Campervan Rental Prices in Iceland in January

A January campervan trip trades crowds and long days for solitude and dark skies. Temperatures sit around −2 to 3°C with regular snow, ice and wind, and while the Ring Road stays open it can shut in sections at short notice during storms — check road.is and vedur.is every morning and never try to outrun the weather. The highland F-roads are entirely closed, so the interior is off-limits; plan a loop of the south coast, the Golden Circle and other maintained routes. A studded-tyre 4x4 or winter-prepared van with a diesel heater is close to essential.

The payoff is a country most visitors never see: frozen waterfalls, snow-covered lava fields and long golden-hour light bracketing a short midday. With such long, dark nights, January ranks among the best aurora months of the year, and a van lets you chase clear skies away from town lights. The catch is campsites — very few stay open in winter, mostly year-round sites in Reykjavik and Akureyri — so you'll base around a handful of serviced stops rather than roam freely, and electric hookups for overnight heating matter more than usual.

Because demand bottoms out in the dark months, the vans on offer skew toward hardier, winter-equipped models and rates land near their annual floor. The honest trade-off is a genuinely demanding drive and thin services, so pad your itinerary, treat any single-day plan as flexible, and keep the tank and food stocks fuller than you would in summer.