Paphos to Limassol: the bus, a taxi, the drive, and where to hire the car

TL;DR

Paphos to Limassol Paphos to Limassol is a 62 to 79 km journey along Cyprus's A6 motorway, depending which part of Paphos you start in. Driving takes about an hour with a clear road. The licensed intercity bus takes 1 hour 15 minutes and costs EUR 5 one way. A taxi from Paphos Airport is a fixed statutory fare.

• Road distance is 61.6 km from Paphos Airport and 68.4 km from the town centre, both to central Limassol. Free-flow drive time is about 58 minutes either way.
• Intercity bus: EUR 5 one way, EUR 9 return, 1h15, about twenty weekday departures each way. Cash only on board.
• There IS a bus from Paphos Airport to Limassol. It is a separate airport shuttle, EUR 10 for an adult and EUR 5 for a child, and its timetable is different on every day of the week.
• Taxi from Paphos Airport to Limassol: a fixed EUR 60 by day and EUR 70 at night for up to four, luggage and VAT included. From Paphos town there is no fixed fare, because the instrument only covers hires to and from the airports.
• Hiring a car: Paphos is cheaper from three days and by EUR 390 over a month. Limassol is cheaper for the Nissan Note, the one model on both cards, from fifteen days. If you need five seats Limassol is cheaper at every length, because the Paphos card carries no five-seat car. Limassol will not hire for one day at all.
• There is no one-way. A car collected in Paphos comes back to Paphos, and a wrong-location return is charged from EUR 300.

Four ways, and they are separated by about EUR 55 rather than by convenience. The bus is EUR 5 and takes 1h15. The airport shuttle is EUR 10 and only runs from the airport. A taxi from the airport is a fixed EUR 60. Driving takes about an hour on the A6, which is the only road involved.

The thing worth knowing before you compare any of these: there is exactly one road, the A6, and everything above uses it. So the differences are cost, where you start, where you are dropped and whether you have a car at the far end. They are not differences in the route.

Two of the options are not interchangeable in the way the search results imply. The airport shuttle does not call anywhere in Paphos town, and the intercity bus does not call at Paphos Airport. Whichever one you want, the other is no help at all.

On the two price cards dated 26 August 2026, Paphos is cheaper for the cheapest car at every hire length: EUR 15 less over three days and EUR 390 less over a month. Limassol is cheaper for the Nissan Note, the one model on both cards, from fifteen days, by EUR 300 over thirty. And Limassol will not hire a car for less than two days at all.

This is the one question on this page that no aggregator can answer, and the reason is structural rather than clever. Rents in Cyprus runs two separate price lists. The Paphos fleet is priced on a seven-rung ladder by the length of the hire. The Limassol fleet is thirteen different cars on four bands. Neither list contains the other's vehicles. So the answer is not a discount or a preference, it is arithmetic across two cards, and it goes different ways depending on what you actually want.

Start with the simplest version of the question: what does the cheapest car in each town cost? These are not the same car, and the table says so rather than burying it: in Paphos the cheapest is a four-seat Nissan March, and in Limassol it is the five-seat Economy class. Compare them as the cheapest thing each town offers, which is what a reader picking a town is actually choosing between.

• Seven seats: the Paphos Serena is cheaper at every length until the two cards meet at EUR 75 a day from twenty-two days.
• The optional damage waiver is EUR 15 a day with a EUR 300 excess, and it is identical on both cards. None of the figures above includes it. The full ladder for both towns, at eight hire lengths with the waiver and the fuel worked in, is on what car hire actually costs in Cyprus.
• Everything else is the same in both towns: no cash deposit with a valid credit card, unlimited mileage from five days, fuel full to full, and the same driver requirements.
• Handover fees are not the same. In the Paphos area a delivery outside 09:00 to 17:30 is EUR 30, and a Paphos Airport collection is EUR 20 on a hire of under five days. Limassol carries none of that.
• The full fleet and the current rates for each town are on the Paphos car hire page and the Limassol car hire page.

One day is not a rounding difference. A Limassol car is not hired for less than two days at all, and a day here means 24 hours rather than a date on a calendar, so an overnight collected at ten on Monday and returned at ten on Tuesday is one day and is not enough.

Yes to both, and they are two different companies with two different fares. The intercity bus runs town to town, EUR 5 one way, about twenty times on a weekday. A separate airport shuttle runs Paphos Airport to Limassol five to seven times a day, EUR 10, and its timetable changes with the day of the week.

