Valletta, Malta · Congestion charge
Official name Valletta charging zone — Vehicle Access Zones (Control) Regulations, S.L. 65.31
In force in Valletta right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 11:03 · Europe/Malta
Lifts Tuesday, 13 October 2026 at 18:00 local time.
The Third Schedule makes a public holiday that falls on a charging day free. We hold no published calendar of Maltese public holidays, so on a public holiday this schedule will say the zone is in force when the charge is in fact suspended. Treat a Maltese national holiday falling Monday to Friday as a free day and check before relying on it.
Being inside the window does not mean you are being charged. The first thirty minutes are free, a vehicle that enters after 14.00 and leaves before 08.00 the next day pays nothing, and a vehicle that enters within thirty minutes of 18.00 and stays until 18.00 pays nothing. This encoding says when the zone is in force, not what your visit will cost.
This encoding says the zone is in force, not that you are inside it. We hold no boundary: the First Schedule specifies the charging area by a plan printed in the legal text, so the warning is at the level of the locality of Valletta, which may be wider than the cordon.
Large classes of vehicle never pay, whatever the clock says — electric and hybrid vehicles, motorcycles, buses and vehicles built to carry more than eight passengers besides the driver, emergency and public-service vehicles, and any vehicle that meets the residence-based 'non-chargeable vehicle' test.
The Board may temporarily suspend or amend the tariff for special occasions on three days' notice in the Government Gazette. Such a notice is not visible to this encoding.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
Malta enters this corpus on a charge that is metered by the hour rather than sold by the day, and on a national framework that has designated exactly one city in nineteen years.
The Vehicle Access Zones (Control) Regulations, subsidiary legislation 65.31 under the Traffic Regulation Ordinance, came into force on 1 May 2007 and let the Authority for Transport in Malta establish 'one or more charging zones within any Council locality'. The First Schedule has always listed one: VALLETTA, Monday to Friday 08.00 to 18.00.
Access is read by camera — the regulations call the installation a 'Vehicular Access Control System', operated under contract to the Authority — and what it produces is an invoice, not a fine. The meter is unusual enough that a driver who assumes a London-style day charge will get it wrong in both directions. The first thirty minutes inside the zone are free.
Between thirty and sixty minutes the charge is 82 cents flat. After an hour it is 82 cents for each hour or part of an hour, and it stops at 6.52 euro for the day. Enter after 14.00 and leave before 08.00 the next morning and there is no charge at all; enter in the last thirty minutes before 18.00 and stay until 18.00 and there is no charge either; and a public holiday that falls on a charging weekday is free.
Nothing here asks what the engine is in the sense a low emission zone does — there is no Euro class, no fuel ban, no windscreen label and no vehicle age anywhere in the instrument — but the exemption list does reach the powertrain once, and in the driver's favour: electric and hybrid vehicles are exempt from the charge outright, as are motorcycles, buses and anything registered to carry more than eight passengers besides the driver.
The largest exemption is not a vehicle type at all but a residence test: a 'non-chargeable vehicle' is one kept in a garage or parked on a street inside the locality at night for at least fifteen nights a month and at least seven months a year, which is how Valletta's own residents fall out of the scheme. Not paying is not an offence and carries no penalty charge notice.
It is a debt that follows the vehicle: the charge rises by 2 per cent or 5.82 euro after thirty days, by another 2 per cent after sixty, and doubles after ninety, and until it is settled the Authority will not renew that vehicle's road licence, register its transfer, or allow it to be scrapped or garaged. What the regulations do make an offence is obscuring the number plate, at up to 1,164.69 euro.
One more instrument overlaps this one and a visitor should know it exists: the Valletta Pedestrian Zones Regulations, S.L. 499.54, prohibit vehicles from proceeding or waiting in a schedule of named streets and squares inside the city, with bollards at each end — no charge will buy you in there.
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta (legislation.mt), the Office of the State Advocate's official consolidated-legislation service — the entry for Subsidiary Legislation 65.31, Vehicle Access Zones (Control) Regulations. This is the page that states the instrument exists under that title and is one of the consolidated laws of Malta; the consolidated text itself is the PDF cited on the other fields
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta — the consolidated text of S.L. 65.31, Third Schedule (substituted by Legal Notice 430 of 2013), read under regulation 5. The figure recorded is the ceiling, not the price of entry: the Schedule reads 'Access for first 30 mins: Free', 'Access over 30 mins up to 60 mins: €0.82' and 'Access over 60 mins: €0.82 per hour or part thereof with a maximum daily charge of €6.52'. A short visit therefore costs nothing and a long one cannot cost more than 6.52 euro. The same Schedule discounts the applicable charge by 10 per cent for payment before the invoice is issued and for automatic debit, and makes a public holiday falling on a charging day free. Regulation 5(2) lets the Board suspend or amend the Schedule temporarily for special occasions provided it publishes a notice in the Gazette at least three days in advance, so the tariff can move for an event without the Schedule changing
Monday to Friday from 08.00 to 18.00. The First Schedule states it in four words under the heading VALLETTA — 'Prescribed periods: Monday to Friday from 08.00 to 18.00' — and regulation 3(4) makes controlled access remain in force throughout those periods.
