Geneva, Switzerland · Low emission zone
In force in Geneva right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 11:02 · Europe/Zurich
Lifts Tuesday, 13 October 2026 at 22:00 local time.
This is the timetable of an activated day, not of the year. The restriction runs only while the department responsible for transport has ordered it by decree during a pollution peak, and the canton says outright that in the absence of smog no Stick'AIR restriction applies inside the perimeter at all. Most days of the year a verdict of 'in force' here is wider than the rule: between 2020 and August 2025 the canton activated the scheme twice.
Whether the scheme is running today is a live fact and is deliberately not encoded. The canton publishes it on its Bulletin Stick'AIR du jour and sends it a day ahead to anyone subscribed to the Stick'AIR alert or using the Air2G2 app, and any answer this corpus baked in would be a guess about the weather.
Which vehicles are barred is not in this encoding either, because it moves with the alert level within a single episode: level 1 bars macaron 5 and vehicles with no macaron, level 2 adds macaron 4, level 3 adds macaron 3. A driver whose car is macaron 3 is inside the scheme at level 3 and outside it at level 1, on the same road in the same week.
No weekday, weekend or public-holiday rule is encoded, because the scheme names none. Its trigger is a measured or forecast pollutant concentration, which does not consult the calendar. Switzerland has cantonal public holidays and no Swiss holiday calendar is held in this corpus; the instrument does not mention one, so none is encoded.
The 06:00 to 22:00 window is the canton's statement on its own service pages, not a provision of the regulation, which sets the alert levels and the measures and leaves each activation's timing to the departmental decree that orders it.
Vehicles exempted by article 5(5) — emergency, disabled-badge, agricultural, professional passenger transport including taxis, military, special convoys, diplomatic, works vehicles, cycles and mopeds, and hearses — are outside the ban at every level and at every hour, and the schedule cannot express that.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
Geneva's low emission zone is the only one in the corpus that is switched on rather than left on.
Most days of the year there is no restriction at all inside the perimeter; when the canton measures or forecasts a pollution peak, the department responsible for transport orders the circulation différenciée by immediately enforceable departmental decree, and from that moment the dirtiest vehicles may not drive in the centre of the canton between 06:00 and 22:00.
The instrument is the Règlement régissant le dispositif d'urgence en cas de pics de pollution atmosphérique, rsGE K 1 70.09, made by the Conseil d'État on 6 November 2019 and in force since 15 January 2020, under articles 13A(4) and 15D to 15J of the cantonal act applying the federal environment law. What decides a driver's case is a sticker.
Every motor vehicle is classed 0 to 5 by fuel and Euro standard on the regulation's own annexe, and the class is shown by a Stick'AIR macaron glued inside the windscreen; a vehicle too old for any class is hors catégorie and carries none. The restriction then arrives in three steps, and each step bans one more class. Alert level 1 bars macaron 5 and every vehicle without a macaron.
Level 2 adds macaron 4 and makes all Unireso public transport free from the following day. Level 3 adds macaron 3 and bans open fires. For an ordinary car that resolves to two numbers: at the worst level a petrol car needs to be Euro 4 or newer and a diesel Euro 5 or newer, and at the mildest level a petrol car needs Euro 2 and a diesel Euro 3.
Where you are registered makes no difference — article 15E(3) says so expressly, and it catches foreign plates as squarely as Genevan ones — and the French Crit'Air sticker is accepted in place of the Swiss one, with identical numbering. Two things make this scheme easy to misread.
It is not a charge: the macaron costs 5 francs once, which the regulation states is its production and distribution cost, and it lasts the life of the vehicle. And it is not permanent: the same perimeter carries no restriction at all in the absence of smog, so a record that simply said 'Geneva has a low emission zone' would warn a driver every day of the year about a rule that ran twice between 2020 and August 2025.
The canton announces an activation the day before by e-mail alert, by app and on variable signs at the edge of the perimeter, and the scheme has been through the courts: the Chambre constitutionnelle of the Cour de justice upheld the canton's power to create environmental zones on 27 August 2020 while quashing three provisions, and the Conseil d'État re-enacted the two threshold articles on 11 November 2020.
