Charging Salik and Darb Tolls Back to Renters

What Salik charges now

Salik replaced the flat AED 4 crossing with variable pricing on 31 January 2025. Monday to Saturday, peak hours cost AED 6 and the rest of the charged day costs AED 4, with the exact bands in the table below. Sunday is AED 4 all day, though public holidays and special event days revert to the normal peak bands. During Ramadan the bands move: peak is 09:00 to 17:00, off peak is 07:00 to 09:00 and 17:00 to 02:00, and the free window is 02:00 to 07:00.

Since 1 June 2026 the toll carries 5 per cent VAT, announced by Salik on 22 May 2026. The tariff itself did not change, so a peak crossing is now deducted as AED 6.30 and an off peak crossing as AED 4.20. Build your rate card on those figures. One rule matters when reading a statement: a car passing Al Mamzar North and South, or Al Safa North and South, in the same direction within one hour is charged once, so a driver who says they crossed twice and paid once is often right.

What Darb charges in Abu Dhabi

Darb is run by Abu Dhabi Mobility, formerly the Integrated Transport Centre, and charges AED 4 per crossing. There is no windscreen tag. Cameras read the plate, which must be registered at darb.itc.gov.ae against a funded wallet. Registration carries a one-off fee per vehicle, around AED 100, part of it credited to the wallet.

On 1 September 2025 the evening window moved earlier, from 17:00 to 15:00, and the AED 16 daily cap went, along with the monthly caps for private vehicles. There is now no ceiling on what one car can accumulate in a month. Then on 4 May 2026 the Ghantoot and Al Qurm gates opened, taking the emirate to six. Both charge AED 4 around the clock, seven days a week, so a car returning from Abu Dhabi at 23:00 on a Sunday now generates a toll it would not have a year ago.

Salik and Darb side by side

The toll lands on you, not on the driver

Both systems bill the vehicle, and your company holds the Salik account and the Darb registration, so every crossing is your debt until you recover it, and the penalties below cannot be passed on. On Salik, crossing without sufficient balance gives you five working days to top up, after which the fine is AED 50 for each day the car keeps crossing on an empty account. An unregistered vehicle gets ten working days, then AED 100, AED 200 and AED 400 for a first, second and further violation. Darb applies the same ladder, plus AED 50 where a vehicle registered outside Abu Dhabi crosses without enough balance and does not top up within five days. A Dubai plate in Abu Dhabi is that case.

Why a statement is not a bill you can forward

A toll statement is a list of rows: plate, gate, date, time, amount. It knows nothing about your contracts, which are a separate list keyed on plate and time. Recovering tolls means joining the two, and every mistake in the join is either money lost or an argument. For a week-long rental to one person this is easy. The trouble is the car that changed hands mid day. A vehicle returned at 13:40 and handed over again at 15:10 produces crossings on both sides of that gap, plus crossings inside it made by your own staff moving or washing the car. The 16:05 crossing at AED 6.30 belongs to customer two, the 13:20 crossing to customer one, the 14:30 crossing to you. Bill the wrong one and you lose the dispute, because the customer knows what time they signed. Two habits fix most of it: record pickup and return to the minute, timed from when the keys move, and log internal movements alongside your rentals.

Handling fees, and the wording that makes them stick

Most operators add something on top of the raw toll. Rental terms and comparison pages describe two shapes: a per crossing fee of roughly AED 2 to AED 5, or a flat toll service charge of roughly AED 15 to AED 25 per rental day. Those are observed market ranges, not a regulated tariff, and no published RTA cap on toll handling fees appears to exist.

What makes the charge collectable is the contract, and three things in it. State the fee before the customer signs, with the actual figure, not a reference to a price list nobody was shown. State the basis: per crossing, or per rental day, and whether the daily charge applies on days with no crossing. State that tolls incurred during the rental remain payable after return and that you may charge the card on file. Someone who signed a document naming AED 3 per crossing has little to argue about, while someone told after the fact will dispute it, and a chargeback costs more than the fee earned. Quote the fee separately on the invoice too, because customers check Salik balances by plate.

VAT on tolls you pass on, and what is still unclear

Before 1 June 2026 Salik tolls were not taxed at the gate, so treat older advice with suspicion. Salik now applies 5 per cent VAT to toll usage tariffs and tag activation fees, remitted to the Federal Tax Authority. It also applied VAT retrospectively for 1 July 2022 to 31 March 2026, a liability of about AED 471 million including penalties, which the RTA agreed to compensate so motorists do not pay it. That back period is not something you can pass on.

For your own invoices the framework is FTA public clarification VATP013. A disbursement, where you pay on behalf of a client who is legally liable to the supplier, is not a supply and carries no VAT. A reimbursement, where you contracted in your own name, follows the VAT treatment of your main supply. Your Salik account sits in your company name, so a toll recharge looks like a reimbursement, taxed at 5 per cent as part of the rental, with the VAT Salik charged you recoverable as input tax.

