Bordeaux, France · Low emission zone
Official name Zone à Faibles Émissions (ZFE) de Bordeaux Métropole
In force in Bordeaux right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 11:03 · Europe/Paris
The zone is always on; whether it reaches you depends on whether your vehicle can be given a Crit'Air sticker at all, which this timetable does not check. Any Crit'Air class from 1 to 5 is unaffected at every hour.
The national ZFE register encodes Bordeaux's hours as 'Mo-Su 00:00-23:59; PH off', which would mean public holidays are exempt. Bordeaux Métropole's own page says 7 days a week, 24 hours a day and names no holiday exception, so the publisher's wording is what is encoded here — the stricter of the two, and the one that cannot get a driver fined.
It applies to parking as well as driving, so leaving a banned vehicle inside the rocade is not a way round it.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
Bordeaux's zone is set at the mildest level a French ZFE can be set to: since 1 January 2025 only 'non classés' vehicles are barred — the ones too old to be given a Crit'Air sticker at all, which for a car means first registered before 1 January 1997. Everything from Crit'Air 1 to Crit'Air 5, plus electric and hydrogen, may drive and park inside.
The perimeter is the intra-rocade, and the Métropole is explicit that the rocade itself is outside it and stays open to everyone. Even a banned vehicle is not shut out entirely: eleven park-and-ride sites inside the ring are reachable on access roads deliberately excluded from the zone, and a Pass ZFE buys up to 24 days a year.
There is no charge and no day rate. Bordeaux's ZFE bans rather than prices: an unclassified vehicle may not drive or park inside the rocade at all, and every classified one may, so there is nothing to buy on entry. The Pass ZFE that lets a banned vehicle in for up to 24 days a year is a derogation, and the Métropole's page states no fee for it — so none is stated here.
In force since 1 January 2025, and the Métropole states it as 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. It covers parking as well as driving.
The intra-rocade: everything inside Bordeaux's ring road. The rocade itself is outside the perimeter and remains open to all vehicles, and so are the dedicated slip roads that lead from it to eleven park-and-ride sites inside the ring — Brandeburg and 40 Journaux in Bordeaux, Gare de Bruges, Hippodrome in Eysines, Les Pins in Mérignac, Bougnard and Unitec in Pessac, Arena and Dravemont in Floirac, and Buttinière and Lauriers in Lormont.
The authority's own map: Point d'Accès National transport.data.gouv.fr
A petrol car first registered before 1 January 1997 may not drive or park inside the rocade, because it is too old to be given any Crit'Air sticker. Every petrol car from that date onwards — Crit'Air 1 through 5 — is unaffected.
The same date, and that is the point: Bordeaux draws its line where a vehicle stops being classifiable, not by fuel. A diesel car first registered before 1 January 1997 is banned; one registered on or after it is Crit'Air 5 at worst and may enter. The corresponding dates for other categories are 1 October 1997 for vans, 1 June 2000 for powered two-wheelers, and 1 October 2001 for lorries, buses and coaches.
Bordeaux Métropole's own ZFE page does not state a fine. The amount for driving a restricted vehicle in a French ZFE is set nationally rather than by the metropolis, and other French publishers in this corpus give it — but a figure read on Lyon's or Toulouse's page is not a fact about Bordeaux's scheme, so it is not carried across.
Next scheduled re-check: 2026-12-11.
This is owed on the country's roads, not inside this scheme. What France asks, with the source