Vienna → Warsaw: vignettes & tolls

Vienna – Brno – Katowice – Warsaw runs on the Czech D1/D2 and Polish A4/A1/S8 network, a straightforward single-day drive with just one vignette country on the way. Polish motorways are largely toll-free for cars on the state network, keeping costs low.

Tips & tricks

• ✓Only the Czech e-vignette is needed on this route — Poland's state motorways are free for cars, though a few private sections (e.g. around Katowice) still charge tolls at booths.
• ✓Buy the Czech vignette for the shortest useful period (10 days) rather than a month — this route only touches Czechia for a couple of hours around Brno.

On the road — good to know

• •Via Brno the route runs onto the Czech D1, the country's oldest and busiest motorway, where decades of patchwork resurfacing mean rough surfaces and shifting work zones especially north of Brno.
• •Crossing into Poland toward Katowice puts you on tolled A1/A4 sections billed through the e-TOLL system, while the parallel S7/S8 expressways further east remain toll-free for cars — a detail that can shift which fork drivers pick.
• •The alternative via Bratislava and onward through Poland's S7/S8 corridor skips more of the D1's rough patches but trades them for the still-growing expressway network around smaller Polish towns, where lane drops appear with little warning.
• •Fuel is typically the cheapest of the whole trip once in Poland, so many drivers deliberately hold off filling up until after Katowice rather than topping off in pricier Austria or Czechia.

Watch out for

• 🇨🇿Roadside resellers near border crossings charge a markup to "help" buy the e-vignette, when the official e-dálnice app or portal does the same thing free in about two minutes.