Tolls in Greece: which motorways charge a fee for a rental car road trip

In Greece, only proper motorways — identified by a number preceded by an A (A1, A2, A5, A7, A8...) — are tolled. Regular national roads ("ethniki odos"), secondary roads, and almost all mountain, island, and countryside roads are free. In practice, a road trip through the deep Peloponnese, the Zagori, or Crete crosses almost no tolls at all: it's the major inter-regional links that are tolled.

Seven paid stretches structure the network: Attiki Odos (the Athens ring road), Egnatia Odos (A2, running across the whole north of the country from Igoumenitsa to the Turkish border), Nea Odos and Kentriki Odos (A1, Athens-Thessaloniki), Olympia Odos (A8, Athens-Patras), Moreas (A7, Corinth-Kalamata-Tripoli), Ionia Odos (A5, Antirrio-Ioannina), and the Rio-Antirrio bridge, which links the Peloponnese to the mainland near Patras.

Prices went up on 1 January 2026 on several stretches, including a first-ever increase on Attiki Odos (never revalued since it opened). Here are the 2026 rates for a private car on the most common legs of a road trip out of Athens.

Every Greek toll plaza accepts cash and bank card at the regular booths, with no advance setup required — by far the simplest option for a rental car over a short stay. An electronic tag (e-Pass) exists and earns a discount in the 8-15% range plus a faster lane, but it requires a subscription with one of the motorway operators: rarely worth it for just a handful of crossings on one or two routes.

Keep a few small-denomination notes handy in the car: at peak times on Attiki Odos or approaching Thessaloniki, the cash lanes are sometimes faster than the fewer card-only lanes. Since 31 December 2025, Egnatia Odos has changed operator (the GEK TERNA group, via Nea Egnatia Odos), and the old discounted EgnatiaPass subscriptions were scrapped — no impact for a visitor simply paying at the booth.

On several of these routes, an old free national road runs alongside the tolled motorway — this is notably the case along Egnatia Odos in the north of the country. The savings are real, but so is the trade-off: a narrower road, more village crossings, more bends and trucks, for a noticeably longer journey time.

A study by Ioannis Politis, Michalis Kyriakoglou, Georgios Georgiadis, and Panagiotis Papaioannou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), published in 2020 in Transportation Research Record, looked precisely at how Greek drivers behave around Egnatia Odos: it found that travel cost and the toll fee are the decisive route-choice criteria for private car drivers, even more so than travel time (study on Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Politis+Kyriakoglou+Georgiadis+Papaioannou+toll+avoidance+highway+drivers+Greece). For a road trip spanning a few weeks, though, the financial stakes stay marginal — a few tens of euros over the whole trip — against the time and comfort the motorway buys, especially with kids in the car or after a long driving day.

On stretches recently upgraded from a single-carriageway national road into a tolled motorway, such as parts of Egnatia Odos, safety standards (central barrier, hard shoulders, lighting) are noticeably higher than on the old single-lane-each-way national road — a factor worth weighing alongside the pure cost calculation.

For a classic Peloponnese loop out of Athens (see our dedicated itinerary), budget for the Rio-Antirrio bridge if you close the loop via the north, plus a few tens of euros of Moreas or Olympia Odos depending on your stops — rarely more than €30-40 in tolls for the whole trip, since most roads through the Mani, Arcadia, or the Gulf of Corinth stay free.

For a run up to the Meteora or a round trip Athens-Thessaloniki, the A1 motorway accounts for most of the spend (around €35-40 one way); for a bigger loop toward Epirus and the Zagori via Igoumenitsa, budget €50-90 in round-trip tolls depending on the exact route. Either way, tolls remain a minor line item next to car rental, fuel, and accommodation.