Motorcycle & moped parking in London: every borough’s rules

Where is motorcycle and moped parking free in London?

Solo motorcycle bays — the ones marked “Solo motorcycles only” or “Solo M/C” — are free to use in 24 of London’s 33 boroughs. That includes the City of London, which surprises people: the Square Mile has free on-street motorcycle bays and publishes a map of them, with a 24-hour maximum stay.

Do not assume free means outer London, though. Bexley charges a motorcycle the full car tariff at every on-street pay-to-park location, Havering charges £2.50 a session, and Waltham Forest gives two wheels no concession at all — three outer boroughs that catch riders who took “outer London is free” at face value. Free also does not mean unregulated: the bay still has to be a motorcycle bay, free of a suspension notice, and the borough can still ticket a bike left across two bays or hanging into the carriageway.

Which London boroughs charge for motorcycle parking?

Bexley, Camden, Hackney, Havering, Islington, Lewisham, Waltham Forest and Westminster charge wherever you park. Rates run from £1 a day in Westminster to £2.50 a session in Havering; Camden charges £1.30 a day, while Hackney (15p–47p) and Lewisham (84p) meter it by the hour. Even the dearest is a fraction of car parking, and a motorcycle or moped pays no Congestion Charge at all for the same trip.

Three more boroughs are free almost everywhere but keep one named exception, which is why the map shows them green and the table still names a price. Brent charges only inside the Lower Place zone. Hammersmith & Fulham — our own borough — charges only on a handful of Caxton Village streets in W12. Kensington & Chelsea charges only in signed shared-use bays; its solo bays without a timeplate are free to any motorcyclist. Ride anywhere else in those three and you pay nothing.

If you ride into the same borough every working day, find its season ticket before paying daily — the gap is large. Westminster is £1 a day but £100 for the year, Islington £1.15 a day but £123.90 a year, and both halve again for an electric machine. Two of the charging boroughs go further than price: Lewisham requires a permit to park a motorcycle anywhere in the borough, and Camden’s bays were free until February 2026, so almost all the advice still circulating about it is out of date.

Motorcycle parking in Westminster

Westminster is the borough most central London commuters actually deal with — it covers the West End, Soho, Mayfair, Marylebone, Victoria and Pimlico — and it has the clearest electric advantage of any. A fully electric motorcycle or moped parks free in its solo motorcycle bays; a petrol one pays £1 a day, or £100 for the year. So the saving is £100 a year rather than the £260 the daily rate implies, because a sensible petrol commuter buys the annual season.

One caveat worth knowing before you rely on it: the electric exemption applies in solo motorcycle bays only. Park in a standard pay-to-park bay instead and the zonal motorcycle charge applies to an electric machine like any other — £4.70 an hour at the base rate, against £1 a day in the bay next door. The practical rule in Westminster is to hold out for a marked motorcycle bay, which is rarely difficult: the borough has the densest motorcycle bay network in the country, and one location number, 6789, covers all of them.

The electric discount, borough by borough

Three boroughs charge a petrol motorcycle and let a fully electric one park for nothing — and they are three a central London commuter meets constantly:

• Hackney — petrol 15p–47p/hour by zone, electric free. "If you have a fully electric motorbike, you do not need to pay for short-stay parking or get a permit." Petrol pays by the hour, banded by zone and emissions. Park in an ordinary pay-and-display bay instead and you pay the full car rate.
• Lewisham — petrol £2.10 all day (84p/hour), electric free. Charging began May 2022 and now covers car parks too. The council's page says both that a permit is needed borough-wide and that electric machines park free, and never reconciles the two — ride electric and check the signs.
• Westminster — petrol £1/day (£100/year), electric free. Confirmed against the council's 2 March 2026 fee notice. Free off-street to anyone in a Q-Park dedicated motorcycle bay car park, Soho excepted. The bay type is everything here: £1 a day in a solo motorcycle bay and nothing at all if electric, against £4.70 an hour in an ordinary pay-to-park bay.

Two more discount rather than exempt: Camden charges an electric machine £0.66 a day against £1.30, and Islington £0.57 against £1.15 — real money over a year, but not zero. Three give electric nothing at all: Bexley and Havering run no emissions-based parking scheme of any kind, and Waltham Forest charges every motorcycle the car tariff, discounting only the resident permit. Kensington & Chelsea is a fourth kind of case: both fuels can park free there, because its solo bays without a timeplate are open to anyone.

Read the conditions before relying on any of this. Westminster’s exemption covers solo motorcycle bays and not ordinary pay-to-park bays. In a Kensington & Chelsea bay that is signed, the exemption arrives as a £0 PayByPhone session you still have to book — no session, no defence. Lewisham still requires a motorcycle permit borough-wide; the electric one simply costs nothing.

Every Moon Fleets vehicle is fully electric, so wherever a borough runs an electric scheme, our riders get it. Combined with £0 ULEZ and no Congestion Charge, parking is one of the places the running-cost gap against a petrol bike quietly widens — see what an electric moped actually costs to run and the London commute cost index for the full picture.

