Budapest, Hungary · Heavy vehicle ban
Official name Budapest főváros össztömeg-korlátozott forgalmú övezetei (behajtási hozzájárulás)
Partly in force in Budapest right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 11:05 · Europe/Budapest
This encoding says when a zone's restriction is in force, not which zone you are in. We do not hold the boundaries as data — the authority publishes them street by street in prose — so the warning is at city level and a driver still has to read the zone definition or the authority's own map.
Three rules are encoded because Budapest publishes three different timetables, and they overlap geographically: a 3.5-tonne zone can sit inside a 12-tonne zone. A vehicle can therefore be outside one zone's hours and inside another's at the same moment.
The free windows belong to five zones only. In the other ten there is no hour of the day at which a permit stops being required.
No weekday, weekend or public-holiday rule is encoded, because the authority's zone definitions name none. Hungary has public holidays; this scheme does not mention them, and inventing an exemption would be worse than having none.
Being inside an hour is not the same as needing a permit. The restriction only bites on a vehicle heavier than the zone's stated limit, and several classes — emergency vehicles, refuse and public-health vehicles, postal collection and delivery, and vehicles already holding a national oversize permit that names their route — are outside it entirely.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
Budapest is covered, not ringed. Fifteen weight-restricted zones tile most of the city, each one carrying a sign with a maximum permitted laden weight on it, and a goods vehicle heavier than the figure on that sign may not drive in the zone at all unless it has bought an entry permit — a behajtási hozzájárulás — before it gets there. There are three tiers.
Four zones are set at 3.5 tonnes: Buda (code B35) and Pest (P35), which between them cover the two inner districts either side of the Danube, plus Kelenvölgy (KV35) and Dél-Pest (DP35). Four are set at 7.5 tonnes: Észak-Buda (EB75), Közép-Pest (P75), Pesterzsébet (DP75) and Csepel-Csillagtelep (CS75).
Seven are set at 12 tonnes and they take in most of the rest of the city: Észak-Buda (EB1), Hegyvidék (HB1), Dél-Buda (DB1), Észak-Pest (ÉP1), Kelet-Pest (KP1), Dél-Pest (DP1) and Csepel (CS1), the last of which is simply the whole XXI district.
The zones are defined by street, and the road authority publishes the definitions that way: each entry names the roads that bound the area, whether the bounding roads are themselves inside it, the motorway approaches and through-routes that are cut out of it, and a further list of streets that may be used by destination traffic only.
The rule is the vehicle's registered maximum permitted laden weight — the F.1 code on the registration document — measured against the zone's figure, so a 7.5-tonne van needs nothing in a 12-tonne zone and a permit in a 3.5-tonne one.
Who runs it is worth knowing, because the permit is not sold by the city hall: Budapest Közút Zrt. has operated the capital's freight entry system under a public-service contract since 1 April 2016, and it issues the permits in the name of the Municipality of Budapest through an online system called TOBI.
What it costs depends on the vehicle, the zone tier, the number of days and the vehicle's Euro class and age, and the authority publishes the whole grid as a spreadsheet rather than as a single price.
A one-day permit for the lightest vehicle that needs one — a 3.5 to 4.5 tonne lorry in a 3.5-tonne zone, or a 12 to 13 tonne lorry in a 12-tonne zone — is 172.60 forint including VAT; a one-day permit for an articulated combination over 32 tonnes in a 3.5-tonne zone is 2,174.79 forint; and a 360-day permit for that same combination is 782,926.03 forint.
On top of the entry fee every application carries a fixed cost recovery of 4,000 forint net, which is why the cheapest single day of access is not the 172.60 figure on its own. Vehicle registration in the system is required for these zones but is free.
The emission rules run through the price rather than through a ban, with one exception that is a ban: a Euro 0, 1 or 2 vehicle pays a 50 per cent surcharge and a Euro 3 vehicle 25 per cent, while a vehicle no older than five years takes 20 per cent off and one between five and ten years takes 10 per cent off — and the road authority states that a new entry permit can no longer be issued at all to a Euro 0 or Euro 1 vehicle for the 3.5-tonne and 7.5-tonne zones.
Hours are part of the rule and they differ by zone. Nine of the fifteen apply around the clock; Buda, Pest, Észak-Buda and Közép-Pest apply from 07:00 to 18:00 and again from 22:00 to 05:00, which leaves an unrestricted window in the early evening and the early morning; and Dél-Pest (DP35) applies from 12:00 to 17:00 and from 19:00 to 10:00.
