The new parking rules, and what they do at an airport drop-off

The Private Parking Code of Practice was laid before Parliament on 20 October 2026, under the Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019. It applies to England, Scotland and Wales. It governs private parking operators — the companies that run car parks and issue charges on private land — not council parking tickets, which are a different system entirely.

It is not in force, and nothing in it helps anyone today. gov.uk says the Code “will now be subject to a 40-day period of Parliamentary scrutiny before it can be issued”, and that it “will come into force 21 calendar days from the point of issue”.

Every clause quoted on this page was read in the Code’s own text on 21 October 2026, not in coverage of it. The Code.

8.2.1 — “The parking charge cap is set at £100 and parking charges must not exceed this cap.”

8.2.2 — “A minimum 40% discount must be offered where payment is made within 14 days of the parking charge notice being issued.”

9.1 — Where a charge becomes overdue, a sum of up to £70 may be added “for the purpose of debt recovery only”.

19.1 — An Appeals Charter, setting out three separate things: when a charge should not be issued at all, when it should be cancelled on appeal, and when it should be reduced to £20 for 14 days. Between them they cover a payment machine that was out of order with no alternative, a breakdown, the onset of illness, a minor keying error in a registration, and a permit held but not displayed.

This is the part that makes it ours. The Code’s definition of parking carves out a car that stops only to let people in or out — and then takes the carve-out straight back for drop-off zones, airports’ among them.

2.17 — “An instance of a vehicle being caused by the driver to remain stationary other than in the course of driving (excluding instances where the driver has stopped temporarily to enable passengers to leave or enter the vehicle not including drop-off zones such as those at airports in scope of the Code or other facilities designed for dropping off and picking up passengers).”

Read plainly: at an airport in scope of the Code, stopping in its drop-off zone to let someone out counts as parking for this Code’s purposes. It is not treated as merely stopping.

Which airports, though, is not settled by the Code. It applies to “relevant land” as defined by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012, and says plainly that whether land is relevant land “depends on the specific legal and factual circumstances of that site, including whether parking is subject to statutory control”. That is a question about each airport, not one this page can answer by reasoning.

The Code sets a 10-minute grace period. At an airport drop-off, it is genuinely unclear whether that applies.

5.2 — A grace period must be allowed at “facilities for the parking of vehicles on relevant land, other than for clearly signed, designated ‘short stay’ locations”.

And in Annex B, the table of minimum periods gives short-stay land a grace period of zero — five minutes to decide whether to park, then nothing — where every other kind of site in the same table gets ten minutes.

We are not going to tell you that settles it. The Code never says an airport drop-off zone is a short-stay location. A forecourt signed for five or ten minutes looks exactly like the thing that table describes, and that is an inference, not a rule — the kind of line that gets repeated until everyone believes it. Whether a particular airport’s forecourt is signed and designated that way is a question about that airport’s own signs.

It matters because it is the difference between arriving back two minutes late and being fine, and arriving back two minutes late and getting a charge.

One more thing that could switch all of this off at an airport. The Code says, in its own scope section:

Scope — “Nothing in this Code of Practice overrules the provisions and enforcement of byelaws where they apply.”

Several UK airports publish their own byelaws covering vehicles on airport roads. Where those apply, the Code does not displace them — so the cap, the discount and the appeal grounds may simply not be the rules in play. Again: a question per airport, and one we would have to read each airport’s own byelaws to answer.

Every clause on this page was read in the Code’s own published text on 21 October 2026 — not in news coverage of it, and not in a summary. Where the Code does not answer a question, this page says so rather than filling the gap.

We have deliberately not said whether any particular airport is covered, whether any particular forecourt is short-stay land, or whether any airport’s byelaws displace the Code. Those are three separate factual questions per airport, and the way we answer that kind of question is by reading that airport’s own pages and dating what we find. How we check.

What each airport charges to drop off today, and what it says about staying longer: the drop-off charge comparison. The separate Government review of those charges, now through its Commons committee: what that review actually does.

This page describes the position on 21 October 2026, the day after the Code was laid. We will update it when the 40 days end and again when it is issued.