Three things are not settled. No FTA clarification deals specifically with rental companies recharging tolls, so that reading is a general principle applied to your case rather than a ruling on it. No announcement applying VAT to Darb has appeared. And whether a downloaded Salik statement counts as a simplified tax invoice is discussed by tax advisory firms rather than stated by Salik. Get all three answered in writing before you change your invoice template.

A monthly reconciliation you can run in a spreadsheet

1. On the first working day of the month, download last month's Salik statement for the whole account and export Darb transactions for every registered plate.
2. Normalise them into one sheet with six columns: plate, system, date, time, amount, gate. Convert every timestamp to a single 24 hour format so sorting works.
3. Build a second sheet of contracts: plate, contract number, customer, pickup timestamp, return timestamp. Build a third of internal movements: plate, reason, start, end.
4. Sort the toll sheet by plate, then by timestamp, never in the order the statement arrived. Match each crossing to the contract whose timestamps enclose it, then check what is left against the movements sheet.
5. Investigate the remainder before you invoice. The two usual causes are a return time recorded as a date with no time, and a paired gate charge at Al Mamzar or Al Safa.
6. Total per contract, add your contracted handling fee, and show toll and fee as separate invoice lines.
7. Keep both source files. When a charge is disputed six weeks later, the statement row ends the conversation.

Settle against the deposit, and do not release it the day a car comes back. Hold it two or three days, check the plate across the rental window plus a margin, settle, then release, and tell the customer the hold period at signing. Once the file is closed, a missed crossing means chasing a departed tourist across a border for AED 12.60. Nobody does, so it becomes fleet cost.

When the spreadsheet stops coping

Around thirty cars with frequent same day turnover, the matching step alone eats an afternoon a month. We build Deck, an operations panel for UAE rent-a-car companies, which matches crossings to contracts from timestamps it already holds. It will not set your handling fee or settle your VAT question. If the spreadsheet above is working, keep using it.

Check these three things this week

One, confirm your rate card uses AED 4.20 and AED 6.30, not the pre June 2026 figures. Two, confirm your contract names the handling fee in figures and says tolls stay payable after return. Three, confirm somebody checks Darb and not only Salik, because those two 24 hour gates opened in May 2026 and cars come back from Abu Dhabi at night.

Questions operators ask

How much is a Salik crossing in 2026?

Since 1 June 2026 a peak crossing is deducted as AED 6.30 and an off peak crossing as AED 4.20, both including 5 per cent VAT. Peak is 06:00 to 10:00 and 16:00 to 20:00, Monday to Saturday. Sunday is charged at the off peak rate all day, apart from public holidays and special event days. There is no charge between 01:00 and 06:00.

Do Salik rates change during Ramadan?

Yes, the bands shift. Peak runs 09:00 to 17:00 at AED 6 before VAT, off peak runs 07:00 to 09:00 and 17:00 to 02:00 at AED 4 before VAT, and the free window moves to 02:00 to 07:00. If your billing rules hard code the normal hours, they will misprice a month of crossings every year.

Can I charge my renter an admin fee on top of the toll?

Yes, and most Dubai operators do. Rental terms and comparison pages commonly show either a per crossing fee of roughly AED 2 to AED 5 or a daily toll service charge of roughly AED 15 to AED 25, though these are observed market ranges rather than a regulated tariff. The fee only holds up if the exact amount and its basis appear in the signed rental agreement, and it should be a separate line on the invoice.

Does VAT apply when I recharge a toll to a customer?

Most likely yes, at 5 per cent, because the Salik account is in your company name and you are the party legally liable, which makes the recharge a reimbursement rather than a disbursement under FTA public clarification VATP013. A reimbursement follows the VAT treatment of your main supply, so it is taxed like the rental. No FTA clarification deals specifically with rental toll recharges, so confirm this with your tax adviser before changing your invoices.

Do Darb tolls in Abu Dhabi carry VAT too?

No announcement applying VAT to Darb has been published. The 5 per cent VAT announced in May 2026 covered Salik toll usage and tag activation fees in Dubai, along with Dubai public parking. Treat Darb as AED 4 flat until Abu Dhabi Mobility says otherwise, and check if the amounts on your Darb statement stop matching AED 4.

How do I work out which customer caused a toll?

Match the crossing timestamp against the pickup and return timestamps of the contracts for that plate, working one plate at a time in time order. Record pickup and return to the minute, because a car that changed hands mid day will produce crossings on both sides of the handover. Log your own internal movements too, otherwise a delivery run looks like an unexplained crossing.

What happens if I find a toll after releasing the deposit?

In practice you usually lose it. Chasing a departed customer for AED 12.60 costs more than the amount, so it becomes fleet cost. The fix is a short deposit hold, two to three days is common, with the toll check done before release, and telling the customer about the hold when they sign.