Cross-border tolls versus fuel: budgeting the bigger cost

For a long time fuel was the obvious headline cost of running a truck across Europe, and tolls were a smaller line beneath it. That has changed. In several countries, road tolls per kilometre now rival, and in some cases clearly exceed, the cost of fuel for heavy goods vehicles. If your budgeting still treats tolls as the junior partner, your route costing is out of date.

The shift matters because tolls behave differently from fuel. They are sharply route-dependent, they differ by country and emission class, and across a cross-border lane they are incurred in several currencies, all of it paid up front while you wait to be paid for the load. This guide covers why tolls have climbed and how to budget them as the major cost they have become.

Tolls now rival fuel per kilometre

Recent industry analysis makes the shift concrete. In Austria, a Euro VI articulated truck can pay tolls of up to roughly 0.62 euros per kilometre against fuel of around 0.46 euros per kilometre, so the toll is the larger of the two. In Hungary, the heaviest and most polluting vehicles, in the Euro 0 class, can pay around 1.48 euros per kilometre in tolls, reported as more than double their fuel cost. These are approximate, sourced figures that change, so confirm the current rates for your vehicles and routes with the relevant national toll operator.

The pattern is not universal, and the gap depends heavily on the country, the route and the vehicle's emission class. But the direction of travel is clear enough that, on some lanes, tolls have quietly become the single largest variable cost of moving a load, and they deserve at least as much attention in your route costing as diesel does.

Why CO2 surcharges changed the picture

A big driver of the increase is the move to fold CO2 emissions into toll calculations. Germany introduced a CO2-based toll surcharge from 1 December 2023, and for many trucks that sharply raised what they pay, with increases reported in the region of 80 percent or more for some Euro VI vehicles. On some routes tolls now exceed fuel spend as a result, and tolls have been reported to reach a substantial share of total cost of ownership, in some cases up to around 15 percent. Treat all of these as approximate figures that change.

The CO2 component also rewards cleaner vehicles and penalises older, dirtier ones, which is why a Euro 0 truck can face a per-kilometre toll several times higher than a modern Euro VI tractor on the same road. As more countries add a CO2 element, the spread between emission classes widens, and the toll line in your costing becomes more sensitive to which vehicle you put on which lane.

A multi-currency, route-dependent cost

Tolls are not one cost, they are many. Each country has its own operator, its own rate structure and, often, its own currency. Run a lane from western Europe through central and eastern Europe and you accumulate toll charges denominated in euros and in local currencies, settled through different systems, all on the same trip. Convert each of those through an unrelated home currency and the FX leakage on a high-volume toll bill adds up fast.

On top of that, tolls are paid up front. You incur them as the wheels turn, well before the customer pays for the load, so they sit squarely inside the cash-flow gap that already strains cross-border haulage. Budgeting tolls well means costing them per route and per emission class, holding the right currencies to pay them in, and tracking the spend closely enough to spot when a lane stops being profitable.

Controlling toll spend

Because tolls are large, recurring and spread across drivers, vehicles and countries, they are worth treating like any other major spend category: with controls and visibility, not just a monthly bill you reconcile after the fact. Per-card limits and merchant controls let you scope what a given card can be used for and cap exposure per vehicle or per driver, which matters when the same card is used across borders.

Real-time visibility of toll spend, separated cleanly by entity where you run several, lets you compare actual toll cost against what you budgeted for a lane and react while the route is still live. That same categorised record also feeds your VAT recovery, since toll VAT is often reclaimable in the country where it was incurred, so clean toll data does double duty as both a cost control and a refund input.

How Altery fits

Tolls are a large, route-dependent, multi-currency cost paid up front, and that is exactly the shape of problem Altery is built around. Multi-currency accounts hold EUR alongside USD and GBP, so you can fund and pay toll charges in the currency they are billed in rather than converting every charge through an unrelated home currency and bleeding margin to FX. Cards are usable in-currency abroad, which keeps in-country toll payments clean.

Per-card limits and merchant controls let you scope and cap toll spend per vehicle or per driver, and real-time balances give you visibility of what is going out across every lane as it happens, not weeks later. FX runs on your timeline, and ring-fenced reserves help you hold funds against the up-front toll spend while you wait to be paid for the load. If you run several entities, multi-entity management keeps each one's toll spend separated, which also keeps the records clean for any VAT recovery. Altery is not a bank, and this is general information rather than tax advice; confirm current toll rates with the relevant national toll operator.

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