A loophole to avoid motorway vignette fines: tens of thousands benefited last year

In 2023, the National Toll Payment Service PLC imposed around one million surcharges on cars without a vignette on Hungarian motorways and passed on a further 1.5 million cases to foreign collection partners. However, tens of thousands of people managed to avoid fines for not having a motorway vignette by using an option that was not widely known.

The National Toll Payment Service PLC (Nemzeti Útdíjfizetési Szolgáltató Zrt., NÚSZ) has provided information on motorway vignette purchases and data on surcharge payments for missed purchases in 2023, in response to questions from Pénzcentrum.

The company reported that in 2023, nearly one million fines were imposed on domestic drivers for lacking motorway vignettes or having improperly purchased stickers, and another 1.5 million cases were passed on to foreign toll payment servicers.

However, 30,917 drivers avoided fines by opting to buy a full-year motorway vignette instead of paying the surcharge. The aim of this option, as NÚSZ points out, is to encourage compliance with regulations rather than punish individuals.

Other discount options regarding fines include surcharge maximisation or surcharge amnesty. It is important to note that these exemptions are not automatically granted but must be requested by the customer.

A surcharge waiver is also available if a person has mistyped the licence plate number of their car, provided a maximum of three characters need to be corrected. Corrections can be made up to 60 days after the penalty notice has been served, and the administration fee for the process is HUF 1,470 (EUR 3.71).

If someone has confused the characters “0” (zero) and “O” or the characters “1” (one) and “I” on the licence plate and the motorway vignette, they do not need to pay an administration fee when correcting their sticker, according to the service provider.

The correction process can be initiated via online video call, in person at the offices of the National Toll Payment Service, or by email and postal mail.

Photo: FB/NÚSZ

Motorway vignettes sold in the first half of the year

Pénzcentrum also enquired about motorway vignette sales in recent months. According to NÚSZ, from the beginning of 2024 to 15 June, a total of 7,335,334 e-stickers were sold for Hungarian motorways. Most of these were weekly (10-day) vignettes, totalling exactly 3,283,827 purchases, but 2,505,299 county vignettes were also sold. The distribution of the remaining e-vignettes was as follows:

Annual: 654,980
Monthly: 620,360
One-day: 270,868

As we wrote earlier, the relative disinterest in the one-day vignettes might be due to it being the most expensive in the region, surpassing the price of its Austrian counterpart, for example. We highlighted in that article how, according to the Hungarian Automobile Club, this type of motorway vignette is likely most worthwhile for foreigners passing through the country.

Regarding sales proportions over the past six months, Pénzcentrum and the National Toll Payment Service noted that shares are likely to change throughout the year as road user habits and motorway vignette purchasing trends vary from season to season.

“For this reason, different types of vignettes are popular at different times of the year. For example, most annual national and county stickers are bought by road users as part of a pre-purchase or in the first month or two of the year, while the popularity of weekly and monthly stickers really spikes in the summer months, in July and August,” NÚSZ said.