République et canton de Genève — 'Dispositif et périmètre', the canton's own service page for the circulation différenciée, maintained by the Office cantonal de l'environnement. Held as the statement of how the scheme reaches a driver: that it is activated only during a pollution peak, that the ban runs from 06:00 to 22:00 inside the perimeter, that the macaron has six categories from 0 to 5, and that every motor vehicle is concerned regardless of where it is registered
There is no charge for driving into this zone, on any day and at any alert level, and no ticket, pass or exemption anyone can buy to enter it. The scheme bans and does not bill: when the circulation différenciée is activated, a vehicle in the wrong class may not be inside the perimeter between 06:00 and 22:00, and no payment changes that.
The figure a reader is most likely to mistake for a daily charge is the 5 francs the macaron costs, and it is not one.
Article 5(2) of the regulation prices the sticker at 5 francs and says in the same sentence what the price is — 'son coût de production et de distribution', the cost of producing and distributing it — and the canton's own sales page adds that a correctly affixed macaron stays valid for the whole life of the vehicle.
It is bought once, from the Fondation des parkings, the office cantonal des véhicules, certain garages and filling stations, or online, and it buys nothing but the label; a vehicle that is hors catégorie may buy no macaron at all and is simply barred. Deliberately not divided out of anything: a one-off identification fee is not a daily charge, and the corpus has refused that arithmetic before (D-131, D-132).
Not estimated.
The scheme has two clocks and confusing them is the main way to get Geneva wrong. The first is the day: the restriction exists only while the department responsible for transport has activated it.
Article 2(1) of the regulation gives that department the power to order the measures, and their lifting, by immediately enforceable departmental decree, on advice from the air-protection service about which alert level to trigger or release; article 10A adds that an activation also needs a weather forecast pointing to conditions in which the pollutant will stagnate or rise.
On every other day of the year the perimeter carries no Stick'AIR restriction whatsoever, which the canton states in as many words on its own perimeter page.
The canton announces an activation in advance — by e-mail alert the day before, through the Air2G2 app, on the media and, under article 15D(4) of the enabling act, on road signs — and the regulation's article 6 obliges the environment department to inform for every alert level. The second clock is the one that runs inside an activated day, and it is 06:00 to 22:00.
The canton states it in the same sentence on two of its pages: during a smog episode only motor vehicles bearing a macaron authorised for that peak may drive inside the perimeter between 6h and 22h.
Those hours are the canton's, not the regulation's — the regulation defines the levels and the measures and leaves the timing of each activation to the departmental decree that orders it — so this record cites the operating authority for them rather than the instrument. Nothing in the scheme distinguishes a weekday from a weekend, and nothing in it names a public holiday: the trigger is the air, not the calendar.
Lifting is symmetrical and is written into article 14: the measures are lifted when the measured concentration of PM10, ozone or nitrogen dioxide has stayed below the level-1 trigger for 24 hours at every station, or when the forecast points to that happening, and in practice the canton has lifted at a stated hour on a stated day.
République et canton de Genève — 'Dispositif et périmètre'. The canton states the daily window of an activated day in its own words: during smog, only vehicles bearing an authorised Stick'AIR macaron may drive inside the perimeter between 6h and 22h. The same sentence appears on the canton's questions page. The regulation itself sets no hours, which is why the hours here are the operating authority's statement and not the instrument's
The perimeter is the centre of the canton, and it is defined twice — once in law by reference to a road, and once by the canton in the names of the communes it touches. The legal definition is article 15E(2) of the enabling act: the temporary restrictions apply inside the perimeter of the moyenne ceinture routière, as defined by article 6(2) of the loi pour une mobilité cohérente et équilibrée of 5 June 2016.
That is a named ring road rather than a drawn line, and the regulation repeats it in article 7(1)(b) when it lists the measures. The canton's own description of the same ground is the one a driver can use: the perimeter covers almost the whole of the Ville de Genève plus part of the communes of Carouge, Cologny, Lancy and Vernier.
It is compact — the canton's geoportal gives its bounding box as 6.1088 to 6.1801 east and 46.1724 to 46.2243 north, about 5.5 km across either way — and it does not extend to the airport, to Meyrin, to Versoix or to the lakeside villages. Two boundaries of it are worth stating because they change what a driver should do.
The motorway is outside: article 15E(5) of the act says vehicles with no macaron are forbidden to drive in the zone but may use the motorway network, so the autoroute de contournement stays open to everyone even while the centre is shut, and the only motorway measure is a speed limit of 80 km/h that comes in at alert level 1.
And the edge is signed rather than guessed: the canton puts a variable panel at the start of the main roads into the perimeter showing which Stick'AIR categories may drive during the activation, with a second state for days on which nothing is restricted.