The intercity route is run by Ypersastika Leoforia Kyprou, the licensed intercity operator. It leaves Paphos from the New Terminal Pervola, known as Karavella, and it publishes about twenty departures on a weekday and fourteen at a weekend or on a public holiday. Coming the other way it leaves Limassol from the New Port and publishes twenty on a weekday and thirteen at weekends. The operator prints the journey as 1 hour 15 minutes approximately, and prints that it reserves the right to change any schedule.

Three of the departures in the Paphos column are marked as Larnaca services calling at Limassol on the way, which is worth knowing only because it explains why aggregators quote departure counts that do not match the operator's own page.

• First and last intercity departure on a weekday: Paphos to Limassol runs 05:45 to 20:00, and Limassol to Paphos runs 06:00 to 21:00. At a weekend or on a public holiday both directions run 08:00 to 19:30, so the last bus back is an hour and a half earlier than on a weekday.
• The 05:45 and 20:00 from Paphos are the Larnaca services calling at Limassol on the way, which is why they sit in the same column. They still do this journey.
• Departures from Paphos Airport on the shuttle, by day: Monday 7, Tuesday 7, Wednesday 6, Thursday 7, Friday 7, Saturday 5, Sunday 6.
• Every day of the week has its own times. Monday's first departure from Limassol is 07:15 and Tuesday's is 03:45, so a timetable you were given for one day tells you nothing about the next.
• Saturday is the thinnest day in both directions, at five departures.
• The same document sells a Larnaca Airport to Paphos Airport connection at EUR 15 per person.
• The journey time is not printed anywhere on it. The 55 minutes that third-party pages give is theirs, not the operator's.

If you have seen a lower number, you have probably seen the operator's own older page. Its route page prints EUR 5; its ticket-policy page is titled for April 2024 and still prints EUR 4; and the link the route page gives for the current policy returns a 404. That single broken link is why the published answers run from EUR 4 to EUR 7 across the first page of results, and none of them carries a date.

The airport service is a different thing entirely. It is run by the Limassol urban bus company, it goes from Paphos Airport to the Agios Georgios Havouzas station in Limassol, and it costs EUR 10 for an adult and EUR 5 for a child aged three to twelve. The document is marked valid as of 1 July 2026.

From Paphos Airport it is a fixed EUR 60 by day and EUR 70 at night for up to four people, set by statutory notice and not by a meter. From Paphos town there is no fixed fare at all, because the instrument only covers hires to and from the airports. Which of the two you are asking about changes the answer completely, and almost nothing published says which it means.

The fixed fares come from K.D.P. 79/2021, published in the Official Gazette as Ε.Ε. Παρ. ΙΙΙ(Ι), Αρ. 5463 of 19 February 2021 and in force since 1 March 2021. It is made under the Road Transport Regulation Laws 1982 to 2019 and it sets fixed fares for hires made, in its own words, from and to the airports. The Road Transport Department still carries it as current.

Two things follow that are worth more than the number itself. Luggage is included, so there is no per-bag charge on an airport run, and the fare does not rise on a public holiday. Both are the opposite of the metered town tariff, which does charge for bags.

And because the instrument covers hires to and from the airports, the fare is the same in both directions. A taxi from Limassol to Paphos Airport is also EUR 60 by day.

From Paphos town the honest answer is that no fixed figure exists. That journey falls under the metered urban tariff instead, which the Road Transport Department set on 1 August 2022: EUR 3.80 to start plus EUR 0.95 a kilometre by day, EUR 4.80 plus EUR 1.10 at night, and EUR 1.40 for each piece of luggage. On a journey this long the meter is the fare, and the department publishes no fixed figure for it.

Published quotes I found for the town leg on 5 September 2026 ranged from EUR 50 to EUR 100, and a Hebrew-language guide gave EUR 90 while a Russian-language one gave a supposedly official EUR 46.27 that matches no row of the airport instrument. Treat all of those as undated observations, because that is what they are.

Between 62 and 79 km, and the range is not sloppiness. Paphos Airport to central Limassol is 61.6 km. Paphos town centre is 68.4 km. Coral Bay is 78.9 km. All three are honestly called Paphos to Limassol, and the published figures disagree because nobody says which one they mean.

The single most useful line in that table is the first two rows together. The airport is about seven kilometres closer to Limassol than the town is, and the drive takes the same 58 minutes. From the airport you are on the motorway almost at once; from the town you spend the first few kilometres on urban road. Distance and time do not move together on this route, which is why quoting one as a proxy for the other gives the wrong answer.

You will see 58 km published as the distance. That is close to the length of the A6 itself, not to a journey between two places, and it quietly assumes you start and finish at a motorway junction. Sixty-five is a common figure too. Neither is wrong so much as unlabelled.