Saturdays and Sundays are outside it, and paragraph 1(c) of the Third Schedule says so explicitly: 'When the area designated as a charging zone is accessed during periods of time when the charging zone is not in force, access is free.' Inside the window the clock is not the whole answer, because the tariff has three rules that make part of it free.
A vehicle that enters after 14.00 and leaves before 08.00 the following day pays nothing. A vehicle that enters in the last thirty minutes before the zone stops being in force and stays until it stops pays nothing. And a vehicle that enters between 08.00 and 14.00 and is still inside after 14.00 is charged for the time before 14.00, less the first thirty minutes, plus the time it stays between 14.00 and 18.00.
A public holiday that falls on a day the zone would otherwise operate is free under the Third Schedule, which is the one gap in this timetable we cannot resolve for a driver: we hold no published Maltese public-holiday calendar.
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta — the consolidated text of S.L. 65.31, First Schedule (amended by Legal Notice 430 of 2013) read with regulation 3(4), and the Third Schedule paragraphs 1(c) and 3 for the free periods inside the window
One locality, and the framework has never named a second. Regulation 3(1) says 'There may be established one or more charging zones within any Council locality' and regulation 3(2) sends the reader to the First Schedule for the areas actually designated.
The First Schedule, under the heading 'Localities designated as charging zones and prescribed periods', carries one entry — VALLETTA — and states 'The area designated as a charging zone is that specified in the following plan', followed by a plan printed in the legal text.
So the designated locality is Valletta and the exact cordon inside it is drawn rather than described: the regulations name no street and no boundary in words, which is why this record cannot give one.
What a driver can act on is the entry signage, which regulation 3(3) requires the Authority to place and the Local Council to maintain 'in such positions as the Authority may consider necessary for the purpose of providing adequate warning and, or directions to drivers at all entries to and exits from a charging zone', in the form set out in the Second Schedule. Two further things bound the area.
Regulation 12 lets pedestrian areas be established inside a charging zone in which vehicle access is strictly prohibited or restricted, and a separate instrument does exactly that for Valletta — the Valletta Pedestrian Zones Regulations, S.L. 499.54, which prohibit vehicles from proceeding or waiting in a schedule of named streets and squares and require bollards at each end of each street.
No access fee buys entry there. And the charging zone is not the island: the Traffic Regulation Ordinance has thirty-one pieces of subsidiary legislation under it and exactly two of them restrict vehicle access to an area — this one, and the Mdina (Restriction of Access and Transit of Vehicles) Regulations, S.L. 65.27, which is a flat ban on a different city and carries no charge at all.
The Authority for Transport in Malta Act has seventy-six, of which one does: the Valletta pedestrian zones. Three instruments, two cities, and only Valletta is metered.
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta — the consolidated text of S.L. 65.31, regulation 3 and the First Schedule (amended by Legal Notice 430 of 2013), with regulation 12 for the pedestrian areas inside a charging zone
There is no emission standard in this scheme. The regulations ask what the vehicle is used for, who owns it and where it sleeps, and never what comes out of the exhaust: no Euro class, no fuel ban, no windscreen label and no vehicle age appears anywhere in S.L. 65.31 or in any of its amendments.
The powertrain is reached once, as an exemption rather than a test — regulation 6(m) exempts 'electric motor vehicles and hybrid vehicles' from the charge — so a petrol car of any age may enter and will simply be billed. Not estimated. This is also a statement about Malta rather than only about Valletta.
Searching the State Advocate's consolidated-legislation register for 'Emissjoni' returns twenty-seven instruments, every one of them about air quality, fuel economy, greenhouse-gas trading, machinery or noise, and none of them a low emission zone; a blind negative returns zero and the controls hold ('Toroq' 56, 'Vetturi' 44, 'Traffiku' 7).
The stronger denominator is the enabling act rather than the search box, because a Maltese access restriction is made as subsidiary legislation under a named Chapter: the Traffic Regulation Ordinance has thirty-one instruments under it and the Authority for Transport in Malta Act seventy-six, and reading the title of all one hundred and seven finds three that restrict vehicle access to an area — S.L.
