Swiss motorway vignette 2027: e-vignette or sticker?

CHF 40 buys 14 months of Swiss motorway driving. Here is how the e-vignette and sticker compare, and how to spot the fake portals.

Swiss motorway vignette 2027: e-vignette or sticker?

Every autumn Swiss drivers repeat the same small ritual, and this year it comes with a decision attached. The Swiss motorway vignette 2027 goes on sale in November, it costs the same CHF 40 it has cost for decades, and once again you can choose between the classic windscreen sticker and the digital e-vignette. The price is boring, which is exactly what you want from a road charge. The choice is less boring, and getting it wrong is expensive: taking a motorway without a valid vignette costs a CHF 200 fine, on top of buying the vignette anyway.

What the 2027 vignette costs

The 2027 vignette costs CHF 40, the same figure it has carried since 1995, when it was raised from CHF 30. The Federal Council later proposed lifting it to CHF 100 to help fund the motorway network, and the hiking idea was clearly rejected, with roughly three in five voters saying no. Since then the price has stayed frozen, which makes it one of the very few Swiss prices that never seems to creep upward.

For your CHF 40 you get access to every motorway and expressway in the country, for a car, motorbike, trailer, caravan, delivery van or camper up to 3.5 tonnes. There are no daily, weekly or monthly versions. That flat structure is a deliberate political choice: the vignette is designed to be predictable for drivers and predictable for the road fund.

Whether your car came into the country through the biggest importer, AMAG Automobil- und Motoren AG, or crossed the border as a private purchase from Stuttgart, the rule is identical. The vignette follows the vehicle, not the brand on the bonnet. The contrast with the neighbours is striking: Austria indexes its motorway vignette to inflation, and from 2027 it will scrap the windscreen sticker entirely and go digital-only, with a car vignette costing well over the Swiss equivalent of CHF 100. Switzerland keeps both formats and keeps the price still.

E-vignette or sticker: how to choose

The e-vignette is bought online at www.e-vignette.ch, the Via Portal run by the Federal Office for Customs and Border Security. You enter your number plate, pay CHF 40, and the vignette exists as a database entry linked to that plate. Nothing gets affixed to the windscreen, and roadside checks read plates rather than glass.

"The sticker is a product, the e-vignette is a database entry. Both do the same job, but only one of them lets you spot a typo before it costs you 200 francs," says Luca Berthoud, a Geneva-based motoring writer who has followed Swiss road charges for over a decade.

The sticker route is the traditional one: buy at filling stations, post offices, customs posts at the border, or online from Swiss Post. Then comes the part people underestimate: it must be stuck to the inside of the windscreen, clearly visible. A sticker that lives in the glovebox or on the dashboard counts as no vignette at all. And once applied, it is bound to that specific car. You may not peel it off and move it to a second vehicle, not even one you own yourself. Remove it and it is spent.

There are two situations where the difference really matters. If you run interchangeable number plates, one e-vignette covers every vehicle sharing that plate, while stickers have to be bought once per vehicle. If you are the type who buys the vignette in a hurry at a border crossing, the digital version removes the fumbling with a sticker in the wind and the risk of affixing it badly.

The e-vignette has its own limitation, and it is worth stating honestly: it is locked to the plate you type in. Enter the plate with a wrong digit and you are driving uninsured of vignette, in effect. Neither format is refundable, and if you sell the car mid-year the vignette goes with it. My own judgment, after switching three seasons ago: for a single-car household that shops online anyway, the e-vignette is simply the better product, and the sticker only makes sense for collectors of rituals.

The validity window covers fourteen months

The 2027 vignette is valid from 1 December 2026 to 31 January 2028, a window of fourteen months. This is the design that makes early purchase work in your favour: buy the new vignette when it appears and you get the tail of the previous year on top of the full new year. Your previous sticker also remains valid through the end of January, which is why late January weekends are the one moment when two different vignettes are simultaneously legal on one windscreen.

The long window matters most for winter drivers. If you are heading to the valleys for the first ski weekends of December, the vignette decision lands at the same time as the tyre decision, and honestly it is the easier of the two: the tyre question has more nuance, which we unpacked in our piece on winter tyre rules in Switzerland. Get both right in November and you can ignore the topic until the following autumn.

One genuine caveat deserves its own sentence: the vignette buys access, not comfort. Motorway construction, weekend queues on the Gotthard approaches and closed high passes in winter come bundled with the CHF 40, in the sense that they are not compensated. The product has no service guarantee attached, only an access right.

Driving without one: the fine explained

Driving a motorway without a valid vignette costs a CHF 200 fine, and you are still required to buy the vignette, so the effective damage is CHF 240. There are no penalty points and no criminal record involved, it is an administrative matter, but it is an expensive way to save CHF 40. Controls are largely automatic today, since the e-vignette system reads plates, and border posts remain the classic checking point for cars arriving from abroad.

The vignette obligation only applies to vehicles up to 3.5 tonnes. Heavier vehicles do not buy a vignette at all; they fall under the special heavy vehicle charge instead, the regime that applies to the lorries and coaches operated by firms like Buser Transporte AG. For a private household, though, the 3.5 tonne threshold is generous enough to cover nearly everything up to and including a sizeable camper.

How to buy safely and dodge the scam portals

Every year consumer watchtowers repeat the same warning, and every year people still fall for it: fake vignette sites rank high in search results, look convincingly official, and charge CHF 50 or more for what they present as a registration service for a product that officially costs CHF 40. You are not buying faster processing, you are buying the same vignette with a markup, or in the worst case nothing at all.

There are exactly two safe routes. Online, use www.e-vignette.ch, the Via Portal of the Federal Office for Customs and Border Security. Offline, buy the sticker at filling stations, post offices, customs posts, or the official Swiss Post shop. Any third party charging more than CHF 40 is by definition not a bargain. Delete SMS reminders containing purchase links entirely; the Confederation does not sell its vignette by text message.

And if you would rather sidestep the annual question altogether, the alternative runs on rails. Trains reach the same valleys without a single franc of vignette risk, and with the SBB timetable changes for 2027 bringing new direct connections, the motorway is no longer the only way to arrive relaxed. For everyone else: CHF 40, fourteen months, two formats, one obvious choice.

Lifestyle | SwissMastery