Straight-line distance is about a fifth shorter than the road in every pair I measured, so a flying distance quoted as a driving distance will understate this journey by roughly twelve kilometres.

Easy. It is two lanes each way for the whole distance, dual carriageway, no towns to drive through and no turns to remember. The only thing that asks anything of you is the Limassol end, and the only thing that genuinely catches people out is which Limassol they have told the satnav.

The A6 runs the entire way. It opened in 2006 and it passes through the Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area on its way, which is unremarkable to drive but does mean two tunnels near the eastern end. There are very few services along it, which matters more than it sounds.

Limassol is where the character changes. The motorway skirts the city rather than bypassing it properly, so traffic joins and leaves over a few kilometres and the junctions arrive faster than anywhere else on the route. That is also where the journey gains whatever variance it has.

I will not write the rules from memory. Speed limits, what the left lane is for, the drink-drive limit and what going over costs are all set out with their sources on driving in Cyprus.

The trap is the destination, not the road. Limassol New Port, the old town and the Agios Georgios Havouzas station are three different places several kilometres apart, and the bus timetables use all three. If someone tells you the bus goes to Limassol, ask which part, because a stop eight kilometres from your hotel at the end of a EUR 5 journey is how a cheap trip turns into a taxi fare.

More people search for Limassol to Paphos than the other way round, and the transport answers mirror exactly: the same bus at EUR 5, the same statutory EUR 60 from the airport, the same road. What does not mirror is the hire car. There is no one-way. A car collected in Paphos goes back to Paphos, and a return to the wrong place is charged from EUR 300.

Take the transport first, because it is genuinely symmetrical. The intercity bus publishes twenty weekday departures from Limassol New Port and thirteen at weekends. The airport shuttle runs the same five to seven times a day back to Paphos Airport, on the same day-by-day timetable. And because the taxi instrument covers hires both to and from the airports, Limassol to Paphos Airport is the same fixed EUR 60 by day and EUR 70 at night.

The hire car is where the symmetry stops, and this is the part worth reading twice. Rents in Cyprus has counters at both ends of this road: four handover points around Paphos and an office in Limassol. That naturally reads as a company you can drive between and drop the car off at either end. You cannot. Returns are same-town only, there is no one-way between the two towns, and a wrong-location return is charged from EUR 300.

The planning consequence is simple. If the trip is Paphos, then Limassol, then home from Paphos Airport, hire in Paphos and keep the car. If the trip ends in Limassol, either hire in Limassol for the Limassol part and use the bus or a taxi for the transfer, or accept that you are driving back to collect your own return.

If Limassol is a waypoint rather than the destination, the same constraint applies across the island. Carrying on east is covered in Paphos to Ayia Napa, and arriving from the other airport is covered in Larnaca to Paphos.

Four points around Paphos, and one office in Limassol at Andrea Zaimi 11a. Cars in both towns. The buggies and the scooter are Paphos machines and are not hired in Limassol at all.

• Paphos: the office at Griva Digeni 55 in Chlorakas, Paphos Airport, Coral Bay, and Kato Paphos.
• Limassol: the office at Andrea Zaimi 11a, delivery to a hotel or a villa at no charge and at any hire length, or a meet-and-greet at a spot agreed when you book.
• Paphos Airport is the only airport where anyone is met off a flight, and that is free on a hire of five days or more.
• Cars only in Limassol. No buggy, no quad, no scooter there. Those are Paphos machines.
• Nothing is held until it is confirmed with you, and there is no prepayment. You pay at pick-up.

If you want the car for the Paphos end of a trip, the fleet and the current rates are on the Paphos page. If you are based in Limassol, that is a different card and a different fleet, and it has its own page.

Before you set off

Six things that change the answer, and every one of them is settled before you leave rather than at the kerb.

• Decide which Limassol you want. The bus terminus, the New Port and the town centre are three different places several kilometres apart.
• If you are taking the airport shuttle, check the day. Its timetable is not the same on any two days of the week, and Saturday is the thinnest.
• If you are taking the intercity bus, carry cash. The driver sells a one-way ticket and takes nothing else.
• If you are taking a taxi from the airport, know the fixed fare before you get in, and know that it covers your luggage.
• If you are hiring a car, decide the length of the hire first. It moves the price more than the town does.
• If you are hiring, check where the car has to go back. It is not wherever you finish.

Every fare, timetable and distance on this page was read on 5 September 2026, and the source sits at the claim rather than in a list here.