Left luggage at Gatwick: where to store bags and what it costs

Gatwick's luggage storage is a counter service, not a locker bank: Excess Baggage Company staffs a desk in each terminal, takes your bag over the counter, and hands it back against your ticket. Both desks sit landside, before security, and open 04:00 to 22:00 every day of the year. Security regulations mean there are no self-service lockers anywhere at the airport, so however the question is phrased (lockers, storage, left luggage), these two desks are the answer.

The headline price is £15 per item for up to 24 hours, with a £10 rate for a quick few hours and stepped discounts that take a long stay down to £10 a day. That buys staffed, screened storage inside the terminal rather than a courier trip to an off-site depot, which is what makes it work for the classic use case: dumping the bags between a morning landing and an evening flight, or before a day in London you would rather spend without wheels. For what the desks charge and where they are, read on; for what your airline lets you carry in the first place, see the baggage allowance guide.

At the North Terminal, the desk is on Level 1, next to Costa Coffee, one floor up from the arrivals exit and on the same level as the shuttle link from the South Terminal, so it is the first practical stop after either an arrival or a shuttle ride. At the South Terminal, the desk is on Level 2, the main check-in level, tucked behind check-in zone E. Both are before security, which matters: you can use them whichever direction you are travelling, with or without a boarding pass.

The South desk doubles as the railway station's storage in practice, because Gatwick Airport station is part of the South Terminal: from the platforms, ride up to the concourse, cross the walkway into the terminal, and the desk is a few minutes on foot. Arriving at the wrong terminal for your bag is a ten-minute fix; the free shuttle links the two around the clock.

The card is priced per item, and the airport publishes it plainly: £10 for up to 3 hours, £15 for up to 24 hours, £27.50 for up to 48 hours, and £40 for up to 72 hours. Past three days the meter switches to £12.50 per day, and past a week it eases to £10 per day, which makes a full week roughly £90 per item and a fortnight about £160. There is no published maximum stay.

Two comparisons keep the card honest. For a few hours, £10 per bag is the price of not carrying it, and for a family's worth of cases the total climbs fast, so decide per bag rather than by default; a rucksack rides free on your back. And for genuinely long stints, £10 a day approaches the cost of shipping the bag where it is going, a service the same desks sell, so ask for both quotes before committing a case to a month in storage. Prices are banded, not pro-rata: a 25-hour stay pays the up-to-48-hours rate, so time collections just inside the band you are paying for.

Walking up works: the desks exist for unplanned drops, and outside the sharpest holiday mornings you will be served in minutes. If you want the certainty, storage can be pre-booked at left-baggage.co.uk, the operator's own booking site, which also locks the price before you travel. Either way you hand the bag over the counter, it is receipted, and the ticket is your claim: photograph it, because reclaiming a bag without it means proving ownership the slow way.

Practical limits are the obvious ones. Keep individual items under 32kg, the same handling cap the airlines use, and treat the desk like an airline desk on contents: nothing dangerous, nothing you would not check into a hold. Passports, medicines, chargers, keys and anything valuable or essential stay with you, partly for safety, partly because the desk shuts at 22:00 and a passport locked behind a closed counter is a bad end to a day trip. Collect before closing, and if your plans slip past midnight, the bag waits safely for the 04:00 opening rather than being retrievable overnight.

The desks earn their keep in the gaps of a journey. A long layover is the classic: land in the morning, store the cases, and spend the day in London instead of a departure lounge, with trains from the South Terminal reaching the centre in about half an hour; the Gatwick to London guide compares the fares and the connections guide covers how much buffer a same-day onward flight really needs. The same logic serves the last day of a trip that ends with a late flight: check out, store, and see out the day unencumbered. For a shorter gap that does not justify the trip into town, the Gatwick Aviation Museum is a short bus ride away at Charlwood and opens Friday to Sunday, with free parking and around three hours' worth to see.

Storage also patches the awkward edges of airport logistics: the cabin bag that failed a sizer on a day you cannot check it in, the extra case bought mid-trip that will not fly home until you have paid for hold space, the pushchair between a landing and a pick-up. What the desks do not solve is a bag that never appeared on the carousel; that is a different process through your airline's handling agent, and the lost property guide explains who to chase for what.

The same counters run the airport's other baggage services. Bag wrapping seals a case in film before check-in, a deterrent against tampering and casual theft and a fix for a zip you no longer trust. Baggage weighing settles the overweight question before the airline desk does it expensively. And the shop side sells luggage and travel accessories, which quietly rescues anyone whose case arrived broken or whose hand luggage needs downsizing to a compliant bag before security.

The bigger service is shipping: Excess Baggage Company forwards luggage and boxes worldwide from the same desks, door to door, which is the escape hatch when an airline's excess-baggage price makes flying with everything absurd. For students, movers and anyone hauling a trip's worth of extra weight, pricing the shipment against the airline's per-kilo rate is worth the five-minute conversation. The rest of what the airport runs, desk by desk, is indexed in the services guide.