65.27 for Mdina, S.L. 65.31 for charging zones, and S.L. 499.54 for the Valletta pedestrian zones — and not one that mentions an emission class.
That listing is also the reason this note does not rest on the word search: a title search for 'Żoni' returns twelve instruments and misses Mdina entirely, because Mdina's regulations are titled a restriction of access and transit and never use the word zone.
There is no diesel test either, for the same reason there is no petrol test: the charge is keyed to time spent inside the zone and to a list of exemptions, not to the engine. An old diesel belonging to a Valletta resident whose car sleeps in the locality is a 'non-chargeable vehicle' and pays nothing; a new diesel driven in by a visitor pays 82 cents an hour up to 6.52 euro a day. Not estimated.
Entering without paying is not an offence under these regulations and there is no penalty charge notice, so there is no single figure to record. What happens instead is an escalating debt attached to the vehicle.
The Third Schedule increases the applicable charge by 2 per cent or 5.82 euro, whichever is higher, if it is not settled within thirty days of the first invoice, by a further 2 per cent if it is not settled in the next thirty, and by 100 per cent after ninety days.
Regulation 5(3) then has the Authority withhold renewal of that vehicle's road licence until the fees are paid, unless the invoice is under contestation, and regulation 5(4) blocks registration of its transfer, its scrapping and its garaging on the same condition.
The regulations do create fines, but for other things: up to 1,164.69 euro (multa) under regulation 13 for obscuring a registration plate, or for accessing the charging zone with a plate so obscured; up to 698.81 euro under regulation 10(7) for knowingly giving false information on an exemption application; and 58.23 euro (ammenda) under the proviso to regulation 7(b) for a garage-registered vehicle that overstays the ten minutes it may spend parked in front of its garage, which also costs the exemption for a year and brings clamping if the overstay reaches an hour.
An invoice or penalty may be contested in writing within twenty days to an independent Contestation Board, on payment of an administrative fee of 1.16, 3.49 or 11.65 euro depending on the amount at issue, refunded if the contestation succeeds; the Board's decisions are final. None of those figures is the price of driving in without paying, so none of them is recorded here as the penalty.
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta — the consolidated text of S.L. 65.31: regulation 4 for the camera system, regulation 5 and the Third Schedule for the charge, the surcharges and the road-licence consequences, regulation 6 for the exemption list and the definition of a non-chargeable vehicle in regulation 2, regulation 7(b) for garages and the parking disc, regulation 9 for the delivery windows and the other Board exemptions, regulation 10 for the application procedure and the 46.55 euro registration fee, regulation 11 for contestation and regulation 13 for the obscured-plate offence
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta (legislation.mt) — the consolidated text of Subsidiary Legislation 65.31, Vehicle Access Zones (Control) Regulations, made under the Traffic Regulation Ordinance (Cap. 65). The instrument came into force on 1 May 2007 as Legal Notice 105 of 2007 and the text states its own amendment chain: 'as amended by Legal Notices 408 of 2007 and 269 of 2008; Act XV of 2009; and Legal Notices 430 of 2013 and 57 of 2016'. Served as PDF from the service's document store; the stable citation for the instrument is the ELI identifier eli/sl/65.31
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta — the ELI entry for S.L. 65.31 in the Office of the State Advocate's consolidated-legislation register. This is the watchable half of the citation above: it states the instrument's type, title and keywords, and the register marks a repealed instrument in both the number and the title (L.S. 433.09(R), 'Imħassrin bl-Avviż Legali 354 tal-2017'), which S.L. 65.31 carries in neither
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta — the Legal Notices register entry for Legal Notice 430 of 2013, the Vehicle Access Zones (Control) (Amendment) Regulations, 2013, published in the Government Gazette of Malta No. 19,178 of 6 December 2013. This is the notice that substituted the Third Schedule, so it is the provenance of every figure in the tariff, and it is the newest instrument in the chain that touches the price. Searching the same register for 'Aċċess Kontrollat' returns four notices in total — 105 of 2007, 269 of 2008, 430 of 2013 and 57 of 2016 — and nothing after 2016
Leġiżlazzjoni Malta — the ELI entry for Subsidiary Legislation 499.54, the Valletta Pedestrian Zones Regulations, made under the Authority for Transport in Malta Act and in force since 1 September 2008. It is the second and last instrument in Malta's consolidated legislation that restricts vehicle access to an area, and it is the one that bans vehicles outright from a schedule of named streets and squares inside Valletta rather than charging them
Next scheduled re-check: 2027-03-15.