What a ticket actually costs

London parking penalties are set in two bands, and the gap between the bay charge and the fine is the whole argument for paying. In Band A — most of inner London — a higher-level contravention such as parking on yellow lines or in someone else’s bay is £160, and a lower-level one such as overstaying is £110. Band B, covering most outer boroughs, is £140 and £90. Pay within 14 days and every one of those halves. Against a £1 bay in Westminster or a £2.10 day in Lewisham, even the discounted £55 ticket is the worst deal in this guide.

Two things sit outside the borough system entirely. Red routes — the roads with red lines instead of yellow, run by Transport for London — allow no stopping at all outside a marked bay, and carry a £160 penalty that no borough rule softens. And in the central boroughs a bike parked on the pavement, in a suspended bay or across a bay line can be lifted and removed, which costs far more than any ticket. The cheapest insurance is boring: a marked motorcycle bay, fully inside the lines.

Free car parks in the centre

When central London’s on-street bays are full — or you would rather have the bike off the street — two off-street networks take motorcycles for nothing. Westminster’s Q-Park car parks have dedicated motorcycle bays that are free to any rider, petrol included, with the exception of the Soho site. The City of London’s own car parks — Baynard House, London Wall, Minories and Tower Hill — are free for motorcycles too, on top of the Square Mile’s free on-street bays.

Off-street is also the better answer to theft in the centre: covered, lit and watched beats any kerbside bay. Bexley works the same way at the other end of the map — free in every council car park, charged at the kerb — which is worth knowing if you ride out that way.

Every price here is a price during controlled hours

The rates in the table are what you pay while the zone is operating — and outside those hours, in most boroughs, the same bay costs nothing. Hackney says it plainly: outside a zone’s hours you need no permit or voucher, though yellow lines and disabled bays still apply. Kensington & Chelsea says anyone may park free in a resident, pay-by-phone or shared-use bay outside controlled hours. Camden’s bays are free on bank and public holidays.

The catch is that the hours are not uniform and are not even uniform within a borough. Westminster puts it best: the bay’s own signage tells you when payment is required, and those hours differ by zone and sub-zone. Hackney runs zones from a two-hour window to Monday–Saturday until midnight. So a rider who finishes a shift at eleven at night is often parking free in a borough this table marks as charged — but the only way to know is the sign on that bay, which is why we keep saying it.

Bank holidays are worth checking separately, because they are decided borough by borough rather than London-wide. Camden makes its solo motorcycle bays free on bank and public holidays. Bexley makes its car parks, on-street paid bays and permit bays free on the dates it lists. Tower Hamlets says the controls on parking bays do not apply on public holidays at all. Westminster, though, only suspends its pay-to-park bays and single yellow lines and says nothing about motorcycle bays — so a free bank holiday in one borough tells you nothing about the next one, and double yellow lines stay enforced everywhere.

The one borough we will not call

Barking & Dagenham publishes two official answers that contradict each other. Its controlled-parking page asks the question directly — “Do I need a permit if I want to park my motorbike, moped or scooter?” — and answers “Yes”, at £153.30 a year. Its own controlled-parking consultation FAQ says the opposite: solo motorcycles, mopeds and scooters need no permit at all. Both sit on council domains, and neither looks stale. Note too that the annual permit is residents-only, so on the paid reading a visiting rider cannot buy the thing that would make parking lawful.

The honest answer is that we do not know, so we say so and tell you to assume you pay. Every other row here is one we would stake a fine on; that one you should settle by reading the sign at the bay.

A word on how not to read a permit price, because it caught us out. A borough selling a motorcycle permit is not evidence that its motorcycle bays are charged — the permit usually buys the resident bays, which is a different bay type. Tower Hamlets sells one at £54 a year and its motorcycle bays are still free; so does Kensington & Chelsea, whose untimeplated solo bays are free to anyone. Read the permit against the bay it covers, not against the borough.

How do you avoid a parking ticket?

Use designated motorcycle bays only; do not park on the pavement, on double yellows or in car bays. Pavement parking is prohibited across Greater London, not borough by borough, so “the local council doesn’t mind” is never a defence. Where a bay is paid, start the session in the app before you walk away, and check the bay is not suspended — a suspension notice overrides everything, including a valid session.

Lock the moped through the frame to something fixed where you can, and use the GPS tracking that comes with every Moon Fleets subscription. Most of what gets riders ticketed is not the charge — it is a free bay used slightly wrong. When in doubt, search “[borough] motorcycle parking” for the council’s current rules; they are the definitive source, and the borough name in the table above links straight to it.

Parking somewhere safe, not just somewhere legal

A legal bay and a sensible bay are not always the same thing. Motorcycle theft in London concentrates in a handful of central boroughs and, within them, on quiet residential streets rather than busy overlooked ones. Given the choice, take the bay under a street light on a road with footfall over the empty one round the corner, and use the lock rather than relying on the steering lock.

Every Moon Fleets vehicle comes with a tracker and an anti-theft lock in the monthly price, and theft is handled in-house — there is no insurance claim for you to run. There is more on how riders actually lose bikes, and what stops it, in our guide to moped theft and security in London.

Methodology & sources