Paphos Airport to Paphos: the bus, a taxi, a transfer or your own car

TL;DR

Paphos Airport to Paphos, defined. The journey from Paphos International Airport to Paphos town covers 14.6 km through Timi and Acheleia. Four modes serve it: two ordinary district bus routes, a taxi on a fixed government airport tariff, a pre-booked private transfer, and self-drive. There is no railway in Cyprus and no dedicated airport express service on this leg.

• 14.6 km to the city centre, from the taxi guide the tourism authority publishes with the Ministry of Transport.
• Two buses, 612 and 613, and they are not interchangeable. The 612 runs the seafront to the Tombs of the Kings. The 613 runs the upper town to Karavella station.
• €2.00 a single up to 21:00. After that the operator's fare table says €3.00 and its own Motion ticketing section, on the same page, says up to €3.50.
• There is no 24-hour bus. Last departure from the airport 01:00, first 05:50, so about 4 hours 50 minutes with nothing at all.
• The airport taxi fare is fixed by law, not metered: €20 by day and €25 at night into Kato Paphos and as far as the Tombs of the Kings, up to four people, luggage and VAT included.
• The fare is by zone, so Coral Bay is €35 and not €20, and it changes at 20:30.

Four ways, and the choice is mostly about the hour you land and how long you are staying. The bus is €2.00 and runs roughly 05:50 to 01:00. A taxi is a fixed €20 by day into the town centre and works at any hour. A pre-booked transfer fixes the price before you fly. Your own car costs more for a night and less for a week.

Paphos is not one place, which is why the distance matters more than it sounds. The guide to taxi services published by the tourism authority with the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Works prints the official figures.

A widely read transfer site rounds the airport up to "approximately 20 km" from the centre. The government figure is 14.6 km, and that is the one I use.

Yes, two of them, and picking the wrong one lands you at the wrong end of town. Route 612 and route 613 both serve the airport, both are ordinary Paphos district buses, and they finish in completely different places.

The operator is Pafos Buses, trading as OSYPA Ltd, and Hermes Airports names it as the Paphos airport and region operator on its own arrivals page. Its free phone number is 8000 5588.

Here is the difference nobody in the search results states.

The 612 is the coastal route. Its published stop list runs "Tombs Of The Kings Bus Station (Opposite Mc Donalds), Kings Avenue mall, Spyrou Kyprianou / Agion Anargyron, Agapinoros Street (6th Primary School), Ikarou Street (Post Office), Iasonos Street, Almyra Hotel, Poseidonos Avenue, Geroskipou, Koloni, Achelia, Timi, Airport." Poseidonos Avenue is the Kato Paphos hotel strip. If your hotel is near the harbour or the seafront, this is your bus.

Staying up the hill instead? Then you want the 613, whose stop list runs "Karavela Station, Andrea Tselepou, Evagora Palikaride (Kenedy Square), Griva Digeni, Athinon Avenue, Archiepiskopou Makariou C' (Geroskipou), Koloni, Acheleia, Timi, Pafos Airport." Karavella is the main station in Ktima, the old town. It is also where you change onto a village bus.

Neither route page publishes a journey time, so I am not going to give you one. An aggregator in the same search results says 24 minutes. It is not the operator, and a bus timetable is not a thing to take second hand.

There is a gap here I cannot fill. Hermes tells you exactly where the taxi rank is and says nothing at all about where the bus stops. I could not find an official statement of where it waits at the terminal, so this page does not invent one.

No. Out of the airport the first bus is the 613 at 05:50 and the last is the 612 at 01:00. That leaves a gap of about 4 hours 50 minutes when nothing runs at all. Going the other way the first is the 613 from Karavella at 05:20 and the last is the 612 at 00:20.

That is close to twenty hours of service a day, which is better than most people expect, and it is still a hole exactly where the cheap flights land. Get in at 01:20 and the bus has gone, with the next one four and a half hours away. Hermes states that the taxi service at Paphos runs on a 24 hour basis, from a rank on the right as you come out of Arrivals at Level 0. At that hour it is the taxi or a transfer you booked before you flew.

Two things people ask about these times, and the operator answers both itself.

Does the timetable change in winter? It says no. Across its dated public-holiday notices through 2026 the operator repeats one sentence: "Only the two airport lines 612 and 613 operate year-round without any changes". You will find forum posts claiming a much earlier last bus in winter. They are undated, and the company that runs the buses says in writing that these two routes do not change. I have gone with the operator.

And what about public holidays? The same notices are the reason that sentence exists. On a public holiday every other Paphos route drops to the Sunday timetable, and routes that do not run on Sundays do not run at all. The two airport lines are the stated exception. So 1 May and Easter Monday are ordinary days on the 612 and the 613, which is not true of the bus you might take anywhere else that day.

