Gatwick parking: every option compared

The airport runs five parking products of its own, and they ladder neatly by distance. Short stay is the multi-storey default, a four-minute walk from each terminal. Premium short stay puts the car on the same level as the terminal entrance, two minutes from the doors, with extra-wide bays. Mid stay exists only at the North Terminal, a six-minute covered walk away. Long stay is the cheap one, 10 to 12 minutes out by free bus, and the first two hours cost nothing. Valet sits at the top: drive up to the terminal, hand the keys over, walk in.

Drive-up (roll-up) rates, identical at both terminals.

Third parties add two more layers: meet and greet firms mirror the valet handover at a spread of prices and standards, and off-airport park and ride sites compete with long stay on price. Each product has its own guide, with short stay parking covering the hourly maths, long stay parking the transfer logistics and price bands, and valet parking the official handover. Before paying for any of them, check current parking promo codes; legitimate discounts exist and take a minute to apply.

For minutes rather than hours, the choice is forecourt or car park. The forecourt costs £10 for up to 10 minutes (the drop-off charge explained), while short stay costs £8 for 30 minutes and lets you walk in with your passenger. Meeting a flight is cheaper still: park in long stay, where the first two hours are free, and ride the free bus to arrivals; the pick-up guide walks through it step by step.

For a stay of an hour or two, seeing someone through check-in or collecting a delayed arrival, short stay charges £14 to the hour and £18 to two hours, against nothing at all in long stay if you can spare the bus ride. A full working day flips the logic: £70 in short stay against £38 in long stay at drive-up rates, and far less than either pre-booked.

From a weekend up, long stay is the default. Drive-up pricing runs £38 for the first day and £32 a day after that, so even a three-day trip reaches £102 at the gate, while the same dates booked a few weeks out typically cost a fraction of it. For a week or more, pre-book long stay, an off-airport site, or a hotel package, all covered below. North Terminal travellers who want to skip the bus can pre-book mid stay and walk six minutes instead. Flying several times a month is its own case: the airport sells commuter season tickets, covered at the end of this page.

Two price systems run in parallel. Drive-up (the airport calls it roll-up) is the published tariff you pay by turning up unannounced, and it is deliberately steep. Pre-book prices are dynamic, set by date and demand like air fares, and Gatwick's own line is that booking ahead saves up to 60% against the gate. Consumer-press spot checks regularly find the real gap at the top of that range in school holidays, and tens of pounds even on quiet weeks.

Published drive-up tariff, both terminals. Long stay meters differently: free to 2 hours, £38 to 24 hours, £32 each further day.

The arithmetic makes the case for booking better than any slogan. Seven days of drive-up long stay is £230; the same week booked well ahead routinely comes in at less than half, and a week of short stay at the gate would be £490, which is why nobody should ever leave a car there for a holiday. One published exception rewards the unplanned evening: South Terminal short stay from 17:00 to 02:00 costs £25 pre-booked, the evening special, useful for late pick-ups and send-offs.

Drive-up rates above are the fixed ceiling; anything you pre-book comes in under them. When you have your dates, grab a promo code first, then book your dates and enter the code before you pay, not after.

Both terminals carry the same core set: short stay a few minutes from the doors, premium short stay inside it, valet at the terminal, and a long stay compound out by the perimeter with its own free bus. The numbering is the only quirk, with car parks 1 to 3 serving the South Terminal and 5 and 6 serving North. The North Terminal adds the products South lacks: mid stay, its six-minute covered walk an alternative to the long stay bus, plus a premium mid stay tier two minutes out.

Park on the side your flight leaves from. easyJet flies only from the North Terminal, British Airways only from South, and TUI splits by flight number, so trust the terminal named on your booking rather than habit. Getting it wrong is not fatal: the free shuttle crosses between terminals in about two minutes, roughly ten minutes door to door with luggage. Sat navs want RH6 0NP for South and RH6 0PJ for North, both reached from M23 Junction 9; the driving guide covers the approach roads and forecourt rules.

The per-terminal pages map every car park, entrance and walking route in detail: North Terminal parking and South Terminal parking, with the terminal guides themselves at the North Terminal and the South Terminal.

Valet is the airport's own handover product, bookable in advance only. You drive to the valet reception at your terminal, hand the keys over two minutes from check-in, and the car is parked on-airport in a barrier-controlled compound with 24-hour patrols. Add-ons include a hand wash and EV charging, so an electric car can come back full. It is the dearest way to park at Gatwick and the fastest from driver's seat to departures, and the valet parking guide covers prices and how the return works.

Meet and greet means the same handover run by a third party, and this is the one corner of Gatwick parking where diligence genuinely matters. The airport has no relationship with these firms, even when Gatwick features in their names, and when it last published complaint figures they had jumped 164%, with cars returned damaged, carrying extra mileage, or found abandoned in the short stay levels with the parking unpaid. Gatwick's own five-point checklist for choosing an operator: credible reviews on an independent platform, full contact details on the website, a Companies House number and VAT number, Park Mark accreditation, and Trading Standards Buy With Confidence membership.

The honest steer: if you want handover convenience with zero research, book the official valet. A good third-party firm can do the same job for less, and the meet and greet guide explains how to separate the professionals from the rogues. What you should never do is book the cheapest name a search advert offers.

Independent park and ride sites a short drive off the airport run their own transfer buses and usually undercut official long stay, most sharply for a week or more. The tradeoff is time and rigidity: transfers run to a timetable rather than on demand, and the bus adds a leg to both ends of the trip. Stick to operators holding Park Mark accreditation, and treat any site that will not name its address before booking as a warning sign. The off-airport parking comparison covers the established names, Purple Parking, APH and Airparks among them, with the transfer-time truth for each.

Two other routes beat headline prices without a car park comparison at all. A night at an airport hotel with parking bundled in sometimes costs less than the same parking booked alone at peak, and turns a 04:00 alarm into a lie-in; hotel and parking packages runs those numbers. And for some trips the honest answer is not to park: with a train station inside the South Terminal and services every few minutes, every way to reach Gatwick compares the alternatives before you commit the car.

Official car parks are booked on the airport's own site, and the booking is tied to your number plate, so a typo in the registration is the one detail worth triple-checking. Short stay, premium short stay and long stay also take drive-up traffic with no booking at all; mid stay and valet refuse it, so never drive to those unbooked.

The terms behind official bookings are unusually forgiving, which removes the last reason to delay. Any booking can be amended free of charge online up to 24 hours before arrival, dates, car park and registration included. Cancelling at least 24 hours before arrival brings a full refund with no admin fee; inside 24 hours there is no refund. Changes made by phone rather than online carry a £5 fee. Book when the flights are booked, and adjust later if plans move.

Electric cars get eight 22kW charging points on the airport, four in each terminal's short stay, first come, first served. Long stay and mid stay have none, so for a holiday the realistic options are the valet charging add-on or arriving with range to spare; the GRIDSERVE Electric Forecourt on Ring Road South, beside the South Terminal approach, runs high-powered chargers around the clock and solves the empty-battery return.

Motorbikes park free in the yellow-hatched bays along the sides of each short stay level, with no booking possible and no anchor points provided. The exemption is strict: a bike in a standard bay pays car rates, and one outside any bay can be removed. Blue badge holders get dedicated bays in every official car park at normal rates, plus an exemption from the £10 forecourt drop-off charge.

The niche product is commuter parking: monthly, quarterly and annual season tickets in the South Terminal short stay car parks, a short walk from the platforms, aimed at people using the station rather than the runways. With direct trains to London and Brighton every few minutes, it is effectively station parking sold by an airport.