Not Paying For Speeding Tickets In Norway: What Happens When You Don’t Pay

Speeding tickets are incredibly expensive in Norway, and breaking the speed limit with 11 km/h on a road with 60 km/h speed limit will set you back 4,150 NOK in 2022!

Many foreigners find these speeding tickets to be pretty rough, but that’s what it’s like in Norway. Some people simply refuse to pay their tickets when they get a speeding ticket in Norway, so what are the consequences of not paying for a speeding ticket in Norway?

For most European countries, the ticket will be sent to your home address, and collected like any domestic speeding ticket would. It’s a bit more difficult for the Norwegian government to collect fines from the US and Asia, but they often attempt to get it from local money collection agencies.

There are examples of people who have just left Norway without paying their fine, and never getting in any trouble for it. In certain cases the fine collection might not be worth the hassle for the Norwegian government.

Others have experienced that the fined turned up at their home address as much as a year later, now with lots of late payment extra costs.

It really depends on which country you live in, and what the laws are for collecting money. The Norwegian government do cooperate with a lot of foreign debt collection agencies across the world.

I would recommend everyone to pay their speeding tickets within the time given (usually 1 week after getting it), because it can get a lot worse if you try to outrun it. This is especially true if you live in a country that cooperates with the Norwegian government, or plan on visiting Norway again in the future.

Also read: How much speeding tickets are in Norway.

Countries with a cross-country fine cooperation

Many European countries have made an agreement that any traffic related fine should be collected by the local authorities, so this means that the speeding ticket will end up in your mailbox if you live in any of these countries:

Austria, Chech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom.

This also allows your local laws to dictate how to collect the fine if you refuse to pay it, so you are then subject to your local laws instead of Norwegian laws from there on out (as long as you return to your home country of course).

You could theoretically go to jail for not paying your speeding ticket

Unpaid speeding tickets can in theory be converted to jail time if you don’t pay by a certain date. This is very unusual, but you should be aware that you can in theory be summoned to serve jail time in a Norwegian prison if you don’t pay your speeding ticket.

This opens up for extradition so that your local police will get you. This will typically lead to a sentence where you get jail time in your local country instead of being sent to Norway.

Keep in mind that this is super rare, but it could happen for more serious traffic crimes such as those that have harmed or put other people in danger.

Unpaid traffic fines can also lead to expulsion from Norway for a certain time period. Serious speeding crimes can even lead to the government revoking a permanent residency or revoking a visa.

Who is responsible for collecting speeding ticket fines in Norway?

Norwegian speeding tickets are collected by an agency called Statens Innkrevingssentral (Norwegian National Collection Agency). This is a subdivision of Skatteetaten (Norwegian Tax Administration), so they are not directly affiliated with the police itself.

We often have a saying that it’s just as bad to be on bad terms with the tax office in Norway as it is with the police, since the tax office has a lot of freedom to collect your money by any means possible.