European route E6 (, , or simply E6) is the main north–south thoroughfare through Norway as well as the west coast of Sweden. It is long and runs from the southern tip of Sweden at Trelleborg, into Norway and through almost all of the country north to the Arctic Circle. As many travellers who love road trips use E6 to get to Nordkapp, a common misconception is that E6 leads to North Cape, but the route ends in Kirkenes close to the Russian border. To get to North Cape, one has to fork off E6 at Olderfjord and take European route E69, from the mainland through the North Cape Tunnel, onto the island of Magerøya. The Norwegian part of E6 functions as Norway's transport backbone, often being the only continuous paved road, connecting north and south. When E6 gets interrupted, Norway gets cut into two pieces (Norge er delt i to),Norge ble delt i to etter ulykken: Dette er konsekvensene Norway remains cut in two after accident; These are the consequences, NRK, published on 30 October 2024, in Norwegian, retrieved 13 November 2024; Archived version: and detours are often hundreds of kilometers long,Travel chaos after landslide splits Norway in two Forbes, published 30th of August 2025, retrieved 2nd of September 2025; Archived version <= here through Sweden, or along the coast, involving ferry crossings. More examples of frequent closures of E6 can be found below, in the chapter Vulnerable infrastructure, often interrupted.
Route
From south to north, the E6 runs through Trelleborg, Malmö, Helsingborg, Halmstad, Gothenburg, Svinesund in Sweden, before crossing the border at the Svinesund Bridge into Norway. It then passes Halden, Sarpsborg, Moss, Vestby to the capital Oslo. North of this, it passes by Gardermoen, Hamar, Lillehammer, Dombås, Oppdal, Melhus to Trondheim.
Beyond Trondheim, the E6 meets Stjørdalshalsen, Verdalsøra, Steinkjer, Grong, Mosjøen, Mo i Rana, then over the Saltfjellet mountains. It then passes through Rognan, Fauske, and Hamarøy towards Bognes, where there is a ferry crossing over the Tysfjorden to Skarberget. It then runs through on via Narvik, Setermoen, Nordkjosbotn, Skibotn, and Alta to Olderfjord, where European route E69 continues north towards Nordkapp. The E6, meanwhile, turns south towards Lakselv and Karasjok, then runs on the west bank of the Anarjohka, which forms the border with Finland. Beyond the border, it passes through Varangerbotn, and Kirkenes, where the road terminates just east of the town centre.
Between Trelleborg and Kirkenes, there is a more than shorter route using E4 and E75, among the longest detours any European route has. In Finnmark there are several shorter alternative routes to the E6. Moreover, on the stretch from Oslo to Trondheim, following E6 strictly is a detour compared to using Norwegian National Road 3 or Norwegian National Road 4 for their applicable portions of the trip.
Features
The road is a 2+2 lane motorway from outside Trelleborg to Moelv, about . The last Swedish part of the E6 motorway through Bohuslän was completed in 2015. Archived version: Archived version: This motorway is also connected to Central Europe by uninterrupted motorway (via E20). Some stretches further north also have four lanes or motorway standards. The rest of the road is usually wide ordinary road. Some parts in the north of Norway are less than wide, making it very tight when heavy vehicles meet. The northern half of the road, north of Trondheim, is also often fairly curvy, making high speeds a possible safety hazard.
E6 passes over treeless mountain passes in a few places in Norway. In the winter, bad weather and snow storms can cause the road to be temporarily closed, though, unlike many minor roads, it is kept open wherever practical. Because the road is the main artery through the country, cyclists and leisure travellers avoid the southern sections owing to the excessive traffic. In the north, traffic used to be sparse in 2009, Dead weblink; Archived version here: but traffic numbers on E6 may have increased since the number of mobile homes in Europe has doubled, or because road trips and van life are being largely promoted on social media.
Electronic road tolls in Norway
Travellers driving from Svinesund, at the border between Norway and Sweden, to the other end of E6 in Kirkenes, will pass around 32 electronic toll stations on the Norwegian stretch of E6 between Svinesund and Bjerkvik.Bompengekalkulator in Norwegian In English:toll money calculator Retrieved 27th of October 2024. You need to use 'via', or else this website will send you on a shorter and cheaper itinerary through Sweden. Try typing in: from Skee, Sweden, via Oslo, Norway, via Lillehammer, Norway, via Finneidfjord, Norway, to Bjerkvik, Norway. Always check the map! Also pay attention to the price difference with or without Autopass and rush hour or not Without prior registration, the cost of a straight trip from Svinesund to Kirkenes, with a petrol or diesel car weighing less than 3500 kilos, remaining only on E6, was NOK 1072 (about €90,45) with rush hour fares included, by the end of October 2024. The last electronic toll station would be Hålogaland Bridge, between Narvik and Bjerkvik. The number of tolls to pass and pay for will however increase as soon as one drives off the E6, into cities with toll rings, either for sleeping in a hotel or for sightseeing. The number of toll stations one encounters on E6 can decrease when road projects have been paid for and toll stations are abandoned. The number of toll stations can also go up in the future if new roads need to be financed. As of October 2024, there are no electronic road tolls on E6 in Finnmark.
