How Bulgaria’s rental prices change between summer and winter

A headline such as “cars from €3 a day” tells you little about the cost of a week’s rental in August. To explore that difference, we collected 626 advertised rental offers across 16 searches covering four Bulgarian airport markets and selected winter and summer weeks in 2027.

We examined both the cheapest manual economy offers and the same product listings available in all four sampled weeks. The results show how advertised prices differed between those dates, alongside the deposits, protection options and rental conditions travellers should consider.

The markets were Sofia, Varna, Burgas and Plovdiv, with airport pickup requested and a driver aged 35. We collected every returned results page for each search rather than taking prices only from the first screen.

The observations included offers from eight supplier names: Burgas Auto Rent, Low Cost Cars, Lucky Rent a Car, PM Rent, Team Auto Rent, Top Rent a Car, Universal Car Rent and Varnarentals.eu. They were not all available in every location or rental week.

The prices below are advertised rental totals returned by the search. Optional protection, fuel, parking and other travel expenses are excluded. We did not complete checkout, and exact-time service fees were not verified. A separate methodology section explains the time-handling limitation and how we calculated the results.

Source: Get My Rides searches collected 29 October 2026. These are the lowest returned manual Economy offers, not market-wide minimum prices or confirmed checkout totals. The supplier and model can change between columns.

Expressed per rental day, the winter minima ranged from €2.98 to €5.10, while the summer minima ranged from €22.95 to €30.85.

To compare the two seasons without choosing just one unusually cheap week, we averaged the two winter minima and the two summer minima within each location.

For example, Varna’s two winter minima averaged €28.28 for seven days. The summer equivalent was €178.50, a difference of €150.22 for the week (+531.2%).

Those percentages are large partly because the winter starting prices are very low. They should not be used to claim that every Bulgarian rental car becomes six or seven times more expensive in summer.

There is another distinction: the lowest price does not necessarily buy the same rental product. A change of supplier may also change mileage, deposit requirements, vehicle age and payment conditions.

Each matched listing receives equal weight. The combined result is calculated from all 114 listings, rather than by averaging the four city percentages

The city figures require care. Sofia contributed more than half of the matched listings and had a broader supplier mix. The Burgas and Plovdiv matched samples were smaller and heavily concentrated in Top Rent a Car offers.

The table therefore does not establish that Plovdiv has Bulgaria’s strongest seasonal pricing, or that Sofia is the cheapest destination. Differences in the listings available for comparison can influence those results.

Across the full matched sample, 97 listings had higher mean summer quotes, 17 were unchanged, and none had a lower mean summer quote. Unchanged advertised prices do not establish that a supplier has committed to year-round flat pricing: future rate loading and availability can still change.

For Sofia, Varna and Burgas, the mean winter quote for this listing was €28.28 and the mean summer quote was €223.13. The summer figure was approximately 7.89 times the winter figure.

That is a striking example, but it represents one supplier’s product and pricing across several locations. Identical prices in three cities should not be treated as three independent confirmations of a national market trend.

The protection column is the returned total including that protection option, not an amount to add to the standard rental price. Conditions and exclusions must be checked before booking.

In this example, the protection option added €75.60 to the weekly quote in every sampled period. That extra amount is much more noticeable beside a €20.86 winter rental than beside a €238 summer rental.

A refundable deposit is separate from the rental cost. It matters for card capacity and cash flow, but it should not simply be added to the rental price as though it were a fee. Equally, choosing additional protection should depend on its coverage, exclusions and payment conditions, not just on the lower deposit.

Research methodology

Collection date and source

We collected the research sample on 29 October 2026 between 21:42:11 and 21:42:38 Europe/Sofia time, equivalent to 19:42:11-19:42:38 UTC. We used the live search service that supplies Get My Rides listings and retained the responses from every results page.

The research dataset contains 16 location-and-date searches and 626 returned offer observations. These are listings, not 626 unique cars, bookings or independent supplier decisions. The same product may be counted in several rental periods or locations.

Search controls

• Country: Bulgaria.
• Markets: Sofia, Varna, Burgas and Plovdiv.
• Requested pickup type: airport, with return to the same market.
• Driver age: 35.
• Rental length: seven days, confirmed in all 626 returned records.
• Rental dates: 18-25 January, 15-22 February, 19-26 July and 16-23 August 2027.
• Price units: EUR. We made no currency conversion.
• No promo code was entered. Any automatic discount already reflected in a returned search total was retained. Twelve observations contained a positive search-discount amount.
• All returned pages were collected, and the number of collected offers reconciled to the reported total for each search.

Pickup-time limitation: We requested 10:00 local pickup and return, but the returned search metadata normalized the dates to midnight. A Varna results-page spot check also displayed 00:00 in the date controls. We therefore treat this as a date-based advertised-price comparison. Exact operating-hour eligibility and out-of-hours charges were not verified, and the figures must not be presented as confirmed 10:00 checkout totals.

Price measures

We used the returned search total for the seven-day rental. For daily equivalents, we divided that total by seven. We did not reconstruct a total from the vehicle’s catalogue price. Returned daily prices reconciled to the seven-day totals within €0.10 for every observation.

The manual economy series uses the minimum returned total within the source class label Economy and transmission Manual for each search. The seasonal comparison averages the two minima in each season. It does not estimate the average paid by customers.

The matched series includes only product listings present in all four sampled weeks, with unchanged recorded matching fields: city, supplier, stable product identifier, model, year, source class, transmission, mileage policy, fuel policy, deposit and rate identifier. Missing recorded fields were not independently verified. Matching does not establish that every contractual term was identical.

For each matched listing:

Winter quote = (January total + February total) ÷ 2

Summer quote = (July total + August total) ÷ 2

Summer increase (%) = [(summer quote ÷ winter quote) − 1] × 100

We report the median of the resulting listing-level changes. Calculations use unrounded figures, with prices displayed to two decimal places and percentage changes to one decimal place.

Coverage and limitations

This is a snapshot of one marketplace’s returned offers. The full sample includes eight supplier names; six are represented in the 114-listing matched sample. Top Rent a Car accounts for 70 matched listings, and Low Cost Cars for eight. Supplier names and repeated listings should not be assumed to represent independent fleets or independent pricing decisions.

The search returned different numbers of offers for different dates. For example, Sofia returned 117 in the January search and 64 in each summer search. A missing offer can reflect date-specific availability, rate publication or search coverage; it is not evidence by itself that a fleet is sold out. Restricting the matched analysis to listings present in all periods also introduces selection bias.

Summer lead times were 263 and 291 days, compared with 81 and 109 days for winter. We did not control for that difference, and we did not observe how quotes changed as the rental dates approached.

We did not audit every supplier’s full terms, complete a reservation or validate the final payable amount at checkout. Optional protection and equipment, refundable deposits, fuel, parking, cross-border charges, contingent fees and any charges not captured in the search total are outside the base-price comparison.

The four selected weeks do not represent every day of either season. No national weighting, market-share weighting, causal estimate or statistical significance claim is made.

How to cite this research

Get My Rides, How Bulgaria’s rental prices change between summer and winter, advance-quote study collected 29 October 2026. Sample: 626 advertised offer observations across 16 searches in four Bulgarian airport markets for selected 2027 rental weeks; matched analysis of 114 listings.

When quoting a finding, retain the observation date, sampled rental periods and marketplace scope. Refer to the figures as advertised quotes rather than prices paid by customers.