Larnaca to Paphos: the bus, the shuttle, a taxi, or driving it yourself

TL;DR

Larnaca to Paphos, defined. Larnaca to Paphos is a 134 km road journey across southern Cyprus, from the island's main international airport to its western resort town. No intercity bus leaves the Larnaca terminal for Paphos, so the realistic choices are a fixed-fare taxi, two buses with one change at Limassol, or driving it yourself in about an hour and a half.

• The road distance to Paphos town is 134 km and the drive takes about an hour and a half. Published figures range from 106 km to 138 km because sites measure to different places: the airport, the town, or Coral Bay.
• No intercity bus serves Larnaca Airport. The operator's Larnaca departures start at Finikoudes and the Nikolaidis Building, both in the town centre, and the airport's own list of its operators does not include the intercity company.
• A taxi from the rank is a fixed statutory fare, not a meter reading: €105 by day and €125 at night for up to four people, €135 and €160 for five or six. Luggage and VAT are included and the fare is the same on public holidays.
• All three Paphos areas are one fare from Larnaca. Coral Bay costs exactly what Kato Paphos costs. From Paphos Airport those same three areas are €20, €25 and €35.
• The cheapest sensible way across is about €15: the airport express to Limassol at €10, then the intercity bus on to Paphos at €5. The direct intercity bus runs four times on a weekday and once at a weekend.
• There is no railway in Cyprus, although an aggregator is currently selling train tickets for this route.

The road distance from Larnaca Airport to Paphos town centre is 134 km, and the straight line is 110 km. I measured both on 3 September 2026, with a routing engine over the OpenStreetMap road network. Cyprus publishes no official road-distance table for the pair.

The reason the published numbers disagree is not that some of them are wrong. It is that "Paphos" is three different places, and almost nobody says which one they mean.

That is a 17 km spread between three destinations all correctly called "Paphos", and it accounts for the whole of the disagreement you see online. Rome2Rio prints 137 km beside a road distance of 131.6 km, 12Go gives 138 km overland and 106 km flying, distancecalculator.net 111 and 132 km, and Omio 112 km, all read on 3 September 2026. Every one of those sorts neatly into the table above once you know what it was measuring, and not one of them says which point in Paphos it measured to. Rome2Rio's pair cannot both be right: a straight-line distance of 137 km cannot exceed its own 131.6 km road distance.

The route runs on three motorways: the A5 out towards Limassol, then the A1, then the A6 west. The European Commission records the A6 as the 66 km Limassol to Paphos link, so that last stretch is nearly half the journey in one run.

Drive time is about an hour and a half in normal conditions. Eight of the published sources cluster between 1h22 and 1h35. The honest caveat is that the Limassol stretch is what moves the number.

From Larnaca town, yes, and there are two routes. From Larnaca Airport, no: not one intercity bus leaves the terminal for Paphos.

This is the single most useful thing on this page, and I have not found another page that says it. The licensed intercity operator publishes its Larnaca departures as starting "από Φοινικούδες", from Finikoudes, the seafront promenade. The other starting point is the Nikolaidis Building on Archbishop Makarios III Avenue. Its published Larnaca stop list runs Nikolaidis Building, the old hospital, the municipal library, the Agamemnon kiosk, Xydias, Ypsoma Krasa and Choirokoitia. There is no terminal on it.

Hermes Airports publishes its own list of the public transport at Larnaca Airport, and it names four operators. They are Cyprus Public Transport "(only for Larnaka airport and Larnaka region)", Kapnos Airport Shuttle, Limassol Airport Express, and Pafos Transport Organisation "(only for Pafos airport and Pafos region)". The intercity company is not among them, and two of the four are fenced to their own district in the airport's own wording. Nothing on that list crosses the island to Paphos town.

So three things actually leave the terminal, and none of them is a bus to Paphos:

• the urban bus into Larnaca town, from which the intercity buses depart;
• the airport express to Limassol, from which another intercity bus goes on to Paphos;
• the airport-to-airport shuttle, which ends at Paphos Airport.

That last one matters more than it looks. The second-ranking result in Google for this journey sells a bus ticket described as Larnaca to Paphos. The coach it sells terminates at Paphos Airport, 14.6 km short of the town. Three separate readers, in English and Hebrew, have had to explain that to somebody in a forum. If your hotel is in Paphos, budget for that last leg too. I have written up the 14.6 km from Paphos Airport into town separately, including its own fixed taxi fare.

There are three ways to do this by public transport, none of which any operator sells as a single journey. The cheapest assembled route is €12.70 and the most practical is €15.

The airport express timetable I read is printed "Valid as of 01/07/2026". Hermes Airports lists the operators that actually serve the terminal, and the intercity company is not one of them. All fares and times below were read from the operators' own pages on 3 September 2026, and every one of them reserves the right to change a schedule without notice.

The €15 and the €12.70 are my arithmetic over two operators' published fares, not a through-fare anyone sells. Neither operator is responsible if a connection fails. I am also not giving you a door-to-door time for either, and that is deliberate. The airport express terminates at Agios Georgios Havouzas and the Limassol tourist area, while the Paphos intercity's published times start from the New Port. Havouzas is on the intercity's own Limassol stop list, so the two documents do correspond. But that is two published stop lists agreeing, not a measured or guaranteed interchange, and no offset between them is published. Allow slack.

