How to charge rental customers for tolls in the US

The agency bills the registered owner, you, often weeks after the car came back. Recovering tolls is three jobs, each with a trap that loses money quietly: export each agency's statement, find which renter had the car at each toll, and bill them what your agreement allows.

How do you get toll statements from E-ZPass, SunPass, TxTag or FasTrak?

Every major agency portal offers a transaction export, usually CSV. Agencies rarely document it, but HQ Rental Software's public knowledge base has click-by-click guides with sample files. Examples:

TxTag, I-PASS, NTTA and the other E-ZPass states have similar exports; E-ZPass Virginia and NTTA give Excel files instead of CSV. The Pennsylvania Turnpike says commercial account activity can be viewed, printed or downloaded, and is viewable for 120 days, so export at least monthly or the older rows are gone.

The files differ in column names but share one shape: a plate or tag number, a date and time, a plaza or location, an amount, and often a posting date and the agency's transaction id.

How do you match a toll to the right rental?

By the vehicle, then by the time of the passage. Four things trip people up.

Plate or tag in one column. Columns are named "Tag/Plate #", "TRANSPONDER/LICENSE PLATE" or "TAG_NUMBER/PLATE_NUMBER" and hold either. Plates come decorated: SunPass appends the state ("AA11AA-FL"), The Toll Roads puts it in front ("CA 1111111"). Tags come with prefixes ("TEX.01111111" on TxTag). Strip the decoration before you compare, and record each car's transponder number, or every tag-only row stays unmatched.

No timezone. None of the sample files carries a timezone or offset. Read the time as the agency's local clock. A trip that crosses a time zone, or an E-ZPass account that lists tolls from other states, can be an hour off, so allow some margin around the pickup and return times.

Posting date is not the toll date. In the sample files tolls posted one to four days after the passage, and the Pennsylvania Turnpike says 2 to 3 business days. Always match on the transaction or exit time. A statement filtered "last month by posting date" includes tolls from rentals that ended the month before.

Late tolls. Agencies bill on different cycles. Turo lets hosts invoice tolls up to 90 days after a trip, and tolls more than 180 days after trip end are not reimbursable there. Your rental record has to stay findable long after the car came back.

Two more: payments and top-ups sit in the same file as tolls (E-ZPass NY shows them as rows with Exit Plaza "PAYMENT"), so drop them; and some agencies give no transaction id, so a second export over an overlapping date range can double-bill a renter unless you check for repeats.

For a toll you also need evidence the renter can check. Turo's rule for a manual toll invoice is a useful minimum: the bill must clearly show the date, time, location and licence plate or VIN. Every export above carries those four fields.

What may you charge the renter?

The toll itself: yes, in every state we checked.

• California. Vehicle Code section 40264 lets the rental company return an affidavit of non-liability with the rental agreement within 30 days; the agency then notices the renter and "may proceed against the rentee or lessee". Civil Code section 1939.19, the rental-charges section, does not mention tolls or admin fees; it bans undisclosed mandatory charges.
• Florida. Statute 316.1001 lets the owner escape a toll citation by an affidavit within 14 days naming who "leased, rented, or otherwise had the care, custody, or control" of the vehicle.

An admin fee on top: we found no cap in force, and found proposals.

• New York. Bill A4665 (2025) would amend General Business Law section 396-z to forbid "any fees, charges or penalties, other than the actual cost of a toll". It was re-referred to the Assembly Consumer Affairs committee on 7 January 2026 and has not passed. The same idea has been filed every session since at least 2017.
• California. SB 1250 (2022) proposed a per-rental cap with the dollar amount left blank. It passed the Senate; we could not confirm whether it became law, so we treat it as not law.
• Florida. SB 1552 (2016) would have allowed at most a 10 dollar surcharge, once per day, only on days with a toll. We found nothing showing it passed.

What we did not find: a statute in any of these three states that sets a maximum admin fee today, and any research on whether sales tax applies to a recovered toll in your state. Ask your accountant about the tax.

If you charge a fee, state it in the agreement, and keep it small and per rental rather than per toll, the shape every proposed cap has taken.

How does Turo handle tolls?

Hosts link a toll agency account, Turo matches each toll by transponder first and plate as backup, and generates the invoice 7 days after the trip. Agency admin fees fall on the host for late payment, a low prepaid balance or a missing transponder, and on the guest only for use outside the host's transponder coverage or a toll-site speeding ticket. Turo allows no host admin fee of the host's own.

How to bill tolls with Renviq

1. Export the statement

   From E-ZPass NY, SunPass, TxTag, The Toll Roads or Tolls by Mail NY, as CSV. For any other agency, copy the rows into Renviq's CSV template.

2. Import it with a dry run

   Renviq recognises the format from the header row, with no column mapping to set up, and shows what it will create before it creates anything. A re-import of rows already imported creates nothing.

3. Check the matches

   Each toll is matched to the rental that had the car at that time, including after a vehicle swap. A toll with exactly one match links itself; the rest wait for you in the fines register.

4. Bill one invoice per rental

   A rental's tolls go on one invoice, one line per toll, with your handling fee, if you set one, added once per invoice.

Renviq does not pull from agency accounts automatically, does not track transponders, and does not decide whether your fee is lawful in your state. Traffic tickets use the same register; see how to start a car rental business in the US.