Councils across England are pulling in massive profits from parking charges, and drivers are calling it a straight-up money grab.
Fresh stats from the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government show councils made a huge £2.3 billion from parking between April 2024 and March 2025. Once costs were stripped out, that left a staggering £1.2 billion profit.
No surprise here, London leads the way. Boroughs in the capital alone raked in over half a billion pounds, mostly from on-street parking. Westminster topped the list with £90.6 million profit, while Kensington and Chelsea banked £49.7 million.
Elsewhere, Nottingham Council made £20 million, Manchester pulled in £19.5 million, and Bournemouth walked away with £17.1 million in parking profits.
And the numbers are only going up. Profits have jumped from just under £900 million pre-Covid to today’s record-breaking figures, rising by about £150 million in the last year alone.
The AA has slammed the surge as a “record parking plunder spree.” Its head of roads policy, Jack Cousens, said: “For too many councils, particularly in cities, the cost of parking seems to have gone from a reasonable charge to a full-on local tax. Why? Because there is next to nothing holding them back.”
He accused councils of “creat[ing] new ways and reasons to plunder more money from people with cars, often on low incomes travelling in for work”.
Meanwhile, the government is working on a code of practice for private parking companies, but it won’t touch council-run car parks, meaning they can still charge what they like.