Alongside these fifteen the same authority runs eleven separate protected zones — the Buda Castle, the inner third of district V, Margitsziget, Városliget, the Opera House surroundings and others — under a different municipal decree with its own permit types and its own fee basis. Those are not this record.
Budapest Közút Zrt. — the road authority that operates the capital's freight entry permit system (TOBI) under a public-service contract, on its own 'Területi felsorolás' page for the weight-restricted zones, which enumerates all fifteen zones with their codes, their street-by-street extents and their hours of application
There is a charge and it is published in full, but there is no single daily number to print, so none is invented here.
The road authority prices an entry permit off four variables at once — the zone's weight tier, the vehicle's maximum permitted laden weight band, the number of days applied for, and the vehicle's Euro class and age — and publishes the result as a grid in its own spreadsheet, 'Dijak_2026_07_01.xlsx', in force from 1 July 2026 and quoted with VAT included.
The floor of that grid is the same in all three tiers: 172.60 forint for one day for the lightest band that needs a permit at all (3.5–4.5 t in a 3.5-tonne zone, 7.5–8.5 t in a 7.5-tonne zone, 12–13 t in a 12-tonne zone).
The ceiling for one day is 2,174.79 forint, for a combination over 32 tonnes in a 3.5-tonne zone; the 7.5-tonne tier tops out at 1,812.33 and the 12-tonne tier at 1,337.67 for the same class of vehicle. Longer permits are sold at 7, 15, 30, 180 and 360 days and scale close to linearly — 360 days for that heaviest combination in a 3.5-tonne zone is 782,926.03 forint. Those numbers are the entry fee only.
Every application also carries a cost recovery of 4,000 forint net, payable each time a request is filed, which the authority states separately and which dominates the price of a single day. Vehicle registration in the system is required but free for these zones, unlike the protected-zone permits where it is charged.
Recording any one cell of the grid as 'the daily charge' would tell a driver a number that is right for one vehicle in one zone and wrong for the rest, and adding the cost recovery to it would be our arithmetic rather than the authority's, so the field stays null and the figures stay in the prose where their conditions travel with them.
Not estimated: every amount above is read from the authority's own published table.
The hours are part of the zone, not part of the city, and Budapest publishes a separate 'Időbeli hatály' line for each of the fifteen. Nine of them run continuously, from 0 to 24 hours: Kelenvölgy (KV35), Pesterzsébet (DP75), Csepel-Csillagtelep (CS75) and all seven 12-tonne zones — Észak-Buda (EB1), Hegyvidék (HB1), Dél-Buda (DB1), Észak-Pest (ÉP1), Kelet-Pest (KP1), Dél-Pest (DP1) and Csepel (CS1).
Four run a split day: Buda (B35), Pest (P35), Észak-Buda (EB75) and Közép-Pest (P75) apply from 07:00 to 18:00 and again from 22:00 to 05:00. That leaves two genuinely unrestricted windows in those four zones — from 18:00 to 22:00 in the evening, and from 05:00 to 07:00 in the morning — and they are the only free windows the scheme publishes anywhere.
One zone is on its own timetable: Dél-Pest (DP35) applies from 12:00 to 17:00 and from 19:00 to 10:00, so its free windows are 10:00 to 12:00 and 17:00 to 19:00. Nothing in the authority's published zone definitions distinguishes a weekday from a weekend or names a public holiday, and none is encoded here. The restriction is the sign, and the sign does not change on a Sunday.
Two things the clock does not do should be said plainly. It does not change the price of a permit by itself — a discount for night running exists in the scheme but it is a discount on the entry fee for a permit valid in a stated night period, not a free window — and it does not affect the eleven protected zones, which are governed by a different decree and are outside this record.
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Területi felsorolás' for the weight-restricted zones, which prints an 'Időbeli hatály' line under each of the fifteen zone definitions. The '0 órától 24 óráig' and '7 órától 18 óráig és 22 órától 5 óráig' forms are the authority's own wording
Fifteen zones, defined by street rather than by coordinate, covering most of Budapest between them. The road authority publishes each one as a perimeter of named roads, then says which of those perimeter roads are themselves inside the zone, then lists what is cut out of it.
