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A season ticket is sold on its monthly price and won or lost on the days you actually park. Price all three ways of paying against the same year of attendance.
A label only. Nothing is converted.
What a day at the barrier costs you.
Leave blank if none is offered.
Take off leave, sickness and the weeks you work from home.
A ticket is billed by the calendar, not by attendance.
Give at least one price and the days you actually park. Every rate comes off your own sign or permit.
The weeks figure is the one that decides this, and it is the one people overstate. Annual leave, public holidays, a fortnight off sick and any day the car stays at home all come off it, and a ticket bought against fifty-two weeks and used for forty-four has paid for eight weeks of empty tarmac. Count the weeks you were genuinely there last year rather than the weeks in a year.
No tariff is built in, because they differ by street, by city and by time of day. If your car park charges by the hour, work out what a normal day costs you and enter that; if it charges more for staying late, use the day you usually have rather than the cheapest one on the board.
A car park will usually sell you the same space in three shapes: pay at the barrier, buy a month at a time, or buy a year up front. Each is quoted in a different unit, which is what makes them hard to compare on the spot, and the operator has no reason to help you convert between them. Putting all three on a yearly footing against the same pattern of attendance is the entire job here, and it is arithmetic anybody could do on a receipt if they ever sat down to.
The output that matters is not which one is cheapest for a hypothetical full-time driver. It is which one is cheapest for the number of days you personally turn up, which is almost always fewer than you would guess.
Divide the monthly ticket price by the price of one day and you have the number of days a month at which the two ways of paying cost exactly the same. Below it, the barrier is cheaper. Above it, the ticket is, and every additional day after that costs nothing. A ticket at 140 against a daily rate of 9 crosses at roughly 15 and a half days, so it needs 16 days in a billed month to be strictly ahead.
That single number is worth more than any yearly total, because you can check it against your own calendar without trusting anybody else’s arithmetic. Count the days you were actually in a typical month last year and compare. If you are close to the crossing point, the two options are effectively the same price and the decision should be made on something other than money.
People price a season ticket against fifty-two weeks and then live a year with annual leave, public holidays, a fortnight of illness, a stretch of working from home and a week when the car was in the garage. Forty-four or forty-six weeks is a much more honest starting point, and the missing weeks are paid for in full by anybody on an annual ticket.
The billed months matter for the same reason. A ticket is charged by the calendar, not by attendance, so somebody who buys twelve months and uses ten has bought two months of empty tarmac. If your operator lets you buy months individually, the days you park should be spread across the months you actually pay for rather than across the whole year — otherwise a term-time or seasonal pattern is judged against a diluted usage rate and looks worse than it is.
Some season tickets are priced above what a month of daily parking could ever cost, because they are sold on convenience rather than savings. If the break-even lands past thirty-one days, no amount of attendance rescues it: there are not enough days in the month to get there, and the ticket can only be justified by what it buys besides money.
That can still be a fair trade. A reserved bay, a guaranteed space at nine in the morning, no queue at the barrier and no fumbling for a card in the rain are worth something real. They are simply not worth a number this page can compute, so they belong in your decision rather than in the total.
Usually but not reliably, and the discount is often smaller than people expect. Price both and compare, and weigh the annual saving against the fact that a year is a long commitment to a job, a commute and a car that might all change inside it.
Work out what a normal working day costs you under the hourly tariff and enter that as the daily rate. Use the day you usually have, including the times you stay late, rather than the cheapest combination the tariff board technically allows.
That is entirely down to the operator and it is worth asking before you commit. Some refund unused whole months, some charge an administration fee, and some offer nothing at all, which turns an annual ticket into a bet on your circumstances staying put.
Because the weeks figure is the one that decides the answer and the one people overstate most. Holidays, sickness and days at home come off it, and a ticket bought against fifty-two weeks but used for forty-four has paid for eight weeks of nothing.