Even so, if you are landing near the last departure, check the operator's live journey planner on the day rather than trusting the times above. Mine included.

€2.00 for a single in the daytime, €6.50 for a day ticket, cash to the driver, and luggage is included. After 21:00 it gets more expensive, and the operator publishes two different figures for how much.

The Pafos Buses ticket page lists a one-way night fare, after 21:00, at €3.00. Further down the same page sits the national Motion ticketing scheme, run by the Ministry of Transport with OSYPA. That section says "between 21:01hrs - 03:49hrs an evening one way paper ticket is issued by the driver with maximum charging price not exceeding the €3.50". Both are published by the operator. They disagree by fifty cents.

I am not going to average them. Carry €3.50 for a late landing and you cannot be caught out.

The same page settles three questions people keep asking. Singles, day and night tickets are sold "only on the buses", so the driver takes your cash and you do not need to arrange anything first. "The above fares include the luggage carriage for passengers", so a suitcase costs nothing. And children up to five travel free, with half fare for 13 to 18 year olds and university students.

One related thing I could not establish: whether the reusable plastic smart card can be bought at the terminal itself. The operator sells those through its information offices and points of sale, and it does not say whether one of those is airside or landside at the airport. It does not matter much for a single journey, since the driver takes cash, and I mention it because people keep asking and nobody answers.

The highest-ranked answer to this question in Google says the bus costs €2 and stops there. Land at 22:30 and it does not.

€20 by day and €25 at night into Kato Paphos and as far as the Tombs of the Kings, for up to four people, with luggage and VAT included. It is not a meter reading. Airport journeys are on a fixed government tariff, and that single fact explains almost every confused answer you will read about Paphos taxis.

The instrument is Κ.Δ.Π. 79/2021, published in the Official Gazette of the Republic on 19 February 2021, made by the Minister of Transport under the Regulation of Road Transport Laws. It sets fixed fares for hires made from and to the airports, for the urban and rural taxi categories, in force from 1 March 2021. Hermes Airports hosts the same document, which is a useful check: the airport operator and the tourism authority publish one instrument between them.

Paphos is split into three zones, and the fare depends on which one you are going to.

The notes on the instrument matter as much as the numbers: "The above fixed fares include the cost of luggage carriage as well as the VAT. Fixed fares also apply on public holidays." So on an airport run there is no charge per bag and no holiday surcharge. Both exist on ordinary town journeys and neither applies here.

This is where the forum advice is half right, and the half that is wrong costs money. Regulars in Paphos will tell you that drivers there do not use the meter on airport work, and they are correct, but not for the reason they think: on a fixed-zone airport hire a meter has nothing left to decide. What they add is that drivers are renowned for overcharging, and the fares they report run from €25 to €45. Some of those land on the table exactly, €25 being the night fare into the centre. One of them does not. A €45 fare quoted for a hotel near the port is an Area 1 journey, and Area 1 does not reach €45 at any hour or any party size, since even five or six passengers at night is €35. So do not read the fixed tariff as proof that nobody overcharges. Read it as the thing that lets you tell.

For contrast, take an ordinary town taxi that is not going to or from the airport. It runs on the metered urban tariff the Road Transport Department publishes, valid since 1 August 2022. By day that is €3.80 to start plus €0.95 per kilometre, by night €4.80 plus €1.10, and €1.40 for every piece of luggage. That is a different tariff for a different journey, and applying it to an airport run gives you the wrong number.

Two practical things worth knowing before you get in. The fare is per car, not per person, up to four people, so a family of four pays the €20 once. And the driver has to give you a receipt if you ask for one: the government guide states the legal obligation and says the receipt should carry the date, the taxi's registration number and the driver's name. That is the document to have if you want to dispute a fare afterwards.

A loose end, and I would rather name it than paper over it. The fixed airport table dates from 2021, while the town meter beside it was raised on 1 August 2022. I went looking for a later instrument on 3 September 2026 and found none, and both official sites still publish the 2021 document as current. So those are the fares in force as far as the record goes. Agree the zone with the driver before you set off, and if a fare looks wrong, the Road Transport Department takes complaints on 22807000, weekdays 08:00 to 15:00.

Sometimes, and rarely for the reason the sellers give. A transfer buys you a fixed price agreed before you fly and a driver waiting when you land. It does not buy you a cheaper ride than the fixed taxi fare, and the per-person headline price is usually a car price divided by four.

