Do I have to pay a private parking ticket?

It is not a fine, and that cuts both ways

Only a public body can fine you. A private company operating a supermarket, retail park or hospital car park cannot, so what it issues is an invoice: a claim that you agreed to terms by parking and then broke them. The terms are on the sign.

People take two wrong lessons from this. The first is that a private charge is therefore fake and can be ignored. It cannot: the operator can issue a county court claim, and a judgment against you has real consequences. The second is that it works like a council ticket. It does not, and the differences decide how you should respond.

	Council PCN	Private parking charge
What it is	Statutory penalty	Claim for breach of contract
Where	Public road or council car park	Private land
Issued under	Traffic legislation	The terms on the sign
Independent appeal	Statutory tribunal	POPLA or the IAS, run by the trade bodies
If you never pay	Debt registration and bailiffs	County court claim by the operator

If your ticket came from a council on a public road, you are in the wrong guide: see how to appeal a PCN instead.

The sign is the contract

This is the single most useful thing to understand. Because the charge rests on contract, everything turns on whether the terms were properly brought to your attention before you parked. Signs that are too small to read from a moving car, hidden behind foliage, missing from the entrance, contradictory across a site, or lit so badly they cannot be read at night all undermine the operator's case.

So photograph the signs. All of them, including the one at the entrance, the one nearest your space, and anything obscuring them. Do it at the time if you can, and note the lighting conditions. That evidence is worth more at appeal than any argument about fairness.

Why the charge can be higher than the loss

Drivers often argue the charge is disproportionate because the operator lost nothing. The Supreme Court dealt with that in ParkingEye Ltd v Beavis [2015] UKSC 67. It upheld an £85 charge for overstaying a free two-hour limit, holding that it was not an unenforceable penalty because the operator and the landowner had a legitimate interest in managing turnover of spaces that went beyond simply recovering a loss.

The practical effect is that "you did not lose any money" is not, on its own, a winning appeal point. Arguments about signage, about whether the notice requirements were met, and about the facts of your visit are far stronger.

Keeper liability, and where it does not apply

An ANPR camera reads a number plate, not a face, so the operator often does not know who was driving. Schedule 4 of the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012 lets them hold the registered keeper liable instead, but only if they follow its requirements to the letter. Where no notice was put on the windscreen, the notice to keeper has to reach you within 14 days beginning with the day after the parking ended, and it has to contain specified information. Note that for a posted notice the test is when it was delivered, not when it was posted.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• A late or defective notice defeats keeper liability. If the operator missed the window or left out required wording, they cannot pursue you as keeper, only as driver, and they have to prove you were driving.
• Schedule 4 covers England and Wales only. It does not extend to Scotland or Northern Ireland, so there is no keeper liability there and the operator must establish who was actually at the wheel.

You are not obliged to tell them who was driving. Whether it helps you to do so depends on the circumstances.

The statutory code of practice, and why there is no cap

The Parking (Code of Practice) Act 2019 provided for a binding statutory code for private operators. A code was laid in February 2022 and then withdrawn on 7 June 2022 after a legal challenge, part of which concerned the caps it set on charges and its ban on debt recovery fees. Government consulted again in 2025, and has said it intends to lay a new Code before Parliament in autumn 2026.

So be careful with anything you read about a capped private parking charge. There is no statutory cap in force. What exists are industry caps in the single code the two trade associations introduced in October 2024: £100 on a parking charge and £70 on debt recovery fees. Those are self-regulation, not law, and they are not the £50 figure that still circulates online, which came from the code that was withdrawn in 2022 and never took effect. If a figure is quoted to you as a legal maximum, check whether the code it comes from has actually come into force.

How to appeal, step by step

1. Appeal to the operator first. In writing, within the deadline on the notice. Set out the facts plainly and attach your photographs and any payment evidence. Most operators pause the discount while an appeal is open, but check.
2. Get the independent appeal reference. If they reject you, they must provide a code for the relevant scheme. POPLA handles appeals against British Parking Association members. The Independent Appeals Service handles appeals against International Parking Community members. Both are free to motorists.
3. Make the independent appeal properly. Address the operator's evidence pack point by point. Signage, the notice timing, and whether you actually breached the stated terms are the productive grounds.
4. If you lose and they sue. A county court claim can be defended. Respond to it, do not ignore it, since a default judgment is the worst outcome available.

Grounds that tend to work: signage that was unreadable, absent or contradictory; a notice to keeper that was late or missing required information; a valid ticket or payment that the system failed to match; a machine that was out of order; and mitigating circumstances such as a breakdown. Grounds that rarely work on their own: not having seen the sign, the charge feeling excessive, and everyone else doing it too.

Avoiding them in the first place

Most private charges come from the same handful of mistakes: overstaying a free time limit, mistyping a registration into a terminal, and assuming a bay is general parking when it is reserved. Read the entrance sign before you park rather than on the way out, check the registration on the screen character by character, and photograph the sign if the terms look unusual. The 10-minute grace period that applies to council bays in England does not apply on private land, so a free two-hour stay means two hours.

Read the terms before you walk away

Private car park signs bury the important terms in small print: the maximum stay, whether registration is required, and what happens if you return the same day. Kerbnow reads the sign and tells you in plain English how long you can stay and what the conditions are, and it keeps the photo of the sign in your scan history, which is exactly the evidence you want if a charge turns up weeks later.

Frequently asked questions

This guide is general information about UK parking rules, not legal advice. Kerbnow is a sign-reading aid, so always check the answer against the sign in front of you.