The canton does publish the outline as vector data — the SPAIR_STICK_AIR layer on its geoportal, served as an ArcGIS feature service, as WFS, as WMS and as a map service — but it publishes it for private use, so this record links the canton's own interactive map instead of holding a copy. See boundary_coverage.
République et canton de Genève — 'Dispositif et périmètre'. The canton names the communes its perimeter covers, links its own interactive map of it, and describes the variable signs that mark the entry points and state which categories may drive. The legal definition it rests on, the moyenne ceinture routière of article 6(2) of the loi pour une mobilité cohérente et équilibrée, is in the enabling act, which is in this record's source list
The authority's own map: Système d'information du territoire à Genève (SITG) — République et canton de…
At the strictest alert level a petrol car must be Euro 4 or newer; at the mildest it must be Euro 2 or newer. The chain from the vehicle to that answer runs through the macaron, because the regulation never names a Euro standard in its articles — it names a sticker number, and the annexe turns the sticker number into a Euro standard.
For a passenger car running on petrol the annexe reads: Euro 5 and 6 are macaron 1, Euro 4 is macaron 2, Euro 2 and 3 are macaron 3, and Euro 1 and anything older is hors catégorie, entitled to no macaron at all.
Light commercial vehicles are classed on the same petrol scale; heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches use the heavy standards, with Euro VI at macaron 1, Euro V at 2, Euro III and IV at 3 and Euro II and older hors catégorie; two-, three- and four-wheelers are classed Euro 4 at macaron 1, Euro 3 at 2, Euro 2 at 3, first registered between 1 June 2000 and 30 June 2004 at macaron 4, and before 31 May 2000 hors catégorie.
The bans then arrive one class at a time. Article 8 makes alert level 1 bar macaron 5 and every vehicle with no macaron; article 9 adds macaron 4 at level 2; article 10 adds macaron 3 at level 3.
So a petrol car is only ever caught by the last of those, because no petrol car is classed 4 or 5: Euro 2 and 3 petrol cars are macaron 3 and are stopped at level 3 alone, and a petrol car older than Euro 2 has no macaron and is stopped from level 1. Euro 4 petrol and newer is never restricted at any level.
Gas and plug-in hybrid vehicles take macaron 1 whatever their Euro class, electric and hydrogen vehicles take macaron 0, and both are therefore clear at every level. The French Crit'Air sticker is recognised here under article 5(7) and the canton states the two systems use identical performance requirements and identical numbering, so a Crit'Air 2 petrol car may be read straight across.
Conseil d'État de la République et canton de Genève — Règlement régissant le dispositif d'urgence en cas de pics de pollution atmosphérique (RPics), rsGE K 1 70.09, of 6 November 2019. Articles 8, 9 and 10 name the macaron number banned at each of the three alert levels and article 5(1) refers the classification to the annexe; the annexe itself is a separate PDF linked from the act and is in this record's source list, because the monitor cannot watch a string inside a PDF
At the strictest alert level a diesel car must be Euro 5 or newer; at the mildest it must be Euro 3 or newer. Diesel is classed one macaron worse than petrol at every rung of the annexe, which is why a diesel driver meets this scheme far sooner than a petrol one.
For a passenger car running on diesel the annexe reads: Euro 5 and 6 are macaron 2, Euro 4 is macaron 3, Euro 3 is macaron 4, Euro 2 is macaron 5, and Euro 1 and older is hors catégorie. Light commercial vehicles use the same diesel scale; heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches run Euro VI at macaron 2, Euro V at 3, Euro IV at 4, Euro III at 5 and Euro II and older hors catégorie.
Reading that against the three levels: a Euro 2 diesel car is macaron 5 and is stopped as soon as the scheme is switched on at all, together with everything older that carries no macaron; a Euro 3 diesel is macaron 4 and is stopped from level 2; a Euro 4 diesel is macaron 3 and is stopped at level 3; a Euro 5 or Euro 6 diesel is macaron 2 and is never restricted.
So the answer to 'may I drive in' depends on which level is running, and the honest general rule for a diesel car is that Euro 5 is the standard that is safe at every level.
The canton's illustration of why the scale is drawn this way is its own: it states that a diesel passenger car meeting the macaron 2 requirements emits 28 times less combustion particulate matter than a diesel too old to qualify for any macaron at all.
