Renting a Car in Florence and Tuscany: What It Actually Costs

We looked at what Google returns for renting a car at Florence airport and counted twenty-four results. Enterprise, Europcar, Hertz, Kayak, Skyscanner, EasyTerra, Avis, Dollar, Budget, Expedia, Sixt, Auto Europe, Uber, Thrifty. Not one of them is a guide. The only three results that are not selling you a car are a Facebook group, a Reddit thread and a Tripadvisor forum, which is what happens when nobody answers the question and people go and ask each other instead.

Google itself knows what the question is. The second thing it lists under “people also ask” is Is it a good idea to rent a car in Florence, Italy? Nothing in those twenty-four results answers it, for the straightforward reason that all twenty-four need the answer to be yes.

The advertised price, and the one they admit to

You do not need to compare aggregators to find the gap between the advertised price and the real one. It is on one page.

Here is what Discover Cars publishes about Florence Airport, all of it on the same page, on the same day.

The number in the page title is 13 euros. The number further down the same page, under the heading “average car rental price”, is 53 euros. That is a factor of four. And the page cannot agree with itself either: it gives an average of 36 in one box and 53 in another.

None of this is a scandal and we are not calling it one. Aggregators quote the cheapest thing available in the cheapest week of the year because everybody does, and the business only works if you arrive. But it means the number that pulled you in is not a budget, and the honest planning figure is the one they buried.

By car type, their starting prices ran like this.

Two things to add to whatever you pick, because the daily rate is not the cost. Fuel on that page averaged 1.78 euros a litre, ranging from 1.60 to 1.90. And the average rental at this airport runs six days, which is worth knowing when you see a price quoted per day: the industry is describing a week, not an afternoon.

Where you collect it changes the price by three times

This is the most useful thing we found and it takes one line to say. On the same day, on the same site:

• Florence Airport: from 13 euros a day.
• Florence Santa Maria Novella railway station: from 40 euros a day.

Roughly three times the price for collecting the car in the middle of town. In dollars on their home page the same comparison read 17.45 against 47.23, so it is not a currency artefact.

And you are paying that premium for the harder option, because Santa Maria Novella sits right against the limited traffic zone. You would be collecting a car in the one part of Tuscany where a car is a liability, at the highest price on offer.

One caveat we will not paper over. The Reddit thread that ranks for this says the opposite, that you should not rent from the airport because it is far out. We measured the price, not the journey, and we have not timed the transfer or checked which desks are inside the terminal and which are a shuttle ride away. So take this as what it is: the airport is cheaper, and we make no claim about which is more convenient.

The ZTL: a 5 euro permit, or a fine you find out about next year

Florence’s historic centre is a zona a traffico limitato, a limited traffic zone, and it is enforced by cameras that photograph number plates at each entrance. Here is when they are watching, from the operator that runs the system for the council.

Read that Sunday row carefully, because we are being precise rather than helpful. The official page lists Monday to Friday and Saturday and does not mention Sunday at all. It does not say Sunday is free. We are telling you what the source says and not filling in the gap, and the summer night ZTL can overlap regardless.

The permit costs five euros

This is the part almost nobody knows. You can simply buy your way in. The official tariff sheet lists a daily permit at 5.00 euros for a single number plate. There are two kinds: transit only, or transit plus parking in resident bays. It is valid from midnight to midnight on the day you choose, you print it yourself and display it in the car, and it cannot be refunded or cancelled once issued. Any rental car qualifies, since the limit is 3,500 kg.

The tariff document is dated 2018 and is the one the council’s current ZTL page links to today, so treat the five euros as the published figure rather than a quote.

How many people use it? The operator publishes the number: 168,887 daily permits issued in 2025. That is the scale of the traffic that needs to get into a centre most visitors are told to keep out of.

A small thing that tells you how carefully anyone has read this: the operator’s Italian page caps you at sixty days a year per vehicle and its own English translation says seventy. Both were last updated in April 2024. We are going with sixty, and flagging that its two versions disagree.

What happens if you get it wrong

The best description of this is not from a travel site. It is from the US Embassy in Italy, which sets out the mechanics for its own citizens without any interest in selling anyone a car.

The cameras record your plate, and, in its words, if you pass one it is impossible to know at the time that a violation has been recorded. You are not pulled over. There is no contact with a police officer. Then two details that matter more than any euro figure:

• Fines may take up to 360 days to be forwarded to your home address.
• They are cumulative for each time you pass a control point.

