1 scheme in 1 city. Every figure comes from an official source and is re-checked.
Vatican City has 1 driving restriction that we have checked against an official source, in 1 city. It is a limited traffic zone.
This page lists no country-wide requirement for Vatican City. Anything owed before you reach a city is not covered here, so check the national road authority before you leave.
The sources for this country were read on 2026-09-17, from the authorities' own pages. The check is repeated on a schedule, and a rule we can no longer confirm comes down instead of staying up.
Vatican City has one driving restriction on our books: the Permesso di accesso allo Stato della Città del Vaticano — Legge N… (limited traffic zone). What is a limited traffic zone?
Sources last read on 2026-09-17, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2027-09-17.
Vatican City is the one entry in this corpus where the restricted area is a sovereign state and the gate is a border. There is no camera ring, no charge, no Euro class and no time window: the question at the gate is whether you hold a permit issued by the Governatorato, and the answer decides everything. The rule is stated most plainly not in the access law itself but in the act that prices it.
Article 9 of Decreto N. DCCX of 19 December 2024 — a decree of the President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State, converted with modifications into law by Legge N.
DCCXX of 15 March 2025 — says that anyone who is neither a resident nor a citizen and who enters the territory of Vatican City State where free access is not permitted, without holding the prescribed permit issued by the Governatorato under articles 9 and following of Legge N. CXXXI of 22 February 2011, or after that permit has been revoked, is liable to an administrative fine of €10,000 to €25,000.
The second paragraph covers the two softer failures and prices them lower: entering on an expired permit, or entering lawfully and then not observing the prescriptions written into the permit, is €2,000 to €5,000.
Read those two paragraphs together and the shape of the scheme is complete — the permit is the thing, the permit has conditions written on it, and both the absence of one and the breach of the other are enforced against the driver personally.
What happens if you try to drive through anyway is the part the decree spells out in criminal terms, and it is the only place in this corpus where a vehicle is named as an aggravating circumstance.
Article 1 makes entering the territory by violence, threat or deceit punishable with one to four years' imprisonment and a fine of €10,000 to €25,000, and it defines 'deceit' expressly to include fraudulently evading the State's security and protection systems or slipping past the frontier controls.
Article 2 then raises that penalty by up to two thirds where the person, in order to commit the act, enters the territory at the wheel of a vehicle, evading or forcing the frontier control or failing to comply with an order to stop given by the public force.
A conviction can carry the accessory penalty of a ten-year ban on entering the State, and entering in breach of such a ban is itself one to five years, €10,000 to €25,000, and a fifteen-year ban. Article 3 closes the airspace on the same terms: flying over the territory without authorisation, including with a remotely piloted aircraft flown from outside, is six months to three years or €10,000 to €25,000.
One part of the State is deliberately outside all of this, and it is the part every visitor actually reaches.
Article 3 of the Lateran Treaty of 11 February 1929 — still the instrument that creates the State and fixes its boundaries — provides that St Peter's Square, although it forms part of Vatican City, will continue to be normally open to the public and subject to the police powers of the Italian authorities, who stop at the foot of the Basilica steps; and article 5 obliged the Holy See to close the accesses to the rest of the territory and to wall the open parts, St Peter's Square excepted.
That is why the administrative fine in article 9 is worded as it is: it bites on the territory 'where free access is not permitted', which is the walled remainder, not the Square. Two things this record deliberately does not tell you, because the Vatican does not publish them in a form that can be read.
The first is how to obtain the permit — who issues it in practice, what it costs if anything, and what you must bring — because that procedure lives in Legge N. CXXXI of 22 February 2011, and the Governatorato serves that law as an eight-page photograph with no text in it at all.
The second is where exactly the line runs, because the Treaty locates the boundary in a plan annexed to it and the Governatorato publishes no digital perimeter. What is published, and what this record states, is the rule a driver is judged by.