Determining the class is the holder's own responsibility, from the vehicle's fuel and its 'Code émissions' in box 72 of the Swiss registration document, or for an EU vehicle from the vehicle type, the fuel type and the Euro standard on the registration certificate; the canton publishes the conversion table for each case and will correct a misclassified import through the office cantonal des véhicules.
Conseil d'État de la République et canton de Genève — Règlement régissant le dispositif d'urgence en cas de pics de pollution atmosphérique (RPics), rsGE K 1 70.09, of 6 November 2019. The same three articles carry the diesel answer as the petrol one, because the regulation bans macaron numbers rather than fuels and the annexe assigns a diesel vehicle a worse number than a petrol vehicle of the same Euro class. The header of this page is also the record's version pointer: it states the text is in force and carries the date of its last modification
Two different figures answer two different questions here, neither of them is a single penalty for driving in, and the court that read them says so.
The cantonal figure is a ceiling rather than an amount: article 15 of the regulation, echoing article 15I(2) of the enabling act, makes an offender liable to 'une contravention de 500 francs au plus' — a fine of at most 500 francs — and the canton repeats it on its own page as an amende that can go up to 500 francs for natural persons.
That is a maximum a court or the police may impose, not a figure a driver can be told to expect, and this corpus does not turn a band or a cap into a number (D-132).
The paragraph that would have extended it to companies was annulled: article 15(2) purported to allow fines on legal persons, and on 27 August 2020 the Chambre constitutionnelle of the Cour de justice held that an implementing regulation is not a sufficient legal basis for that and quashed it. The more important thing that judgment settles is which offence the cantonal fine is for at all.
Reading article 106(3) of the federal road traffic act, the court held that the offences of driving inside the perimeter without a macaron or without an authorised one — article 15E(5) of the act and articles 8(b), 9(b) and 10(b) of the regulation — belong to road traffic, which is federal, because the alert levels are announced on prescription signs and ignoring a prescription sign is a federal matter; the cantonal contravention of up to 500 francs therefore reaches only the macaron offences proper, a sticker of the wrong category or one affixed contrary to article 5(3) and (4).
For the entry itself the court states the consequence is an amende d'ordre of 100 francs under numbers 304.3 and 304.4 of annexe 1 to the federal ordinance on fixed fines, in the simplified procedure. We do not publish that 100 francs as this record's penalty for two reasons.
It is a figure read out of a 2020 judgment rather than out of the federal ordinance as it stands today, and the federal publisher does not state it to us: fedlex.admin.ch serves every act in its classified compilation only as a JavaScript application, and a deliberately nonsensical ELI path returns byte-for-byte the same 77,119-byte shell as the real one, so nothing can be read from it or bounded by it.
So we hold no single figure and state none. Not estimated, and deliberately not borrowed from another canton or country.
République et canton de Genève — 'Questions particulières', the canton's own question-and-answer page for the circulation différenciée. It carries the exemption list, the rules for affixing the macaron, the recognition of Crit'Air, the treatment of collector and imported vehicles, the inspection-appointment concession, the parking answer and the fine. The price and the points of sale come from the canton's 'Acheter mon macaron' page and the classification procedure from 'Déterminer mon macaron Stick'AIR', both in this record's source list
Conseil d'État de la République et canton de Genève — the full text of the Règlement régissant le dispositif d'urgence en cas de pics de pollution atmosphérique (RPics), rsGE K 1 70.09, of 6 November 2019, in force on 15 January 2020, published in the canton's own systematic collection. The instrument this record rests on: article 2 the ordering authority, article 5 the macaron, its 5-franc price and the exemptions, article 7 the four measures, articles 8 to 10 the three alert levels and the macaron number banned at each, articles 11 to 13 the pollutant thresholds, article 14 the lifting, article 15 the contravention, article 18 the transitional deadlines. Its header is the version pointer: 'Texte en vigueur' and 'Dernières modifications au 18 novembre 2020'. A fourth modification changes that date and drops this record to draft. ⚠️ The canton serves this page as windows-1252, which is why the monitor decodes by declared charset (D-138)
Grand Conseil de la République et canton de Genève — the loi d'application de la loi fédérale sur la protection de l'environnement (LaLPE), rsGE K 1 70, of 2 October 1997. The enabling act, and the place several facts in this record actually live rather than in the regulation: article 15D the three alert levels and the duty to announce them on road signs, article 15E the circulation différenciée itself — the perimeter of the moyenne ceinture routière, the express application to vehicles not registered in Geneva, the requirement of at least five classes identified by macarons, and the rule that a vehicle without a macaron may still use the motorway network — articles 15F to 15H the measures at each level, article 15I the enforcement by cantonal gendarmerie and municipal police and the contravention of at most 500 francs, article 15J the duty to coordinate with the Vaud and French authorities of the Grand Genève
