a large share of the bridge's operating costs; the same announcement halved fares on eastern Canada's ferries, including the Marine Atlantic route between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. The toll is collected in one direction only, when leaving the island via Borden-Carleton: crossing onto Prince Edward Island remains free, as before.

A study by transport economist Robin Lindsey, published in 2007 by the Canadian C.D. Howe Institute under the title "Congestion Relief: Assessing the Case for Road Tolls in Canada", uses the 407 ETR as a case study to show that time-of-day pricing can genuinely ease congestion — but also explains why so few other Canadian routes have followed suit since: political acceptability, far more than economic efficiency alone, is what determines whether a toll road ever gets built. That very political scarcity of tolls is precisely why Canada remains, overall, one of the simplest countries in the world for a rental-car road trip — as long as you know where the two exceptions are.

Our "Canada Self-Drive" guide breaks down the country's main routes — the Rockies, Vancouver Island, the Yukon, the Gaspé Peninsula and the Maritimes — with, for each, the real distances between fuel stops and the driving quirks specific to that region. On a route that crosses the Toronto area or loops through Prince Edward Island, just keep these two tolls in mind: one is avoided with a simple GPS setting, the other now costs far less than it did before summer 2025.