Parking in Munich: prices, car parks and the low-emission zone trap
An hour in a Munich car park costs between €2.50 and €4.00 depending on location, a day €20 to €35. The figures with year and source, the three expensive traps, and the gaps in the city's own data.
Munich is an expensive city to park in, and the amounts quoted in travel guides are almost always the lowest ones. This page sets the documented prices side by side, each with its year and source, and names the three places where it gets costly.
It is written for anyone arriving with a car: a hire car picked up at the airport, or your own vehicle driven in from elsewhere in Europe. If you are flying in and staying in the city, you can skip straight to public transport.
One figure first that you will not find elsewhere. OpenStreetMap lists 6,455 parking areas within the city limits, but only 1,054 of them have a recorded number of spaces, as of 12 September 2026. The data is much thinner than the supply.
Each pin is a car park named in OpenStreetMap. Tap it, then Go: the route opens in driving mode.
How much does an hour cost, and how much does a day cost?
The range depends almost entirely on the distance from the old town. Every value below is documented on its own, and the year is shown because operators change their rates independently of one another.
| Car park, location | Hour | Day | As of |
|---|---|---|---|
| Forum Schwanthalerhöhe, near the Theresienwiese | €2.50 | usually €20 to €25 | 2025 |
| City-Parkhaus, centre | €3.50 for the first hour | €28.00 per 24 hours | 2024 |
| Tiefgarage Oberpollinger, old town | €4.00 from 7am to 8pm | €8.00 flat rate overnight | 2023 |
| Around the Hauptbahnhof (main station) | n/a | €27 to €32 | 2026 |
As a rule of thumb for the centre: €20 to €35 a day. Car parks near the Theresienwiese are noticeably cheaper, those in the old town noticeably dearer.
Why are the averages too low?
Comparison sites like to round things off to "about 4 euros an hour, about 30 euros a day". Documented individual cases are higher: one car park charging €6 an hour with a daily cap of €45 is explicitly cited for 2025.
If you rely on the average, you will budget half a day short. For a full day in the old town, plan on the top end of the range, and book online in advance wherever the operator offers it.
The low-emission zone applies to parked cars too
Munich has a low-emission zone (Umweltzone) where only vehicles with a green sticker are allowed. The point visitors regularly miss: the rule covers not only driving but also parking. A vehicle without a valid sticker can be fined even when it is simply parked.
The fine is €80, up to €128.50 with fees, and it explicitly applies to foreign-registered vehicles as well. There are no penalty points or driving ban attached.
How strictly is parking enforced?
Very strictly, and one figure proves it: the city's district administration department (Kreisverwaltungsreferat) issued 531,923 parking tickets in 2024 alone.
A single case shows the severity better than the total. Leaving a car on the pavement for more than three hours, without obstructing anyone, was fined €70 in 2025.
If the car is going to sit still anyway: once parking costs around 25 euros a day, a central place to stay pays for itself faster than it seems, because the trips into the centre disappear too. The places to stay in Munich with prices and cancellation terms can be filtered by location, and many hotels charge their own garage separately, which shows up straight away when you compare.
Compare places to stay in Munich →Affiliate link: a booking through this link supports the site, at no extra cost to you.
Long-term parking, and what the Wiesn does to it
For longer stays there are long-term parking contracts. Documented rates at a central car park as of 1 March 2024: €130.00 for one week, €380.00 for four weeks, €285.60 for a reserved monthly space.
During Oktoberfest, the supply around the Theresienwiese turns into a market: spaces are traded as long-term parking for up to €250 a month. Coaches and motorhomes have their own areas, from €200 for the period.
In practice, anyone driving to the Wiesn and only looking for a space on arrival is competing for stock that has already been sold. It is not a rip-off, just an ordinary market under scarcity, but it is rarely described that way.
Photo: Srihari Thalla, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The gaps in the public data
The city portal opendata.muenchen.de lists 73 datasets, and not a single one on real-time car park occupancy. A live display of free spaces cannot honestly be built for Munich, and anyone offering one is feeding it from something other than city data.
Three more gaps that genuinely matter for planning:
- No list of free parking. Neither the city nor the comparison sites keep a reliable record of which outlying areas actually allowed free parking in 2024 to 2026.
- No accessibility data per car park. Number of disabled spaces, height clearance, lift, route to the exit: none of it is recorded centrally.
- No occupancy statistics for the Wiesn. Everyone says it gets tight. Nobody publishes occupancy rates, search times or cars turned away at the barrier.
We would rather write this down than invent a number. As soon as the city opens an occupancy dataset, this page will get a real live display, and not before.
The right reflex in one sentence
Short visit: one or two hours in a car park, near the Theresienwiese rather than in the old town, which saves about a third. Full day: park and ride on the edge of the city, where the difference is an order of magnitude. Wiesn: do not bring the car at all.
Further reading
The cheapest option is not on this page but in the comparison of park and ride sites, where a day starts at one or two euros. Once the car is parked, the MVV network with its tickets and zones takes over. And to understand how the city is laid out first: our city map with the districts.
Sources
Sources: city-parkhaus-muenchen.de (price sheet of 1 March 2024), mux.de for the Oberpollinger underground car park (2023), parkeninmuenchen.de and radiogong.de for the 2025 and 2026 rate comparison, sixt.de for the 2025 peak values.
Also: oktoberfest.de and muenchen.travel for parking during the Wiesn, tz.de and ovb-heimatzeitungen.de for the 2024 and 2025 ticket figures, stadt.muenchen.de and tolltracker.eu for the low-emission zone.
The parking area counts come from OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API, area 3600062428, as of 12 September 2026; the finding on the missing real-time dataset comes from opendata.muenchen.de. Rates change operator by operator: check the sign before you drive in.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to park in Munich for a day?
Can you park for free in Munich?
Do you need a green sticker to park in Munich?
How strictly does Munich enforce parking rules?
Is there a real-time display of free parking spaces in Munich?
Where can you park during Oktoberfest?
Sophie Hartinger
Sophie worked at the front desk of a city-centre hotel for five years and answered the same questions about car parks and the U-Bahn every day. She writes the pages she would have liked to hand to her guests. She checks every price with the operator, never in a guidebook.