The intercity timetable is worth setting out properly. A single "last bus" time is the most misleading thing you could take away from this page.

Route A, Larnaca to Limassol to Paphos, runs Monday to Friday only, at 05:55, 10:15 and 15:45, takes about 2h45 and costs €10 single. No Saturday, Sunday or public-holiday service is published on this route at all. There is no return ticket either: the operator's return, weekly, monthly and annual rows all read ΜΗ ΔΙΑΘΕΣΙΜΟ, not available.

Route B, Larnaca to Paphos, leaves at 09:00 seven days a week including public holidays, takes about 2h, and costs €10 single or €19 return.

Every one of those times departs from Larnaca town, not the airport. So put route 425 in front of them. It runs from the terminal every twenty minutes between 06:30 and 23:50 and costs €2.70 in cash, or €4.70 after 21:00, under a tariff that took effect on 3 August 2026. Its stop list reaches Archbishop Makarios III Avenue, where the map marks "near to Larnaca Bus Station".

No. There is no railway anywhere in Cyprus. Take a bus, a shuttle, a taxi or a hire car.

Eurostat states it in the present tense: there are no railways in Cyprus, Malta or Iceland, with data extracted in February 2026.

There was one once. The Department of Antiquities records that the Cyprus Government Railway "was in operation from 1905 to 1951", and its old Evrychou station is now a railway museum. It never served Paphos, and it has been gone for seventy-five years.

The reason this question keeps being asked is that the market keeps answering it wrongly. On 3 September 2026 an aggregator ranked second in Google for the phrase "larnaca to paphos train", advertising train tickets and train times for the route. Google's own AI summary, on that same page of results, said correctly that there is no train service because Cyprus has no railway network. It cited that same aggregator's train page as its source. A second booking site prints "Trains are not available" on its own page for the route.

€105 by day and €125 at night for up to four people, fixed by law. Two things are being confused every time this question is answered online, and separating them explains everything else.

A taxi you take from the rank at Larnaca Airport is on a fixed statutory fare. A pre-booked private transfer is a different product, sold by different companies, and it prices freely. Most of the numbers you will find quoted as "taxi fares" for this journey are transfer quotes.

The fixed fares come from Κ.Δ.Π. 79/2021, a statutory notice made under the Road Transport Regulation Laws 1982 to 2019. It was published in the Official Gazette on 19 February 2021 and has been in force since 1 March 2021. The Road Transport Department still carries it as current, with its page last updated on 28 August 2026.

Now the part nobody publishes. From Larnaca, all three Paphos areas are a single fare. Kato Paphos up to the Tombs of the Kings, Chlorakas up to Kissonerga, and Coral Bay up to west of Pegeia are one row in that instrument. So a guest staying at Coral Bay pays exactly what a guest in Kato Paphos pays. From Paphos Airport, the same three areas are €20, €25 and €35. It is the one point in this journey where staying further out costs you nothing.

The market does not reflect any of this. I collected twenty-three reported and published prices for this journey on 3 September 2026, from travellers in four languages and from the taxi and transfer companies' own pages. Not one of them was €105. They ran €100, €102, €120, €123, €125, €130, €140, €157.63, "from €182", and one traveller reported £300 for a return. The two below €105 both predate the instrument and are still circulating.

I am not suggesting anybody is being cheated. Most of those figures are private transfers, correctly priced for what they are, and read as though they were taxi fares. But here is the part worth carrying with you. If you take a taxi from the rank and are quoted more than the fixed fare, the instrument is what lets you say so. Hermes Airports confirms the rank is available 24 hours, and the Road Transport Department publishes a guide to taxi services with the complaint route on it.

It depends on the hour you land and how many of you there are. The fixed taxi fare does not move with party size, so it gets cheaper per head as the party grows, while the bus stays €15 each however many of you travel.

• Travelling alone with time to spare, take the bus. €15 against €105 is not a close call.
• Landing at 22:00 with two children and three suitcases, take the taxi. The last intercity bus of the day left at 15:45, the fare is fixed and known before you get in, and luggage is included.
• A family of four in daylight is a genuine toss-up at €26.25 a head against €15, and the taxi buys you ninety minutes instead of three hours.

The crossover is worth doing in your head. The fixed taxi fare is €105 whether one person travels or four. Alone, that is €105 a head. For a family of four it is €26.25 a head, against €15 a head on the bus at any party size. For five or six people the fixed fare is €135, which is €22.50 each.

It is an easy drive and a dull one, which is exactly what you want after a flight. Three motorways, one city to get past, and most of it is a single run along the south coast.

Three motorways: the A5, then the A1, then the A6 west. The European Commission puts the A6 at 66 km, so most of the journey is a single run along the south coast.

The only part that asks anything of you on the road is Limassol. The motorway skirts the city rather than entering it, and the junctions come in quicker succession than anywhere else on the route. It is also the one stretch where traffic gets heavy enough to change your arrival time.

