What is road pricing and what will it cost?

September 6, 2022

Kilometer charge

The new form of motor vehicle tax is called the mileage tax, but is also known as road pricing. This means you pay per mile driven per year. So you pay a variable amount, rather than a fixed annual amount. It is considered a fair system because you no longer pay for owning your car, but for using your car.

Pay per kilometer

The details are not yet known, but according to a calculation by the NRC, the amount amounts to 4 cents per kilometer driven. The NRC easily arrives at this figure by dividing the previous year’s full road tax revenue by the total number of miles driven. In fact, the mileage tax is not going to bring the government any more revenue than with the current system. If you extend this calculation it will cost an average of €424 per year. That calculation applies to a distance of 10,600 kilometers. If you are a road user who does a lot of miles a year, this is going to cost you quite a bit so. A calculation by the cabinet revealed that people who drive an average of 80 kilometers a day will be as much as 2.5 times more expensive than they are now. This is a big difference from people who only drive 20 kilometers a day. Those lost half the price. So the government hopes that people will drive fewer miles.

Gasoline or diesel

Because the concept is still in its infancy, for now it doesn’t matter what car you drive. Under the current system, you are more profitable with a gasoline vehicle, than with a diesel vehicle. It is likely that a similar charge will also be established within the mileage charge, but not from the start.

In practice

That leaves one important question. How will it work? We don’t expect you to pay off all the miles once a year. The risk of such a system is that reversing the counter may become attractive. So there should be an additional check for that. One example is a box in your car that tracks your mileage through GPS. This does involve sensitive privacy issues. The cabinet will soon come up with a first draft of the plans. So it is waiting for a better picture of road pricing and how it will work.