The Norwegian system of electronic tolls is based on the assumption that every road user has a credit card and a smartphone to register their vehicle at www.Autopass.no, a website owned by the Norwegian national road administration. There is no place or way to pay for your tolls with cash.How to pay toll in Norway Ferde, retrieved 3rd of July 2024; Archived version: If the tolls aren't paid by registering the vehicle online, a bill with a higher price will be sent to the vehicle owner's address. It is also not possible to evade toll sections by taking smaller parallel roads. Quite a lot of foreign visitors to Norway do not understand how roads that are not motorways can even be toll roads.Road toll system baffles visitors News in English, published 16th of July 2012, retrieved 3rd of July 2024; Archived version: Others are complaining that the Norwegian road toll system works like a trap, because the amount of road toll in cities like Oslo and Trondheim tends to depend on multiple factors, like time of travelling and emission category of the vehicle, making it impossible to predict the exact price of a road trip from the Swedish border at Svinesund till Nordkapp (North Cape). Most toll calculation apps, tools, or websites will not allow you to set out a road trip that keeps you driving on E6 all along the way.
Electric cars have large discounts on tolls, but it can be fairly hard to obtain this discount with a foreign electric car. Scammers have been reported to jump on the bandwagon, by sending fake toll bills, to obtain credit card information.The Toll Road Scam: Unmasking a Growing Threat Johnathon Horner, on LinkedIn, published 21st of April 2024, retrieved 3rd of July 2024; Archived version: Increasing road tolls were also the reason for a large protest in several cities in Norway in 2018 and 2019.Road toll uproar rolled into Oslo News in English, published 6th of September 2018, retrieved 3rd of July 2024; Archived version: Norwegian authorities refuse to comment on the number of fines for unpaid tolls that they cannot collect. Public broadcaster NRK investigated and has written a long news article, in which they estimate that Norway has missed out on about 90 million Kroner (about 7,58 million Euros) between May 2021 and December 2023, because tourists have not paid their electronic road tolls.Turister betaler ikke bompenger - Norge går glipp av millioner Tourists don't pay tolls - Norway missing out on millions, NRK, published 19th of May 2024, in Norwegian, retrieved 28th of October 2024; Archived version: Norway cannot force drivers with foreign registered cars to pay, as long as Liechtenstein has not ratified EETS (European Electronic Toll Service), a European regulation on tolls. NRK spoke with angry locals who were contemplating on closing roads popular with tourists. NRK also spoke with Germans who had not registered their camper van, because they were told that they would get a letter with a payment request sent home into their mailbox. Norway was trying to strike deals on enforcing payment of road tolls with individual countries, to compensate for the missing EETS regulation.
History and future plans This road was called E6 in the old "E" road system before 1975 and previously it continued to Rome (introduced in Sweden in 1962 and Norway in 1965). However, before 1969 E6 went only to Stjørdal near Trondheim and 1969 – 1983 to Nordkjosbotn near Tromsø. The road was considered in too bad condition to be E-routes further north until it got upgraded. Parts were gravel roads. The non-E-route sections were called National Route 6 from 1965.
The northern part of E6 was first opened in 1924, when the Innlandsvegen (Inland road, in English) between Grong and Mosjøen was opened to traffic. An engineer responsible for building the Innlandsvegen wrote in his daily report of 3 February 1916 that he expected little traffic on the new road. A news report published by NRK shows that the opening ceremony picture, taken on 6 August 1924, was recreated 100 years later, after the opening of two new sections of road, between Fjerdingen and Grøndalselv and between the Trøndelag district border and the lake Lille Majavatn, with a similar picture taken on 18 October 2024.Den strakeste veien er 100 år. Feiret med nye 90-soner Straightest road in 100 years, celebrated with 2 new 90 km/h-zones, NRK, published 19 October 2024, in Norwegian, retrieved 27 October 2024; Archived version: The speed limit on these 2 new straightened parts of E6 has been raised from 80 to 90 kilometres per hour (56 miles per hour). E6 was numbered RV50 between Oslo and Kirkenes in 1931, to tie the north and south of Norway more closely together, even though many road sections were still missing links. In 1991 a gate was built at the county border at Namsskogan Municipality, Nordlandsporten, to welcome travellers on E6 into northern Norway. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration, Statens Vegvesen, started the Helgelands project in 2009, a project to modernise E6 and make the road wider and safer between the county border and Saltfjellet. This project is expected to be ready by the end of 2025.
The E6 road was given the number E47 (but not signposted) in the new system on most of the Scandinavian part (Helsingborg–Olderfjord), and E6 only for the northernmost (from Olderfjord in Finnmark). After a political negotiation, the whole part passing through Scandinavia was given the number E6 in the new system, introduced in Scandinavia in 1992. The part Trelleborg-Helsingborg was never intended to be part of E47. E47 connects to E4 at the Helsingør-Helsingborg ferry, and E4 and E6 connect just outside Helsingborg.
The E6 became a 4-lane motorway all the way from Trelleborg to Kolomoen (near Hamar) in 2015, although the road is sometimes wider. The new Svinesund Bridge opened in 2005, replacing an earlier and narrower bridge from 1946. The oldest 4-lane motorway along E6 is Gothenburg-Kungälv from 1958, meaning the motorway construction through Sweden took 57 years.
Between 2012 and 2018, the road was shortened by between Narvik and Alta, by building the Hålogaland Bridge and more bridges and tunnels.