Lebanon Tyre Rules 2026: Chains on Mount Lebanon Roads

Lebanon gets real snow. Mount Lebanon runs the length of the country and carries ski resorts at Faraya, Faqra, Laqlouq and the Cedars, and the Dahr el Baidar pass on the Beirut–Damascus highway sits at roughly 1,540 metres and is closed by snow repeatedly each winter.

What Lebanon does not have is a dated winter tyre mandate. There is no calendar window, no compulsory snowflake marking and no stud season. Mountain roads are handled event by event: after a snowfall a route is closed, limited to four-wheel drive, or opened only to vehicles carrying chains.

The year-round figure is tread depth — 1.6 mm in the main grooves, per Council Directive 89/459/EEC.

Tyre Law Summary for Lebanon

Two countries in one drive

Lebanon is small enough that a single morning can take you from Mediterranean coast to alpine conditions and back.

• The coast. Beirut, Tripoli, Saida. Winter here means heavy rain, poor drainage and standing water on the coastal motorway. Worn tread is the risk, not cold.
• The mountains. Above roughly 1,200 to 1,500 metres, December to March brings genuine snow and ice. Gradients are steep, bends are tight, and the shaded side of a ridge holds ice long after the sunny side has cleared.
• The Bekaa. Colder than the coast, drier than the mountains, with hard overnight frosts. The hazard is black ice on a straight road at dawn rather than snow on a climb.

Chains beat a tyre purchase here

Because the restrictions are expressed as closures, four-wheel-drive requirements or chain requirements rather than as a tyre specification, a set of chains is the item that actually changes your options on a Lebanese mountain road in January.

Practical points:

• Fit-test them once, in daylight, on dry ground. Learning on a snowbound pass is a bad plan.
• Chains go on the driven axle. Know which that is on a hire car before you need to.
• Check the route first. Whether Dahr el Baidar is open is a daily question through the winter, not a seasonal one.

Urban surfaces

Lebanese city and coastal roads carry a lot of pothole and broken-edge damage. The characteristic failure is not tread wear but a sidewall bulge from a hard pothole strike — a bubble in the wall means the internal structure has failed and the tyre needs replacing, whatever the tread reads.

The border picture

Lebanon has two land neighbours, and only one of them can be crossed:

• Syria: to the north and east. Main crossing at Masnaa on the Damascus road, plus the northern Akkar routes. No winter tyre season there either, though the Anti-Lebanon passes see the same snow.
• Israel: to the south. Not an open crossing.

Saudi Arabia, Oman, Kuwait and Armenia are sometimes grouped with Lebanon regionally, but none of them shares a border with it, and reaching any of them by road means transiting other countries entirely.

Speed limits, fines and required equipment are covered in the Driving in Lebanon guide.