The 3.5-tonne tier is the innermost: Buda (B35) is the block bounded by the Bem rakpart, Jégverem utca, Fő utca, Clark Ádám tér, Lánchíd utca, Ybl Miklós tér, Várkert rakpart, Döbrentei tér, Szent Gellért rakpart, Szent Gellért tér, Műegyetem rakpart, Goldmann György tér, Irinyi József utca, Október 23. utca, Bocskai út, Karolina út, Villányi út, Budaörsi út, Alkotás utca, Magyar jakobinusok tere, Krisztina körút, Széll Kálmán tér, Margit körút and Bem József utca; Pest (P35) is the mirror image on the other bank, bounded by the Újpesti rakpart, Váci út, the Nagykörút from Nyugati tér round to Boráros tér, and the Danube embankments back to Jászai Mari tér.
Kelenvölgy (KV35) and Dél-Pest (DP35) are outer and smaller. The 7.5-tonne tier adds Észak-Buda (EB75) above the Margit körút, Közép-Pest (P75) between the Hungária körút and the river, Pesterzsébet (DP75) and Csepel-Csillagtelep (CS75).
The 12-tonne tier is the coarse one, and it is nearly the whole administrative city: Észak-Buda (EB1), Hegyvidék (HB1), Dél-Buda (DB1), Észak-Pest (ÉP1), Kelet-Pest (KP1), Dél-Pest (DP1) and Csepel (CS1), the last of which the authority defines in one line as the administrative area of district XXI. Two kinds of hole are cut in these areas and both matter to a driver.
The first is 'Kivéve' — roads simply not in the zone, and these are almost always the motorway approaches and ring roads: the M0, the M1–M7 and M5 approach sections, the M6, main road 6, the Árpád híd and the Róbert Károly körút.
The second is 'Kivéve célforgalommal' — roads a heavy vehicle may use for destination traffic only, and these run to dozens of named streets and street sections per zone, mostly industrial estates, market approaches and factory gates.
The extent measured independently agrees with a city-wide scheme rather than a cordon: Budapest's own administrative relation in OpenStreetMap is 29.30 km north to south by 30.87 km east to west, and its furthest corner is 26.03 km from this record's anchor, which is why the city entry carries a radius override. We do not hold a polygon for any of the fifteen.
The authority runs a public web map of its freight zones, and the map services behind it are not public.
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Területi felsorolás' for the weight-restricted zones, which is the authority's own definitive enumeration: fifteen zones, each given as a bounding list of named roads, with 'Kivéve' for what is excluded and 'Kivéve célforgalommal' for what is open to destination traffic only
The authority's own map: Budapest Közút Zrt.
No petrol standard, because a petrol car is not in scope. This is a weight rule: it bites only on a goods vehicle, tractor, agricultural tractor or slow vehicle whose maximum permitted laden weight exceeds the figure on the zone's sign, and a car passes through all fifteen zones without needing anything whatever its engine.
The scheme does judge emissions, but it judges them on the price of a goods-vehicle permit and not as a threshold a car could fail: the road authority raises the entry fee by 50 per cent for a Euro 0, 1 or 2 vehicle and by 25 per cent for a Euro 3, discounts it by 20 per cent for a vehicle no older than five years and by 10 per cent for one between five and ten, and surcharges it by 10 and 20 per cent for vehicles over fifteen and over twenty years old.
One of those rules does become a hard floor, and it is recorded here rather than in this field because it applies to lorries and not to cars: the authority states that a new entry permit can no longer be issued to a Euro 0 or Euro 1 vehicle for the 3.5-tonne and 7.5-tonne restricted zones. Not estimated.
Nor a diesel standard, and for the same reason: the trigger is weight, not fuel, and the authority's published rules never separate diesel from petrol anywhere in the scheme.
The Euro class it does read off the registration document is applied identically to both, as a percentage on the entry fee rather than as an admission test — a Euro 0, 1 or 2 goods vehicle pays 50 per cent more and a Euro 3 pays 25 per cent more, and the only outright exclusion is that a Euro 0 or Euro 1 vehicle can no longer be granted a new permit for the 3.5-tonne and 7.5-tonne zones.
Combined discounts are capped at 50 per cent of the permit fee, which means a clean modern lorry still pays. A diesel car is unaffected by any of this, because it is under every zone's weight limit. Not estimated.
The operator publishes no amount, and the amount is not ours to supply. Budapest Közút's general terms for the TOBI system carry a section headed 'Behajtási hozzájárulások ellenőrzése, szankciók', and what it says is that road-use entitlement is checked by the organisation designated in an Act or by government decree, and that Budapest Közút as road authority must hand that organisation the data needed for the check.
