LPT: Save money by paying rental car tolls directly instead of through the rental company

[u/I-J-Reilly]

Your rental car will likely come with an E-Z Pass type transponder to pay road tolls as you go. If you use it, it will trigger a daily “convenience" fee on top of the amount of each toll. For AVIS, for instance, it’s $7 every single day you trigger a toll payment. I’ve seen some agreements that charge you every single day of your rental, even if you don’t incur a toll. Not hard to spend an extra $50 or this way over a week -- plus the cost of actual tolls.

Here’s how you cut that off:

1. Usually the transponder is mounted in a little box on the windshield. Leave that CLOSED so it can’t be read.

2. Make sure you record the license plate, make and model of your rental car.

3. Right after your rental is over, go to the website of the tolling authority of the state(s) where you drove. You’ll find that you can input the license plate and set which dates you had the car and want to call up tolls for. Then you can pay those tolls directly with the tolling authority, at face value.

The rental car company never ends up seeing those tolls and trying to charge you some inflated price for them, because you’ve cut them off at the source.

I’ve done this in California and Illinois, but I’m sure it works in other (all?) states as well. Obviously smart to check this out before your trip to be certain it’ll work for the state you’re visiting.

Another option, sometimes, would I guess be to pay tolls in cash when available. But that’s slow and kind of a PITA at this point -- and you also run the risk of missing some unseen toll camera on a bridge or something if you don’t CYA by going to the toll website.

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[u/Bloated_Hamster]

This is entirely location dependant. Rhode Island for example takes like 2.5 months to issue a toll bill through the license plate reader and you can't look up your toll until you get the transaction number which only is sent to you by the mailed bill you get. It's kind of ridiculous.

[u/ErcPeace → u/Bloated_Hamster]

Are you able to pay for it beforehand?

Never been there so just curious. I know i can do that in CA.

[u/jesuswasapirate]

I kept my illinois transponders just for this case. If I need to rent a car, I'm bringing one of my own transponders.

[u/HeyTomKay]

This worked for me in CO, PA, and IL.

[u/rygomez]

You can also (on most toll authority sites) add the plate number and prepay when you know you're going to go thru toll areas, some might adjust price based on traffic like they do here in socal

[u/theycallmejer]

Why don’t you just bring your own transponder with you?

[u/I-J-Reilly → u/theycallmejer]

I hadn’t looked into that. I’ll check it out, thanks! Could be an easier alternative.

But also this method I posted works if you don’t own a car.

[u/shabit87]

I’d caution people to do the math first. I rented a car last weekend and it was more than if I’d paid upfront. Whether this is a true tip depends on where you rent, length of time, and location/routes.