UK Airport Drop-Off Charges Compared: All 29 Airports (Q3 2026)

No single official source compares what UK airports charge you at the kerb. Each operator publishes its own tariff, on its own page, in its own format — and several publish no figure at all. This index puts them side by side: the published drop-off charge, the penalty for getting it wrong and the free alternative, for the 29 airports covered on this site, read directly from each operator's own pages between 4 and 8 August 2026.

Three different machines are hiding behind these numbers. The first is the barrier: you take a ticket or your plate is scanned, and you cannot leave without paying — annoying, but self-contained. The second is the camera with a deadline: no barrier, no machine, and the burden of remembering to pay online moves to you, usually by midnight the next day. The third is the genuinely free kerb, which still exists — mostly on islands. The trap lives almost entirely in the second machine.

The index, nation by nation

Each nation gets two pieces: the table of kerbside charges, then the free escapes and penalties beneath it, airport by airport. Where a cell says a figure is not published, that is a fact about the operator’s pages, not a gap in our reading — the full tariff structures, and how each airport takes payment, are in the CSV below.

• London Heathrow: free option — Park & Ride car parks: 29 minutes free, with a free bus to the doors · penalty — £80, reduced to £40 if paid within 14 days
• London Gatwick: free option — Long Stay car parks: 2 hours free, with a free shuttle to the terminals · penalty — £100, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days of issue
• London Stansted: free option — Mid Stay: 60 minutes free, then £5 for the next hour, with a free shuttle bus · penalty — £100, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days
• London Luton: free option — Long Stay: 2 hours free, shuttle roughly every 20 minutes · penalty — £95 for staying past 30 minutes, reduced to £55 if paid within 14 days
• London Southend: penalty — PCN issued if unpaid or over 10 minutes — amount not published (signage only)
• Manchester: free option — Free drop-off area with a 24/7 shuttle to the terminals · penalty — £100, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days
• Liverpool John Lennon: free option — Drop-off 2: 20 minutes free, a 5–10 minute walk (no free re-entry within 2 hours)
• Newcastle: free option — Airport Waiting Zone at Callerton Parkway: 90 minutes free, 24/7 free shuttle
• Leeds Bradford: free option — One Hour Free Zone inside the Mid Stay: 1 hour free, about a 5-minute walk
• East Midlands: free option — Long Stay 2: 60 minutes free, then £1/min; a 15–20 minute walk or a shuttle bus · penalty — £100, reduced to £60 within 14 days; T&Cs add up to £70 debt-recovery fees
• Bristol: free option — Waiting Zone by the Car Rental Centre: 1 hour free (no return within 30 minutes) · penalty — Red Routes around the site: £100, reduced to £60 if paid within 14 days
• Southampton: free option — none; the operator states it currently offers none · penalty — £80 for stopping outside the car parks, reduced to £50 within 14 days
• Exeter: free option — Car Park P4: 30 minutes free
• Norwich: penalty — Stopping outside Car Park 1 risks a VCS penalty charge — amount not published
• Humberside: free option — The first 15 minutes in Car Park 1 are free · penalty — Fine for parking outside Car Parks 1, 2 and 4 (VCS) — amount not published
• Teesside: free option — Up to 2 hours free with a £5 minimum spend in the landside café or shops
• Cornwall Newquay: free option — The first 10 minutes in the West Car Park are free

• Edinburgh: free option — Free zone: 30 minutes, about a 10-minute walk from the terminal
• Glasgow: free option — Long Stay: 1 hour free, with a free shuttle to the terminal
• Aberdeen: free option — Long Stay: 1 hour free, with a free shuttle to the terminal
• Inverness: free option — Free drop-off area in the Short Stay: 15 minutes, a 5-minute walk (no return within 1 hour)

• Cardiff: free option — Car Park 2: the first 20 minutes are free · penalty — Contravention charge notice exists — amount only on car-park signage, not the website

• Belfast International: free option — Long Stay: a 15-minute grace period doubles as the free drop-off
• Belfast City: free option — Long Stay: 10 minutes free (reinsert the ticket at the barrier); re-entry within 15 minutes triggers a £8 minimum

• Jersey: free option — The Departures forecourt drop-off itself is free · penalty — Parked cars in the drop-off zone risk a fine or tow-away — amount not published
• Guernsey: free option — Terminal car parks: the first 30 minutes are free
• Isle of Man: free option — The drop-off zone itself is free · penalty — Unattended vehicles face fixed penalties or removal — amount not published

What stands out in this edition

• The cheapest paid hour in the index is Glasgow Prestwick: £4.50 buys a full 60 minutes — the same £4.50 that buys ten minutes at Cardiff. The highest opening charge is £10, shared by Gatwick (for ten minutes) and Stansted (for fifteen).
• Newcastle’s Express is the cliff to respect: £6 for 10 minutes escalates to £120 for a day — parking a car there overnight costs more than some flights.
• Three airports still let you drop off for nothing at the kerb: Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. On the mainland, the free option has moved a shuttle-ride away — where it survives at all.
• Southampton is the only operator that says it plainly: it states it currently offers no free pick-up or drop-off option and no shuttle bus, following the closure of its Long Stay car park. Norwich permits drop-off only inside its paid Car Park 1, and Southend, Bournemouth and Prestwick publish no free alternative either.
• The worst case in the index is not a tariff at all. Miss East Midlands’ payment deadline and its terms allow a £100 charge plus up to £70 in debt-recovery fees: £170 of exposure from a drop-off that costs £5.
• Cardiff prices the same twenty minutes twice on one page: its drop-off section charges £4.50 for the first ten minutes and £4.50 for every ten after, while the pick-up table below it lists 10–20 minutes at £6.00. Whether those are two products or one price is not something the page explains.

Method and editions

• Scope: the 29 UK and Crown Dependency airports that have a researched file on this site — 26 in the UK and three in the Crown Dependencies. Birmingham and London City are not covered here yet, so they are not in this edition.
• Only operator sources: every figure was read on the airport’s own pages (or its own tariff PDF) during 4–8 August 2026, and stored with a verbatim quotation in our evidence files.
• Fixed, published tariffs only. Pre-booked parking prices change by date and are deliberately excluded — this index compares what any driver pays at the kerb, not a booking engine.
• Where an operator publishes no figure (a penalty, a free option, a base tariff), the index says so instead of estimating. A blank is a finding.
• Editions are quarterly. This is the Q3 2026 edition; changes between editions are tracked, so a tariff rise between quarters is visible, not silently overwritten.
• Found an error, or an operator page that changed? Every source is linked below — check the operator first, then tell us.