There is no Uber in Belgrade, you do not need one, and you do not need a travel card either — city public transport here is free to ride. Those two facts together are the whole answer, and they are both the sort of thing a two-year-old guide gets wrong, so here is the current position and what it actually changes about your month.
The transport decision in this city is no longer a money decision. It is a time decision, which is a much better problem to have and a completely different one to plan around.
Checked on 9 October 2026.
The fare is nothing, and that is recent
Belgrade abolished fares on city public transport from 1 January 2025, making it free to ride for all passengers — the European Commission’s Urban Mobility Observatory reported it on 7 January 2025 as the largest European city to do so. The card system that preceded it, BusPlus, had already been scrapped before that, which is why you will still find guides, forum posts and even signage referring to a card you cannot buy and do not need.
So, practically: you board a bus, tram or trolleybus and you sit down. There is nothing to buy, nothing to validate, nothing to top up and no card to apply for as a foreigner — which means this is one of the very few things in this city that asks nothing of your paperwork. If you have just arrived and you are assembling a folder for everything else, enjoy the one exception.
Two caveats, and I would check both rather than assume.
Not every line in the wider network is reported as fare-free. Some suburban and special services are listed as still charging, with tickets bought on board. If your daily commute runs outside the city proper, confirm it with the operator for your line rather than taking a blog’s word for it — including mine.
This is a city policy, not a law of nature. It was introduced by a decision and it can be changed by one. If you are reading this long after the date above, check that it still holds before you plan a month around it.
What runs, and which of it you will actually use
The city network is buses, trams and trolleybuses, operated by GSP Beograd alongside private operators on contracted lines, plus the BG Voz city rail.
Buses are the network. They go everywhere, they are frequent on the main corridors, and they are the default. They are also the thing most affected by traffic, which is the real constraint in this city.
Trams matter more than their route map suggests, because several of them run along the river and across the bridges on their own alignment, which means they are not sitting in the traffic that the buses are. If a tram goes where you are going, take the tram.
Trolleybuses serve the corridors out of the centre towards the south-east. Useful if you live on one, invisible if you do not.
BG Voz, the city rail, is the one locals use and arrivals overlook. For a few specific journeys — the long axis across the city, and out towards Zemun and Batajnica — it is dramatically faster than the road, because it does not share the road.
The metro is under construction and is not a thing you can plan around. Work is ongoing and has been for some years. Do not let a line on a future map influence where you sign a lease; by the time it matters, your lease will have ended twice. The neighbourhood decision as arithmetic is the right frame for that, and the metro is not a term in it yet.
There is no Uber in Belgrade. Here is what people actually use
Uber does not operate in Serbia. Neither the app nor the arrangement exists here, and this is a regulatory position rather than a gap in the market — the passenger transport law here does not accommodate the model, and ride-hailing in Serbia has had a contested legal history that is still not fully settled. The practical consequence for you is simple: do not arrive expecting to open the app you use at home.
What exists instead is taxis, ordered through an app or by phone, which in daily use feels much the same as the thing you are used to. There are local apps for ordering a licensed taxi and the larger taxi companies have their own, and a locally-developed ride service has operated here for years through its own app. Ask a colleague which one people around you currently use rather than taking a list from a blog post; the apps come and go and the answer changes.
The behaviour of the system is where the useful knowledge is, and it has not changed in years:
Order one rather than hailing one. A taxi ordered by app or phone is a metered taxi at the normal tariff. A taxi you flag down outside a tourist attraction or a station may not be, and the difference is not small. This is the single most common way visitors here overpay, and it is entirely avoidable.
At the airport, use the taxi desk. Arrivals has a desk that issues a slip for your destination zone at a set price for that zone, and you give the slip to the driver in the rank. Take the slip. Accepting an offer from someone approaching you inside the terminal is how people pay several times the fare, and the person approaching you is not doing so because the desk was busy.
The meter should be running and the receipt is yours to ask for. Both are normal requests. If the meter is not on, that is the moment to mention it rather than the end of the journey.
I am not quoting fares. Tariffs are set and they change, the airport zone prices are published at the desk you are standing at, and a number remembered from a guide is worse than no number.
What this does to a monthly budget
The interesting consequence of a free network is that the transport line in your monthly budget is now almost entirely discretionary — it is taxis, and taxis are a convenience you choose, not a cost you incur.
For most people living inside the city and working in it, a realistic month is: zero on public transport, and whatever you decide to spend on taxis late at night or when you are carrying something. That is a materially different budget from most European capitals and it is one of the genuine financial advantages of being here, alongside the ones in the itemised month.
It also changes the neighbourhood arithmetic, and it changes it in one direction: the rent premium for being central can no longer be justified as a saving on transport, because there is no transport cost to save. What a central flat buys you is time and the ability to walk, which are real but which you should price as such rather than as a transport saving. The cheaper flat forty minutes out costs you forty minutes, not money.
The car, and when it stops being worth its parking
Here is the verdict, and the arithmetic behind it is short because the fare side of it is now zero.
If you live and work in the city and your trips are within it, do not keep a car. The running cost is not the fuel. It is the parking — the central zones are paid, enforced and administered by SMS, residential permits are tied to your registered address, and a flat with a dedicated space is a meaningfully more expensive flat. Add insurance, the annual registration and the technical inspection, and you are paying a monthly amount for something that competes with a network that charges nothing and a taxi fleet you can summon in minutes.
The car earns its keep on the trips the network does not serve. Weekends out of the city, the mountains, a village, the border runs, furniture, a dog, small children with equipment. If your life contains several of those a month, keep the car. If it contains one of those a quarter, rent one for the weekend and let someone else own it.
The threshold, stated plainly: if you are not making at least one journey a week that genuinely needs a car, the car is costing you money and parking stress for the convenience of a handful of trips a year. That is the call, and it is a rare case on this site where the cheap answer and the easy answer agree.
Two things to check before you decide, if you are bringing a car rather than buying one: how long you may drive on your existing licence and registration before either has to be converted, and what the insurance position is. Both are foreigner-specific rules rather than general ones, both are published by the authority that sets them, and both are exactly the kind of thing where the citizen’s answer and yours differ — so get the current rule from the source rather than from a forum, in the week you need it.
The short version
Public transport costs nothing, so ride it. There is no Uber, so order a taxi by app and use the desk at the airport. Take the tram or the city rail where one goes your way, because they are not in the traffic. And unless your weeks genuinely contain a car-shaped journey, do not keep a car in this city — the fare you are saving by driving is zero.