Four of the top nine results for this journey sell transfers. I read Holiday Extras' own Paphos page on 3 September 2026, because it was the highest placed of them. To Paphos centre it listed a private car for four at £8.19 per person, and a shared shuttle at £13.85 per person. At the European Central Bank reference rate for that day of 0.86055, the private car works out at about €38 for the vehicle and the shared shuttle at about €16 a head.

Read those two numbers again, because they are the wrong way round from what anyone expects. The shared shuttle costs more per person than the private car. Its own listing gives it 50 minutes against 30, serving "resorts and hotels only", with possible "wait times up to 50 minutes". The cheap-sounding product is the expensive, slow one on this route.

There is a second thing the per-person price hides, and it is that a car is a car. £8.19 each is £32.76 for the vehicle, which two people do not split into £16.38. Two people pay for the car.

Across sellers on the same day, "from" prices for this journey ran from £12.29 at Airparks to £42.35 at Hoppa, both read on 3 September 2026. That is what a from-price is worth without the conditions attached to it.

Where a transfer genuinely earns its money: a 02:00 landing, when the bus has stopped, the taxi is on its night rate and you have small children and a lot of luggage. Knowing the price before you fly is worth something then.

Easy, and shorter than the map suggests. It is 14.6 km on a road that runs through Timi and Acheleia and then drops into Geroskipou before the town. Transfer companies' own pages put the drive at 20 to 30 minutes.

First time driving here? The rules, the limits and the road signs are a separate subject, and I have written them up properly in the guide to driving in Cyprus. This section is about the road, not about the law.

The bus for one or two nights near the centre. The fixed-fare taxi for a late landing, a group, or a lot of luggage. Your own car from about five days, or from day one if you intend to leave the town at all.

Now the row I have an interest in, priced honestly. Rentals in Cyprus hires from Paphos Airport, and its cheapest car is €65 for a single day, falling to €35 a day once the hire reaches seven days. Collecting at the airport inside 09:00 to 17:30 costs €20 on a hire of under five days, and bringing it back inside those hours costs nothing.

So for one night in the middle of town, a car is €65 plus €20 for the collection, against €4.00 of bus tickets. The bus wins and it is not close. That stays true for two nights.

The arithmetic turns over around five days. At five days the collection fee drops to nothing, and the day rate has already fallen. A week is €35 a day with both ends free if you keep them inside those hours. And by then you have almost certainly wanted to drive to the Akamas, to Polis or up into the hills, which is not what a district bus timetable is built for.

If you have not decided whether you want a car in Cyprus at all, that is a bigger question than this journey and I have answered it separately. If you are landing at Larnaca instead, that is a different journey entirely and I have written it up in Larnaca to Paphos, where the taxi is a fixed €105 rather than €20. Every figure on this page is checked the way described here.

Paphos Airport is one of Rentals in Cyprus' four handover points, alongside the Chlorakas office, Coral Bay and Kato Paphos. Nothing is held or confirmed until the company confirms it, and the reservation panel sends a request rather than a booking.

The handover charge is worth stating plainly, because it is the number that changes the comparison above, and the two ends are priced differently. Collecting the car at the airport inside 09:00 to 17:30 is free on a hire of five days or more and €20 on a hire of under five days. Bringing it back inside those hours is free either way. Outside those hours, in both directions, it is €30, and each end is priced on its own, so an early collection and a late return are two charges rather than one. That window is a fee boundary and not opening hours: the office works 09:00 to 17:00, seven days, and cars are handed over outside the window all the time, at €30, including well after the counter shuts.

The excess, the deposit, the card the booking was made on and what the desk actually asks for are all on the Paphos Airport hire page. That is the page to read before you book, not this one. The €300 excess and what a waiver does and does not cover are explained in full in the excess guide.

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 Paphos and no transport booked from the terminal.
• You are deciding between a taxi and hiring a car for the week.
• You are landing late, or leaving on an early flight, and need to know what still runs.
• If you want the bus, bring cash. Singles, day and night tickets are sold on the bus only.
• If you want a taxi, know your zone before you get in: the fare is fixed by zone, not by the meter.

Route numbers, stop lists, timetables and fares were read from the Pafos Buses route and ticket pages on 3 September 2026, and the year-round statement from its announcements page. The fixed airport taxi fares come from Κ.Δ.Π. 79/2021 in the Official Gazette, published by both the tourism authority and Hermes Airports. The metered urban tariff, quoted here only as the contrast for a town journey, comes from the Road Transport Department and is valid since 1 August 2022. The distances and the receipt entitlement come from the tourism authority's guide to taxi services, published with the Ministry of Transport, Communications and Works. Hermes Airports is the source for the taxi rank and the 24 hour taxi service. The sterling conversion uses the European Central Bank reference rate for 3 September 2026.