République et canton de Genève — the Table systématique du rs/GE, the canton's own systematic index of its legislation in force, served as one static HTML document. This record's denominator: 865 distinct act pages, each row giving the rsGE number, the title and the date of adoption, and the row for this scheme reads 'K 1 70.09 — Règlement régissant le dispositif d'urgence en cas de pics de pollution atmosphérique (RPics)'. The index was controlled before it was trusted: the title of this act and its neighbour K 1 70 are both in it, and a blind negative ('zzqqxxyy') returns nothing. It is reached from the canton's own legal portal rather than guessed at — silgeneve.ch/legis loads it from its home frame — and because the collection is titled 'Textes en vigueur', an act disappearing from it is a repeal
Conseil d'État de la République et canton de Genève — the annexe to RPics, 'Classification des véhicules motorisés selon leurs performances environnementales', linked from article 5(1) of the regulation on the canton's own legal portal. The whole classification: seven columns from macaron 0 to hors catégorie, and rows for electric and hydrogen vehicles, gas and plug-in hybrids, two-, three- and four-wheelers, passenger cars, light commercial vehicles and heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches, each split into petrol and diesel. Machine-watched since 2026-09-18 — the monitor reads this PDF rather than treating it as noise. The table was read by rebuilding its rows from the word boxes rather than from the PDF's own reading order, which scatters a table of this shape into a column-major heap
Cour de justice de la République et canton de Genève, Chambre constitutionnelle — arrêt ACST/26/2020 of 27 August 2020, in the cause A/4626/2019-ABST, on the appeal of two individuals, the Association suisse des transports routiers section Genève and the Touring Club suisse section Genève against RPics. Linked from the act itself on the canton's legal portal, which is what makes it evidence rather than commentary. It partly upheld the appeal, annulled articles 11, 13 and 15(2) of the regulation and rejected the rest, and its reasoning is the source of this record's statement that the cantonal 500-franc ceiling does not reach the entry offence, which is federal. Machine-watched since 2026-09-18: a 59-page PDF the monitor reads in full
République et canton de Genève — 'Dispositif et périmètre', the canton's own service page for the scheme. Holds the operating facts the instrument does not state: the 06:00 to 22:00 window of an activated day, that no Stick'AIR restriction applies inside the perimeter in the absence of smog, that the macaron has six categories from 0 to 5, the communes the perimeter covers, and the variable signs at the entry points
République et canton de Genève — 'Acheter mon macaron'. The price in the operating authority's words, confirming the regulation's own article 5(2): 5 francs, corresponding to the cost of producing and distributing the sticker, valid for the life of the vehicle when correctly affixed. Also the points of sale and their opening hours, the online order route and the 30-day temporary receipt
République et canton de Genève — 'Questions particulières'. The exemption list in full, how the macaron must be affixed, the recognition of Crit'Air and the statement that no other sticker is accepted, collector and U-plate vehicles, the fine of up to 500 francs on natural persons, the effect of the 2020 judgment and the 11 November 2020 amendment that followed it, the inspection-appointment concession and the answer on parking
République et canton de Genève — 'Déterminer mon macaron Stick'AIR'. How a driver is expected to find their own category: from the fuel and the 'Code émissions' in box 72 of the Swiss registration document, or from the vehicle type, fuel type and Euro standard on an EU registration certificate, with the canton's conversion table for each. It also states that the determination is the holder's own responsibility, that it must be confirmable to the authority at any time, and that 'hors catégorie' means restricted rather than exempt
République et canton de Genève, OCEV — Service de l'air, du bruit et des rayonnements non ionisants — press release of 13 August 2025 lifting the circulation différenciée at 22:00 that day. Held as the evidence that this scheme is operated rather than dormant, which matters more here than in a permanent zone: it records that the canton had activated the measure that morning at the second of three levels after ozone reached 223 µg/m³, that the police carried out checks inside the perimeter, that more than 5,000 macarons were ordered online during the single day, and that this was the second activation since the regulation came into force in 2020
Next scheduled re-check: 2027-03-16.
This is owed on the country's roads, not inside this scheme. What Switzerland asks, with the source