Driving Iceland's Ring Road: The Complete Guide

Route 1 is 1,332km of two-lane road around the edge of Iceland, and it passes within a short drive of the glacier lagoon, the south coast waterfalls, the eastern fjords, the geothermal ground at Myvatn and the whale towns of the north. It is not a difficult drive. The tarmac is continuous, the traffic is light, and the signage is unambiguous.

The difficulty is the weather, and the second difficulty is underestimating how long the good stops take. Both of those are planning problems rather than driving problems, which is why this guide spends more time on days and forecasts than on cornering.

How many days you need

Eight days is the honest minimum. Ten is comfortable. Anything less turns into six hours of driving a day with photograph stops in between, which is a way of seeing Iceland through a windscreen.

The reason the number is high for a loop this size is that the distances between the things you want to see are not evenly spread. The south coast has four major stops in 200km. The east has almost nothing for 250km and then has everything at once. A day that looks like three hours of driving becomes seven because you stopped four times, and each stop involved a car park, a path, and twenty minutes longer than you meant to spend.

A realistic distribution:

• Days 1–2: south coast, Reykjavik to Vik
• Days 3–4: glacier country and the East Fjords
• Days 5–6: Myvatn, Husavik and Akureyri
• Days 7–8: Snaefellsnes and back to Reykjavik
• Days 9–10: slack for weather, plus the Golden Circle or the Westfjords

Build in at least one spare day. You will use it, and the people who do not build one are the people who end up driving nine hours in poor visibility to make a flight.

Which direction to drive

Most people go anticlockwise, starting with the south coast, and there is a reasonable argument for it: the south has the highest density of famous stops, so you front-load the trip while you are still fresh and while the rental car still feels novel.

The argument for clockwise is quieter and, in high summer, better. Going north first means you reach the south coast at the end, by which time the coaches that run out of Reykjavik each morning are behind you rather than in front of you. It also means the East Fjords — the emptiest and most underrated stretch — arrive on day five rather than day three, when you are more inclined to slow down for them.

Neither is wrong. What matters more is that you do not plan to reverse direction partway through to chase weather, because the loop is long enough that backtracking costs a full day.

Summer or winter

These are two different trips wearing the same name, and choosing between them is the single biggest decision on this page.

Summer, roughly June to August, gives you near-permanent daylight, all mountain roads open, puffins on the cliffs and every guesthouse operating. Driving after nine in the evening is genuinely pleasant, and it is the only season in which the whole loop is comfortably achievable in eight days. It also gives you the crowds and the highest prices of the year, and accommodation in the east and north sells out months ahead because there simply are not many beds.

Winter, roughly November to March, gives you Northern Lights, ice caves under Vatnajokull, and a landscape that looks nothing like the summer photographs. It takes away daylight — four to five usable hours in December — reliability, and any guarantee that you will complete the loop at all. Storms close roads for a day or two at a time, and they do so with a few hours of notice.

The shoulder months are the compromise most experienced visitors quietly prefer. Late April, May, September and early October give you long-enough days, open roads, thinner crowds and a real chance of aurora at either end of the season.

What it costs

Iceland is expensive and the landscape is the free part. Rough per-person daily figures for two people sharing, which is the arrangement most of these numbers assume:

• Small 4x4 rental with insurance: EUR 90–140 per day
• Fuel: EUR 35–50 per day at typical distances
• Guesthouse double: EUR 90–160 per person
• Food, cooking most meals: EUR 25–35 per person
• One guided activity (glacier walk, ice cave, whale watching): EUR 90–180

Two habits cut the food line substantially. The supermarket chains Bonus and Kronan are dramatically cheaper than roadside cafes, so buy a cool box on day one and stock up in Reykjavik or Selfoss before you leave the capital region. And most guesthouses have a shared kitchen, which is worth asking about at booking rather than assuming.

The activity line is the one to think about rather than trim. A glacier walk or an ice cave is the sort of thing you cannot do casually and cannot do at all without a guide, and it tends to be what people remember.

The stops that justify a slow day

1. Seljalandsfoss and Skogafoss — the south coast's two headline waterfalls, 30km apart. You can walk behind the first one, and you will get wet doing it.
2. Reynisfjara — black sand and basalt columns. The sneaker waves here kill people almost every year. Stay well back from the water; there is no safe distance marked and the ocean does not warn you.
3. Skaftafell — a hiking base with the Svartifoss trail and glacier tongues coming down almost to the car park.
4. Jokulsarlon and Diamond Beach — icebergs calved from Breidamerkurjokull drifting through a lagoon to the sea, then washing back onto black sand on the far side of the road.
5. The East Fjords — the quietest and most underrated stretch of the whole loop, a sequence of long inlets with a village at the head of each.
6. Myvatn — pseudocraters, lava formations, steam vents and nature baths without the famous lagoon's queue.
7. Snaefellsnes — a peninsula that condenses most Icelandic landscapes into a single day, which is why it is the standard recommendation for anyone who does not have time for the full loop.

Rental car mistakes

Almost every expensive problem on this trip is a car problem, and almost all of them are avoidable at the booking stage.

• Not taking gravel protection and sand-and-ash insurance. Both are standard exclusions on basic policies and both are common claims. Windscreen chips from passing traffic on gravel sections are routine.
• Booking a 2WD in winter. Get a 4x4 with proper winter tyres, which are a legal requirement in the cold months.
• Assuming F-roads are included. Highland roads require a specific vehicle class, are prohibited to ordinary rentals regardless of how capable the car looks, and are closed until late June or later.
• Opening the door into the wind. Hold it. Every rental agent will tell you this and they are not joking; a door bent past its hinge stop is not covered by anything.
• Fuelling casually. Many rural stations are unstaffed and card-only, and some require a PIN rather than a signature. Do not let the tank drop below a quarter in the east or the north.

Where to sleep

Guesthouses and farm stays outnumber hotels outside Reykjavik and are usually better — cheaper, warmer, and run by people who will tell you which road is about to close. In July, book everything ahead. There is a genuine shortage of rooms in the east and north, and arriving in Egilsstadir at eight in the evening hoping for a bed is a plan that fails.

Campsites are plentiful and cheap. Wild camping in a vehicle is illegal outside designated sites, and the rule is enforced.

For the loop itself, spacing your bases so that no single driving day exceeds four hours is a better constraint than trying to distribute them evenly around the circle.

The best day we had was the one we spent stuck in Hofn because the road east was closed. Iceland does that: it takes the plan away and hands you something better.

If you do not have eight days

Do not attempt the loop. A shortened ring road becomes a driving holiday, and the parts you skim are the parts that would have justified the trip.

With four or five days, the better structure is a base-and-radiate one: the south coast out to Jokulsarlon and back, or Snaefellsnes with the Golden Circle. You will see less of the map and considerably more of Iceland.

For the aurora specifically — which forecasts matter, and why cloud beats geomagnetic activity every time — see chasing the Northern Lights without wasting your week. For what to wear in the cold months, what to pack for Iceland in winter. For the country overview, the Iceland destination guide.