The Parkeertabel method: how parking costs are calculated

The Parkeertabel method rests on one public source for rates and hours: the National Parking Register (Nationaal Parkeer Register, NPR), which municipalities fill in and the RDW publishes as Open Data Parkeren under a CC0 licence. We downloaded the tables on 13 November 2026; the register itself was last updated on 12 November 2026. The site covers 24 cities and 831 street zones.

Four tables joined

An area from the GEBIED table is linked to its regulation in REGELING, the regulation to its time frames by weekday in TIJDVAK, and each time frame to a fare made of parts in TARIEFDEEL. Only rows valid on the reading date are kept. A zone with no current fare above zero is left out rather than guessed.

The cost formula

Each fare part covers a span of minutes and charges an amount per step: the cost of a stay is the sum, over the parts, of the steps started times their amount. Utrecht's TAR01 fare, for example, charges per minute and comes to €8.01 for an hour. A stay that runs across several paid periods, or past midnight, is priced period by period, as a new session in a parking app would be. Free minutes cost nothing.

Address to zone

The address search sends what you type to the PDOK Locatieserver of the Dutch Cadastre, which returns the municipality and coordinates. The zone is then found in your browser on the area outlines of the GEOMETRIE GEBIED table. Some municipalities, such as Utrecht and Maastricht, supply no outlines: there you pick the zone from the list.

Permits and penalties

Resident permits and penalty costs are not in the register. We read them in each municipality's 2026 parking tax by-law on the official local legislation site, for example Rotterdam's and Utrecht's. An automated test finds every amount word for word in the downloaded text. For Amsterdam, The Hague and Delft we found no current by-law in that database and show no figure.

Tests and limits

Automated tests check the formula on fares from the register (Utrecht per minute, Amsterdam's day ticket, Rotterdam's evening hours), the join for the three largest cities and the by-law amounts. Not covered: private garages outside the register, parking app fees, blue zones, permit-holder bays and event rates. There is no automatic update: we reload the register by hand. Errors can be reported through the contact page; how we correct is in the editorial policy.