If you have not driven in Cyprus before, the thing to prepare for is not the motorway. It is everything after you leave it. Traffic in Cyprus drives on the left, and the adjustment costs a newcomer more attention in the first hour than the whole 134 km does.

I have deliberately not put a single speed limit, fine or insurance rule on this page. Those belong in one place, kept current: every road rule, limit and sign is in the driving guide.

The best answer I could find anywhere else on what this road is actually like was a forum post from 2009.

Yes to the bus, and it is worse than the bus out. No to the one-way hire, at least from Rents in Cyprus. Paphos to Larnaca is the same 134 km by road and the same hour and a half as the way in, because distance is symmetric. The timetable is not: Paphos has one departure a day on Route B and no weekend service at all on Route A.

Taking the direction in reverse first, because a good share of the lookups are asked that way round. Paphos to Larnaca is 134 km by road from the town centre, 127 km if you are starting at Paphos Airport instead, and about an hour and a half in normal conditions, all measured on 3 September 2026 over the same route in the other direction: the A6 east, then the A1, then the A5. Nothing about the road changes when you turn around. What changes is everything scheduled.

Start with the taxi, because it is the simplest half. Κ.Δ.Π. 79/2021 sets fixed fares for hires "από και προς τα αεροδρόμια", meaning from and to the airports. So the return leg is priced exactly like the outbound. A return taxi for up to four people in daylight is €210, not something you negotiate at the Paphos end.

The bus back is where people get caught. Route A, the via-Limassol service, publishes no Saturday, Sunday or public-holiday timetable at all. If you are flying home on a Sunday, that route does not exist for you, and you are down to Route B or a taxi. Route B's Paphos departure is at 16:00, seven days a week, from Karavella, and 16:00 is the only bus out of Paphos that day. Route A's Paphos departures, Monday to Friday, are 05:45, 10:00 and 20:00.

Then the limit at the company I work for, which I would rather you read here than discover at the desk. Pick-up and drop-off are in the same city. Rents in Cyprus hires cars in Larnaca by bringing one to an address the customer gives. But it holds no counter there and runs no one-way rentals between towns, so a car hired in Paphos comes back to Paphos. A wrong-location return is charged from €300.

So if you are flying out of Larnaca after a week in Paphos, hiring a car for the whole trip and driving yourself to the airport works. Leaving that car at Larnaca does not. Somebody asked four months ago whether a Paphos-pickup, Larnaca-drop hire exists at all. It does, from companies that offer it. It is not something Rents in Cyprus can do, and the honest thing is to say so before you plan around it rather than after.

Often, yes. Sometimes not, and the arithmetic is exact enough to do before you book. For up to four people taking taxis both ways, flying into Larnaca instead of Paphos adds €170 in daytime transfer cost.

Somebody put it well in a forum thread on this exact journey: the cheapness of the flight is often offset by the transfer. People buy a cheap flight to the wrong airport, then find it was not such a cheap flight after all. The single reply underneath asked "How much did it cost?", and nobody ever answered. Here is the answer, and it comes from a statutory instrument rather than a market estimate.

• The €170 collapses to about €30 if you take the bus at both ends and have the time to spare. The gap is a taxi-fare gap rather than a law of nature.
• It grows for a party of five or six, where the fixed fare is €135 each way.
• Many people cannot choose their airport at all. If your airline only flies to Larnaca, this section is a budgeting tool rather than a decision.

So a Larnaca flight has to be at least €170 cheaper than the same trip into Paphos before it is genuinely cheaper, for a party of up to four taking taxis at both ends. That is the number, and no competitor on this search publishes it.

If Paphos is not where you are going, the same instrument fixes the other two runs out of Larnaca and we have measured both the same way: Larnaca Airport to Limassol is 75.3 km at a fixed €55, and Larnaca Airport to Ayia Napa is 59.6 km at a fixed €50, the cheapest of the three and the only one of them that crosses a British base area.

I am a manager at Rents in Cyprus LTD, which hires out its own cars in the Paphos area. There are four handover points: the office in Chlorakas, Paphos Airport, Coral Bay and Kato Paphos. Paphos Airport is the only airport where anyone from the company meets a customer off a flight.

The company does hire cars in Larnaca, by bringing one to an address you give. But there is no counter at Larnaca Airport and no office in Larnaca, so if you are landing there, please do not plan a pick-up around it. And pick-up and drop-off are in the same city, so a car hired in Paphos comes back to Paphos.

If you want a car for the Paphos end of the trip, the fleet and the handover points are on the Paphos car hire page, or you can call the office. Nothing is held until it is confirmed with you.

Who this is for, and what you will need

Four situations, and two of them need something in your pocket before you walk out of Arrivals.

• You have a flight into Larnaca and a hotel at the other end of the island.
• You are deciding whether the cheaper flight into Larnaca is actually cheaper.
• You are landing late, or flying home on a Sunday, and need to know what still runs.
• If you want the bus, bring cash. The intercity driver sells single tickets only and takes nothing else.
• If you want a taxi, know the fixed fare before you get in: it is set by statutory instrument, not by the meter.

Every fare, timetable and distance on this page was read on 3 September 2026, and the source is linked at the claim rather than listed here.