Parking Structure Cost Per Space: 2026 Benchmarks

The 2026 benchmark

Aboveground structured parking averaged about $52,000 per space in early 2026, excluding land, ranging from roughly $29,000 in lower-cost markets such as Phoenix and Washington DC to roughly $99,000 in Portland. Underground averaged about $73,000 per space, from roughly $40,000 to roughly $111,000. The figures come from a 17-city survey by the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies (Schwartz, No Such Thing as Free Parking, February 2026), built on Rider Levett Bucknall construction cost data. It updates Donald Shoup's earlier analysis, which ran on 2012 RLB numbers, and finds parking construction costs rising about 50 percent faster than general inflation since then.

WGI's Parking Structure Cost Outlook refreshes every year, which makes it worth tracking, but it measures something else. WGI reports a single national median, $29,900 per space in its 2024 edition, the most recent to state one publicly. The $52,000 is an average across 17 named cities, aboveground only. The two count different populations, so neither figure checks the other.

Read the number against the decision it drives. A 400-space garage at $52,000 a space is a $20.8 million commitment before a single car parks. Miss the count by 15 percent and the error is roughly $3 million, poured into concrete that stands empty. The per-space cost is not a line item to look up once. It is the price of being wrong about demand.

What moves the number

Four things move a per-space cost more than anything else.

• Market. Labor and materials price locally, which is why the same garage runs about $29,000 in one metro and about $99,000 in another. The national average hides a spread of more than three to one.
• Above or below grade. Excavation, shoring, waterproofing, and forced ventilation push underground costs well above a deck built on the same site. The roughly $21,000 gap between the aboveground and underground averages is mostly the cost of going down.
• Layout efficiency. A structure's cost is set in square feet per space. Column spacing, ramp geometry, and drive-aisle width decide whether a space consumes 300 square feet or 400, and that spread swings the number by tens of thousands over a full deck.
• Soft costs. Design, permitting, and financing ride on top of the hard cost and scale with the size of the build. A bigger garden of spaces grows the soft costs with it.

Two exclusions matter as much as the figure itself. The benchmark leaves out land, which in a dense market can exceed the structure, and it leaves out financing, which turns a one-time cost into a carried one across the life of the loan.

The cost of the wrong count

Every space a project does not need is dead capital at these prices, and the reform data now shows how much of it was being built to satisfy code rather than demand.

• Seattle removed minimums near frequent transit in 2012. Over the next five years, 868 residential developments built 40 percent fewer parking spaces than the old code required, an estimated $537 million in construction cost avoided and 144 acres freed (Gould, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2022, as compiled in City and County of Denver, Modernizing Parking Requirements, May 2025).
• Buffalo removed minimums in 2017, and its mixed-use developments built 53 percent fewer parking spaces than the former minimums demanded (Hess and Rehler, Journal of the American Planning Association 87(3), 2021).

Neither city forced anyone to build less. They stopped forcing owners to build more than demand supported. At $52,000 a space, the savings were sitting inside the code the whole time, waiting for someone to prove the count.

How to prove the right number

Defaulting to a code ratio is the expensive habit. Proving the count takes three steps.

1. Run a shared parking analysis. When uses peak at different hours, the same space serves an office by day and a restaurant at night, so the combined peak is lower than the sum of every use's maximum. Stacking the maximums is how projects end up overbuilt.
2. Right-size against observed demand. Count what comparable assets actually fill, not what the zoning table assumes. Occupancy is a number you can measure; a code ratio is a number someone guessed.
3. Carry the cost through the pro forma. Cost per space belongs in the model next to rent and net operating income, where an extra deck level shows up as the return it erases rather than a rounding note in the site plan.

Where to start

The shared parking calculator on the tools page gives a first read on how many spaces a mixed-use project actually needs, and the gated pro forma workbook carries cost per space through to net operating income. For the full analysis, advisory and expert work scopes it to the asset, and the mixed-use and development page states how it applies to a project with parking on the ground and revenue above it.

When the estimate raises a question, the next step is a conversation. Bring the number and we will tell you whether it holds.