Owners of regular passenger cars may have to pay significantly more. Analysts from the National Bank of Slovakia published a study examining how the car taxation system could be changed. The idea is that an annual tax would apply to every vehicle, and its amount would directly depend on CO2 emissions.
Currently, in Slovakia, the annual tax mostly applies to cars used for business. Regular private household cars are still exempt from this. But the analytical material shows a scenario where, besides ownership, registration and administrative fees during vehicle re-registration would also change.
How much the new tax could cost car owners
In the proposed model, the emission component of the tax included specific amounts depending on the car's emissions. For cars with emissions at 125 grams of CO2 per kilometer, the annual tax would be 30 euros. At 155 grams, the amount would rise to 120 euros, and for vehicles producing 200 grams of CO2, the amount would reach 420 euros per year.
According to calculations by the Institute of Economic and Social Analyses (INESS), a regular driver with an internal combustion engine who drives 20,000 kilometers per year with a consumption of seven liters per 100 kilometers would pay the mentioned 420 euros of this new tax. Such a change would bring nearly 451 million euros per year to the state budget, instead of the current approximately 130 million euros.
Political storm and firm government rejection
The published study immediately stirred the political scene. The opposition party Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) warned about a massive burden on more than three million vehicle owners in the country. According to the liberals, such a tax would affect everyone, regardless of whether a person drives tens of thousands of kilometers per year or is a pensioner who uses the car only occasionally. Opposition representatives claim the proposal is meant to compensate for losses caused by other measures.
However, the Ministry of Finance of the Slovak Republic firmly rejected any reports about preparing such a tax for ordinary citizens and called them false. The National Bank of Slovakia also distanced itself, stating that this was exclusively a theoretical and illustrative analytical calculation by authors Dominik Peli and Martin Nevicky, not an official legislative proposal.
