🚗 A Year From Entry: What to Know About Driving Licences in Georgia

Here's how it usually plays out. Someone arrives in Georgia, drives a rental car on their own licence, everything's fine. A year goes by and they don't give it a second thought, since the licence itself is good for another eight years. Then comes a traffic stop, and it turns out they've technically been driving without a valid licence in Georgia this whole time.

Here's when your own licence is enough, when it stops being enough, and what exchanging it for a Georgian one actually looks like if you're staying.

📅 How long your foreign licence lasts

If you're here for a week or a month, none of this applies to you. Your own licence is enough, no extra paperwork needed.

The complications start for people who stay. A foreign licence is valid in Georgia for one year from the date you entered the country. Not a year from when the licence was issued, not until its own expiry date, but exactly one year from the day you crossed the border.

Here's a concrete example. You entered on 1 March 2025, and your licence back home is good until 2031. In Georgia, it works until 1 March 2026, and after that you need a Georgian licence to drive.

This is exactly where people get caught out. The licence itself is perfectly fine, it's just that this particular country stopped recognising it.

What happens if you keep driving after that. Technically it's an administrative offence, with everything that comes with one. We've covered the actual fine amounts separately in traffic violation fines in Georgia.

One small detail people miss: if you leave the country and come back, the clock resets from your most recent entry. For anyone already doing visa runs to renew their visa-free stay, this sometimes solves the problem on its own.

🔄 The exchange: the good news

This is one area where Georgia is friendlier than a lot of countries.

No exam required. Neither theory nor practical, as long as your documents meet the requirements. Your licence simply gets swapped for a Georgian one.

Country of issue doesn't matter. There's no restriction; you can exchange a licence from any country. That's unusual: in many places, exam-free exchange only works for a specific list of countries.

Categories and driving history carry over. Based on what people who've gone through the process report, whatever was on your old licence shows up on the new one.

One catch worth preparing for. Your foreign licence gets taken away. It stays in the government archive and isn't handed back. So after the exchange, you'll only have the Georgian licence, and if you were counting on holding both, you'll want to rethink that.

How long a Georgian licence lasts. For categories AM, A, B, BE, T, S and subcategories A1, A2, B1, it's fifteen years. For heavy vehicle and bus categories C, CE, D, DE, and trams, five years.

Fifteen years is, incidentally, one reason people go through with the exchange even without any pressing need to.

💰 What it costs

Being upfront: precise, current figures for this process are thin on the ground. The most detailed account I found is one person's experience in Batumi, and it's nearly two years old now. Treat it as a rough order of magnitude, not a price list.

The exchange itself at the office costs next to nothing, somewhere around fifteen lari, and takes under an hour.

Most of the cost is in the paperwork. Notarised translations of three documents, your passport, your licence, and the certificate, together run somewhere around 150 lari. The certificate from your home country may be free if you request it electronically.

The Form 100 medical certificate is billed separately at whatever the clinic charges.

Bottom line. The process itself is cheap. Time is the real cost here, not money, and most of it goes into waiting for the certificate from home.

🎓 What if you don't have a licence at all

That's a different story entirely, and it's worth not confusing it with the exchange.

Getting a Georgian licence from scratch requires proof of residency: either a residence permit or documentation showing you spent at least 185 days in Georgia during the calendar year before the exam. Without that, you simply won't be admitted to sit it.

The exam itself covers theory and practical, and here's the nice part, every stage is available in Russian.

There's an exception for staff at accredited diplomatic missions, who don't need to prove their length of stay.

How to choose a driving school and what to expect from lessons is covered in choosing a driving school in Georgia. Contact details are in the directory: driving schools in Tbilisi and driving schools in Batumi.

🚙 What car rental companies ask for

Briefly, since we've covered rentals separately.

For a tourist it's simple: your own licence is enough, rental companies usually don't ask for an international permit, though it doesn't hurt to carry one. That's it, plus a passport and a card for the deposit.

If you've been living in Georgia for over a year, keep the one-year rule in mind: a rental company might not check your entry date, but a traffic officer at a checkpoint will.

Details on deposits, insurance and the fine print are covered in renting a car in Georgia and transfer versus rental.

Exchanged your licence in Georgia? Leave a review on Madloba: tell us which city, how long it took, what documents they asked for, and whether anything caught you off guard. Real experience on this topic is thin online, and it's worth more than any set of instructions.

Information is current as of September 2026 and is provided for general guidance. Georgia's Ministry of Internal Affairs updates document requirements, deadlines and fees from time to time. The cost estimates here are based on experience described in open sources and may be out of date. Confirm current requirements with the Ministry's service agency or in person before submitting documents.