It names no figure, no offence and no enforcing body by name. That is consistent with how the rule is constructed: driving past a restricted-zone sign is an offence under the Hungarian highway code — the 1/1975. (II.
5.) KPM–BM joint decree, whose section 14(1) z/2 creates the restricted-traffic zone sign — and the sanction for it sits in national law rather than in the municipal decree or the operator's terms. We could not read that national law from here.
The national register of legislation at njt.hu, which is where a Hungarian government decree and the consolidated text of a Budapest municipal decree are both published, closes the TCP connection on us without sending a single byte of response, so no fine amount, no fine range and no enforcing authority has been read from an official source.
Printing a number from memory or from a secondary site would be exactly the fabricated fact this corpus refuses. The field stays null until the register can be read or the operator publishes a figure.
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Mik a korlátozott övezetek?' for who needs a permit, what data an application takes, how the zone is identified from a delivery address, the 4,000 forint net cost recovery and the combined permit; and the authority's 'Ügyintézés menete' page for the two-working-day decision, the payment channels and the rule that a permit is validated only on full payment
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Területi felsorolás', the road authority's own enumeration of the weight-restricted freight zones. This is the register for this scheme: all fifteen zones with their codes, each given as a perimeter of named roads with its exclusions, its destination-traffic-only streets and its hours of application. It is also the page that fixes the three tiers at 3.5, 7.5 and 12 tonnes
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Díjak' for the weight-restricted zones. States the 4,000 forint net cost recovery payable on every application and links the authority's fee workbook, which at the time of reading was 'Dijak_2026_07_01.xlsx', in force from 1 July 2026. The file name would be the ideal thing to watch — it is the authority's own version pointer and changes the moment a tariff does — but it lives in an href and the monitor reads normalised text, where attributes do not survive; it was pre-flighted and missed, so the watched strings here are the page's prose and the tariff date is carried by stale_after instead
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Mik a korlátozott övezetek?'. The authority's own answer to when a permit is needed (registered maximum laden weight above the destination zone's limit), which vehicles are exempt by national law, what an application must contain, how the zone is derived from a delivery address, and what the combined permit across adjacent 12-tonne zones is
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Kedvezmények és környezetvédelmi felár' for the weight-restricted zones. The Euro-class and age scale that prices the permit, and the one hard exclusion in the scheme: no new entry permit for a Euro 0 or Euro 1 vehicle in the 3.5-tonne and 7.5-tonne zones. Also the 50 per cent cap on stacked discounts, the 20 per cent Budapest small-business discount and the 10 per cent haulier-association discount
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Ügyintézés menete'. The procedure: a complete weight-restricted zone application is decided within two working days, the fee depends on laden weight, period, permit type, Euro class and year of manufacture, payment is by card online or at the Kelenföld customer centre or by transfer, and the issuing body validates the permit electronically only once the entry fee has been paid in full
BKK Budapesti Közlekedési Központ — 'Teherforgalom', the capital's transport authority describing the same scheme from the other side. Held as an independent second publisher for two statements that would otherwise rest on one source: that Budapest has fifteen restricted-traffic zones and eleven protected zones, and that the freight entry system (TOBI) is operated by Budapest Közút Zrt., which issues the permits
Budapest Közút Zrt. — general terms and conditions for the use of the Freight Online Entry Information System (TOBI), in force from 1 January 2025. Held for the legal basis, which no HTML page on the site states: the weight-restricted zones and their entry permits are created by Budapest Municipal Assembly decree 92/2011. (XII. 30.) Főv. Kgy. on the regulation of freight traffic in the administrative area of Budapest; the separate protected zones by decree 30/2010. (VI. 4.) Főv. Kgy.; and the restricted-traffic zone itself by section 14(1) z/2 of the highway code, joint decree 1/1975. (II. 5.) KPM–BM. Its section 7 is also the measured basis for this record's null penalty: it names the enforcement duty and no amount. A PDF, so not monitored for watched strings
Budapest Közút Zrt. — 'Dijak_2026_07_01.xlsx', the authority's own fee workbook, in force from 1 July 2026 and linked from both fee pages. Every forint figure in this record is read from its 'korlátozott övezet árak' sheet, which is priced per zone tier, per weight band and per permit length, VAT included. A spreadsheet, so not monitored for watched strings; the file name is watched on the fees page instead
Next scheduled re-check: 2027-01-15.
A city can run more than one scheme, and they do not always answer the same question.