Driving in Belgium on a German Licence — The Brussels Ring & a 70 Limit

For German drivers Belgium feels almost like home until two things catch you out, and neither is on the rental agreement. Your German licence is an EU licence, valid as-is — no International Driving Permit, no translation, and the traffic stays on the right. The differences are about how the roads behave, not what’s in your wallet.

The first is speed, and it cuts the opposite way to what German drivers expect. There is no Autobahn here and nothing derestricted: motorways are capped at 120 km/h, and ordinary rural roads run at just 70 km/h, a full 30 below the German 100. It’s easy to drift over a limit that feels artificially low after the Autobahn, and Belgium — Flanders especially — is blanketed with fixed and average-speed cameras that don’t forgive. Around 10 km/h over typically costs EUR 53, and the cameras will find your plate.

The second is the Brussels ring (the R0). It is genuinely one of the more demanding pieces of urban motorway in western Europe — heavy, fast-merging traffic, lanes that appear and vanish, and exits signed in both French and Dutch that can change name across a language border mid-junction. Know your exit number before you reach it, stay out of the left lanes if you’re leaving soon, and don’t expect German-style lane discipline from the traffic around you. Antwerp’s ring carries the same warning.

Beyond those, Belgium is straightforward: a 0.05 BAC alcohol limit identical to Germany’s, with routine roadside breath tests near cities and on weekend nights, and no winter-tyre mandate to worry about. Fuel sits around EUR 1.90 a litre. Several Belgian cities also run low-emission zones (Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent) that require pre-registration for foreign plates — worth checking before you drive into a centre.

The full rule set is on the Belgium driving guide, you can sanity-check a camera fine on the Speeding Fine Calculator, and if one lands after you’ve returned the car, our explainer on who pays driving fines abroad covers the cross-border collection. The general emergency number is 112.