The Iceland Camping Card, and whether it pays

The rate above is the median of the 8 participating campsites that publish a current-season adult rate on tjalda.is. The other 22 publish none, so we are not going to pretend to a country-wide average — the sum above is the one you can check, site by site, in the table below.

What the card does not cover. The pitch, and that is it. Showers, electricity and laundry are charged as usual, and the lodging tax — 400 ISK per unit per night at the sites that publish it — is due whether you hold a card or not. It appears on neither side of the break-even sum for exactly that reason. Two adults in one campervan paying the tax on 10 nights owe 4,000 ISK with or without the card.

The shape of the trip matters more than the arithmetic. There is no participating campsite in Reykjavík and none in the highlands, and the roster leans north and west — Vesturland 4, Vestfirðir 6, Norðurland 9, Austurland 4, Suðurland 7. A week on the South Coast and the Golden Circle passes 7 of them. A three-week lap of the Ring Road with a Westfjords detour passes most of the list.

The participating list is Útilegukortið’s own, read on 2026-07-28. It is a snapshot with a date on it, not a live feed: the operator warns on its order page that the roster can still change into May, so check the source before you buy. Seasons and rates in the last three columns come from the campsites themselves via tjalda.is — 24 of the 30 publish a season, and a dash under ISK means nothing is published, not that the site is free.

A few names differ between the two sources and both are shown, because they are the same ground under two labels — the card calls Kirkjubæjarklaustur’s site “Kleifarmörk” where tjalda calls it Kleifar. One match is worth naming because it is the kind that goes wrong: the card’s Grettislaug á Reykhólum is the campsite at Reykhólar on Breiðafjörður, not the Grettislaug at Reykir in Skagafjörður 200 km away, which is a different place with a similar name and its own page.

What the campsites themselves say about the card

Almost nothing. Of the 170 campsites in our data carrying a cited tjalda.is fact bundle, exactly six mention the Camping Card in their own text:

• vid-faxa — accepts. “Camping card applies for this campsite.”
• bolungarvik — accepts. “The Icelandic Camping Card is accepted.”
• hladir — accepts. “Accepted; pay at the swimming pool reception.”
• studlagil — accepts. “Sells and accepts the card.”
• sandgerdi — accepts. “Accepted for a 100 ISK fee, except during the town festival.”
• borgarnes — does NOT accept. “States the card is NOT accepted.”

Five accept and Borgarnes states in as many words that it does not — and Borgarnes is indeed absent from the operator’s roster, which is a small but useful check that the two sources agree. Six mentions out of 315campsites is why this page is built on the card operator’s list: a page assembled from what campsites say about the card themselves would list five sites and call it the answer.

What we did not use

Our campsite records carry a bookableWithParkaflag, true for 41 sites. It is tempting and it is wrong: parka.is is the booking platform several Icelandic campsites use for reservations, a different product from Útilegukortið. It is not used anywhere on this page, and any list of “41 camping card sites” you see has probably made that exact substitution.