Parking at Zurich Airport

Zurich Airport has parking for several thousand vehicles across a set of car parks that differ mainly in one thing: how far you walk with your luggage. Price follows distance, and the cheapest option is the one that requires a shuttle.

The car parks

Car park	Where	Walk to check-in	Suits
P1, P2, P3	Directly at the terminals	Minutes, under cover	Short stays, business trips, dropping someone off
P6 (Parkhaus Butzenbüel)	A short distance from the terminals	Longer walk or shuttle	Holiday parking, longer stays
Valet parking	You stop at the terminal	None — the car is taken from you	Time pressure, bad weather, a full car
Off-airport operators	Nearby, private	Shuttle bus	Long stays where price dominates

The rule is simple and holds everywhere: the closer the space, the higher the tariff. For a two-hour pickup that is irrelevant; for two weeks it decides the bill.

Prices

These are the airport’s own on-site tariffs — what you pay driving up without an online booking, in CHF including VAT. Verified 9 August 2026 on flughafen-zuerich.ch. They are revised, so check the source before you travel.

Stay	P1 / P2 / P3 / P4 — at the terminals	P6 — four minutes on foot
1 day	56.–	56.–
2 days	99.–	87.–
3 days	131.–	114.–
4 days	160.–	138.–
5 days	189.–	157.–
6 days	218.–	176.–
7 days	247.–	195.–
14 days	450.–	328.–
21 days	653.–	461.–
Each additional day	29.–	19.–

Booking online is cheaper, and it opens the two outdoor car parks that are otherwise unavailable: P60, a fifteen-minute walk, and P65, a free shuttle five to seven minutes out. The airport advertises online long-stay parking from CHF 94 per week.

Read the shape of the table rather than any single number. The first day costs 56, the fourteenth costs 19 or 29 — on a long stay it is the tariff structure, not the daily rate, that decides the bill. That is also where a transfer starts to win.

What is worth knowing regardless of the numbers:

• Booking online in advance is materially cheaper than turning up at the barrier. This is consistently true and is the single biggest saving available.
• The daily rate falls the longer you stay — a week does not cost seven times a day.
• Short-stay parking is expensive by design, to keep spaces turning over.
• The first minutes at the kerb for a drop-off are free or nearly so; parking properly for a coffee is not.

Two related pages: valet parking, where you hand the keys over at the terminal, and park or transfer?, which works the comparison through with real numbers.

Is parking even the right choice?

Here is the comparison people rarely make. Two weeks of airport parking, plus fuel, plus the drive in both directions, against a fixed-price transfer at CHF 120 each way from central Zurich.

Your trip	Usually better	Why
Two hours, collecting someone	Park at P1–P3	Nothing else is quicker
Two or three days, from the city	Train or transfer	The car sits idle and paid for
Two weeks, from the city	Transfer, usually	Two fixed fares against fourteen parked days
Two weeks, from a village with no rail	Park, or transfer	Depends on distance — price the transfer before assuming
You need the car the moment you land	Park	Nothing replaces having your own vehicle waiting

We sell transfers, so treat that table as an argument rather than a verdict — but run the arithmetic before booking a fortnight of parking. It surprises people.

Practical points

Dropping off and picking up

Dropping off is straightforward: the kerbside areas at the terminals allow a short stop to unload. They are actively managed and not a place to wait.

Picking up is where it goes wrong. Flights arrive late, baggage takes thirty to forty-five minutes on a long-haul, and circling costs more than parking. Park properly in a short-stay car park and watch the live arrivals board from a café.

Parking at Zurich Airport — FAQ