So the failure mode is not one fine. It is a wrong turn you repeat every day of a three-day stay, arriving as three charges, most of a year later, routed through the rental company, which hands over your name and address to a debt collector that has bought the debt. The Embassy explains the two ways to appeal, to the Prefetto of the city or through the Giudice di Pace, and neither is something you want to be doing about a five euro permit.

We are not going to tell you the fine amount, because Florence does not publish one. Its own ZTL rulebook, all sixty-three pages of it, refers the penalty to articles 7, 157-158 and 159 of the national road code, which means the sum is set by national law rather than by the city. Other guides confidently quote 80 euros, or 100. We could not reproduce either from an official source, so we are not repeating them.

The Scudo Verde does not apply to you

You will read about this and it will worry you, so here it is with the worry removed.

The Scudo Verde is a second, much larger zone around Florence, roughly 38 square kilometres, whose camera gates were switched on in April 2025. It sounds like a new trap waiting for tourists. It is not one, and the operator says so in the first paragraph of its own page: the system charges no toll and exists to enforce restrictions that have applied to polluting vehicles for years.

The vehicles actually banned are Euro 0 petrol and Euro 0 to 1 diesel, which the operator describes as roughly cars built before 1997, under 10 percent of the national fleet. Cars running on LPG or natural gas are exempt outright. No rental fleet in Italy is handing out a pre-1997 car, and if you are ever genuinely unsure, the operator runs a public number plate checker.

We are spelling this out because the alternative is the paragraph a lazier guide writes, where every restriction in Florence gets stacked into one warning and the reader ends up frightened of the wrong thing. There is exactly one zone you can accidentally drive into and be charged for, and it is the ZTL above.

The permit the forums say you do not need

Search this and you will find confident people telling you an International Driving Permit is unnecessary in Italy. The official sources say otherwise, and they are the ones whose opinion counts at a rental desk or a roadside stop.

The US Embassy in Italy states that Americans visiting as tourists and intending to drive should obtain an International Driving Permit before leaving the US, and that the alternative is carrying a valid American licence together with an official translation into Italian. It also notes there is no reciprocal recognition of licences between the two countries at all.

And at least one major rental company makes it contractual rather than advisory. Europcar’s own FAQ tells UK licence holders they need no permit anywhere in the EU except Italy, where its rental conditions require one.

The most accurate thing said in any of those forum threads was from someone who had worked out the distinction: you may not need it to rent the car, but you need it to drive it. A permit costs very little and takes minutes to get at home, which makes this a strange argument to want to be having in an arrivals hall.

Do you need a car at all?

For Florence, no, and we would go further: a car in Florence is a cost with no upside. The centre crosses on foot in about half an hour, the ZTL is waiting, and a car sitting in a garage still charges you for every night you are in a city you are exploring by walking. Everything on our things to do in Florence page is reachable without one.

For the rest of Tuscany the honest answer is more interesting than a straight yes. Siena, Pisa and Lucca are all on the train, and the day trips that work best mostly are too. Even the case that always gets cited as needing a car turns out to be softer than the guides claim: when we looked into visiting the Chianti wineries we found a public bus, Autolinee Toscane line 365, running from Florence to Greve, Radda and Gaiole, the three towns that hold all six of the famous estates.

Where a car genuinely earns its keep is the last few kilometres and the freedom to change your mind: the estate that is twenty minutes past the bus stop, the hill town you decide to add at breakfast, the drive itself through the Val d’Orcia. That is worth paying for. Three days of it parked outside your hotel in Florence is not.

Which gives you the plan: do Florence on foot, then pick the car up on the morning you leave the city and drop it at the airport when you fly. You pay the cheap collection price, you skip the ZTL entirely, and you only rent the days the car is doing something.

What we did not measure

On the train routes we have been able to do something better than quote prices, which is to chart them. The Rome to Florence page has a table showing exactly how far ahead the fare stops falling, because we queried the same journey across nine booking horizons.

We have not done that for car hire, so there is no such table here. The only seasonal figure we have is the aggregator’s own: January is the cheapest month at Florence Airport and May the most expensive. Anyone telling you the ideal number of weeks to book a Tuscan hire car in advance is guessing, ourselves included, until we run it.

We also have not verified the final price with insurance, deposit and extras included, which is where the gap between 13 euros and 53 mostly lives. Those are the two measurements this page needs next, and when we have them they will go here.

Questions

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