Top Five Most Expensive Cities in the UK to Park Your Car

The car itself costs money, road tax costs money, fuel costs money, and, of course, car insurance policies cost money. And if you’re (un)lucky enough to live in one of these hot spots in the UK, parking your car is can be an eye-watering cost to add to the list.

In West London, playground of oligarchs and foreign princes and their luxury vehicles, parking spaces can cost more than the average UK house. The most expensive parking spot ever listed, in Knightsbridge, was put on the market for £480,000 in 2015—and sold for an undisclosed amount. Reportedly, it had space for three vehicles, as if that makes its asking price more reasonable.

And that wasn’t an anomaly: a parking space for two vehicles near Royal Albert Hall was listed for sale for £400,000—a small sum for a Proms-loving couple and their vehicles, surely. And a 19.5 foot by 8 foot space near Marble Arch, with room for two cars practically bumper to bumper, was advertised in 2016 for a cool £350,000.

At those price, the £255,000 an unknown buyer paid for 105 to 110-year leases on three parking spots on Park Lane in Mayfair almost seems like a steal.

But even if you don’t need 105 years of parking, stashing a car in London is an expensive proposition. Just three hours of parking on Brewer Street in Soho will set you back £50—and you’ll probably have to leave the theatre at intermission to top up the meter.

London is far and away the most expensive place in the UK to park—and drive, when you factor in congestion charge and all the stop-start traffic that will burn through a tank of petrol and your wits.

This is according to vehicle history checking service HPI Check, which crunched the numbers on daytime parking in 200 car parks in city centres across the UK. They found that shoppers and tourists spend £9.10 an hour to park in Central London. The most expensive car park in London the HPI surveyed charged £20 an hour.

In fact, around the world only New Yorkers are paying more for parking: $27 per hour or £21.25. In fact, it’s so expensive to park in New York, some drivers pay $15 an hour—plus petrol (or gas)—through an app called DropCar for a guy to tool around in their car for an hour.

Back on our own shores, parking isn’t exactly cheap outside of London. HPI found that city centre parking in Manchester was the second most expensive in the UK but at £3.18 an hour, it’s a steal compared to the capital. Parking in the city centres of Cardiff or Leeds will shave an average of £3 off your shopping budgets but choose your car park carefully. Cardiff’s most expensive car park charges a whopping £15 an hour, and a car park in Leeds will lighten your wallet by £12.50 an hour—just shy of highway robbery.

Glasgow rounded out the top five most expensive cities to park in the UK, with an hour of city centre parking running at £2.65—about the cost of a latte.

But shoppers aren’t the only ones shelling out for parking. If your city centre employer doesn’t offer parking, you could be paying hundreds of pounds a month—nearly a month’s train fare in some locations—to park during the working day. HPI crunched those numbers too, analysing the cost of parking at 200 car parks across the UK for a full working day (9am-5pm), Monday to Friday, for a month. And unsurprisingly, parking for work in London is painful.

A month of weekday, work-time parking in the capital will run you £694.80, easily more than the average monthly rent in many cities. Leeds clocked in next, with a month costing £355.40.

Parking your vehicle for a month in the Welsh capital will knock £327.40 off your monthly budget and if you opt to drive into Manchester for work rather than taking the Metrolink tram, you’ll be paying £302.20 in parking fees. Glasgow again completed the top five, with a month’s worth of work-time parking averaging £286.60.

Of course, people aren’t just parking in city centres or in car parks. Citybase, provider of serviced apartments, crunched numbers from councils to determine the average cost of parking within the UK’s cities. They found a divide between the cost of park on the street and in car parks. While you’ll be feeding an average of £1.65 into the meter an hour to leave your car on the street in the UK, an hour in a car park will run you just £1.10.

London is predictably the most expensive place to park, with off-street car parking and on-street parking costing £3 and £4.80 per hour respectively, for an average of £3.90 an hour. In Oxford, off-street parking is as dear as it is in London, but you’ll save £1.80 per hour on on-street parking. In Brighton and Hove, an hour of parking costs an average of £2.55 (that’s £1.50 in a car park and £3.60 on the street), while in Edinburgh and Leeds, parking runs an average of £2.20 per hour and £2.05 per hour, respectively.

But if you head to Newry in Northern Ireland, you’ll pay just 40p in hour in a car park and 60p on the street. It’s the cheapest city for parking in the UK.

Hourly city centre parking rates