Renting a Car in the USA: What Visitors Need to Know

Your home driver’s license is almost certainly enough to rent and drive a car in the United States. The expensive decision is not paperwork, it’s the insurance question you get asked at the counter, and the answer depends on what your credit card actually covers. Everything else that surprises visitors comes down to four fees: young driver, one-way, tolls and fuel.

This is general travel information, not legal or insurance advice. Driving and rental rules are set by individual states and by each rental company, and both change. Confirm the current position with the state DMV and with your rental company’s own terms before you drive.

Do you need an International Driving Permit?

Usually not, but it depends on the language on your license. New York’s DMV puts the rule plainly: a valid foreign license “allows you to drive without a supervising driver,” and an International Driving Permit or certified translation is only required “if your driver license is printed in any language except English.” Most states take a similar line, and rental companies follow suit.

The practical reading. If your license is in English, or bilingual with English, you’re fine. If it isn’t, get an IDP at home before you fly, because you cannot buy one in the US: an IDP can only be issued in the country that issued your license. It costs very little and it’s valid for a year. Carry it with your actual license, never instead of it, since the permit is only a translation and has no standing on its own.

One more thing the agent will want: a credit card in the driver’s name. Debit cards are accepted at some locations under extra conditions, often including a credit check or proof of a return flight, and refused at others. A real credit card removes an entire category of problem.

Age: 25 is the line, 20 is the floor

Most brands set the minimum rental age at 20 across the US and Canada. Thrifty states it in exactly those terms, adding that New York and Michigan are 18 because state law says so. New York’s General Business Law makes it “unlawful… to refuse to rent such vehicle to any person eighteen years of age or older solely on the basis of age,” while allowing the company to pass on the genuine extra insurance cost of a young driver.

That surcharge is the sting. Drivers aged 20 to 24 pay a daily young renter fee at essentially every major brand, and Thrifty’s own wording is that it “varies based on renting location and car class.” On a two-week rental it can rival the base rate. Under-25 renters are also blocked from premium and specialty vehicle classes, so the convertible is not happening.

If you’re 24 or under, price the rental with the surcharge included before comparing brands, because the headline daily rate tells you nothing useful.

The insurance question, which is the whole game

At the counter you’ll be offered a stack of acronyms. Only two of them matter.

CDW or LDW (collision damage waiver, loss damage waiver) is not insurance. It’s the rental company agreeing not to chase you for damage to their car. Decline it and you are on the hook for the vehicle.

SLI or ALI (supplemental or additional liability insurance) is the one that covers damage you do to other people and their property. This is the one visitors underestimate, because state minimum liability limits are low. California, one of the stricter states, requires just $30,000 for injury to one person, $60,000 per accident and $15,000 for property damage under limits that took effect on 1 January 2025. A serious highway accident passes those numbers before the ambulance arrives.

Now the credit card angle, which is where people get burned in both directions. Some US-issued travel cards do carry real cover. Chase’s Sapphire cards, for example, provide primary collision damage cover for theft, damage, loss-of-use charges and towing, on two conditions: the cardmember has to be the primary driver, and has to decline the rental company’s own CDW. The cover is capped, at actual cash value on Sapphire Preferred and $75,000 on Sapphire Reserve, and it excludes vehicles over ten years old, rentals longer than 30 consecutive days, off-road use, nine-seat vans and peer-to-peer rentals.

Two things follow from that, and they’re the practical takeaway of this whole page. First, card cover of this type protects the rental car, not your liability to anyone else, so it is not a substitute for SLI. Second, cards issued outside the US frequently exclude the United States entirely or provide only secondary cover behind a policy you don’t have. Read your card’s benefits document before you travel, and if it doesn’t say what you hoped, buy the counter product or a standalone rental excess policy rather than gambling.

Whatever you decide, photograph the car from every corner before you leave the lot, including the roof and the wheels, and again when you drop it off.

One-way, and the other fees on the agreement

A one-way rental, picked up in one city and returned in another, usually carries a drop fee. It varies wildly: sometimes zero on popular corridors where the company needs cars moved back, sometimes hundreds of dollars for an interstate move. There’s no published national figure, so get the total quoted for your exact pair of locations rather than assuming.

Airport pickups also carry concession recovery fees and facility charges built into the rate, which is why a downtown branch can be noticeably cheaper for a rental of a week or more. If you’re arriving late and leaving from the same airport, the convenience usually wins; if you’re spending three days in a city first, collecting the car on your way out of town often saves more than the taxi costs.

Tolls and transponders

Large parts of the US have gone cashless. On many roads and bridges there’s no booth to stop at: a gantry photographs your plate at highway speed and someone gets billed later. In a rental, that someone is the rental company, which then bills you and adds an administrative charge of its own.

The main transponder network is E-ZPass, which spans 20 states, mostly in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic and Midwest. Florida runs SunPass, California has FasTrak, Texas has TxTag, and interoperability between the regions is improving but incomplete.

The cost difference is real and published. Florida’s Turnpike states that TOLL-BY-PLATE, its plate-photography fallback, mails an invoice for tolls over a 30-day period plus a $2.50 administrative fee, and that “SunPass customers always pay the lowest toll amount and can save an average of 25% on tolls when compared to TOLL-BY-PLATE.”

Rental companies sell their own toll packages, either a per-day administrative fee charged on each day you use a toll road or a flat unlimited-tolls daily rate. The exact figures differ by brand and by state, and they are set out in the rental agreement rather than in the booking price, so read that section before you sign. As a rule of thumb, if your route crosses toll roads on most days, the unlimited package is cheaper; if you’ll touch one bridge once, decline everything and accept the single plate invoice.

Gas: the easy part

Fuel is called gas, it’s sold by the US gallon (3.785 liters), and rental cars take regular 87 octane unless the paperwork says otherwise. Ignore the mid-grade and premium buttons; they do nothing for a standard rental.

Prices vary more by state than most visitors expect. In the week of 20 July 2026 the national average for regular was $4.001 a gallon, against $3.924 on the East Coast and $5.354 in California. Fill up before you cross into California or before a long empty stretch, not after.

Two quirks worth knowing. Foreign chip-and-PIN cards are often rejected at the pump because US pumps ask for a five-digit ZIP code; pay inside at the register instead, telling the cashier your pump number. And in New Jersey you are not allowed to pump your own gas at all: state law requires a trained attendant to dispense fuel, and New Jersey is the only state that still bans self-service statewide. Stay in the car, say “fill it with regular,” and hand over your card.

Return the car full. The rental company’s refueling rate is always worse than the gas station’s.

Before you book

Price the same dates across brands with the young driver fee, the one-way charge and the toll package included, because those three lines are where identical-looking quotes diverge: compare US car rental prices and full terms and read the agreement rather than the headline rate.

A car makes sense for the Southwest, for road trips and for anywhere with a national park in it. It makes no sense at all for the Northeast corridor, where the train wins on both cost and sanity, as our 7-day East Coast itinerary sets out. If you’re still deciding how to cover the ground, flights, Amtrak or a car compares them corridor by corridor. And if the plan involves driving to the parks, note that non-US residents now pay a $100 per-person fee at eleven of the busiest ones unless they hold an annual pass, which our 2-week USA itinerary works through with the numbers.

Read also

• The classic drive to build a trip around: Pacific Coast Highway through California
• Cover for the medical side of a US trip: travel insurance for a USA trip
• Navigation needs data: eSIM and SIM cards for the USA
• Where the driving pays off: Grand Canyon and Zion
• More car rental guides and transport guides