What to charge for HGV parking

It is the first question every landowner asks and the hardest one to get a straight answer to. You have hardstanding, somebody wants to put a lorry on it, and nobody will tell you what that is worth.

The usual advice is to guess low and see what happens. That is how yards end up letting space at twenty pounds a night to a haulier who was budgeting for thirty-five, and never finding out.

Here is a better way to arrive at a number.

Start with what the truckstops charge

Published rates are the cleanest anchor available, because they are the price the market has already agreed to pay.

Welcome Break publish their HGV parking charges openly. Across their network the parking-only rate runs from £27.00 to £41.50 a night, and parking with a £12.00 meal voucher runs from £29.00 to £41.50. Derby is parking-only at £28.00.

Two things in that are worth more than the numbers themselves.

The first is the spread. One operator, one standard of facility, and the price varies by more than fifty per cent depending on where the site is. Location is doing most of the work. If you have been told there is a going rate for HGV parking, that spread is your answer.

The second is what is bundled. A chunk of the headline price at a truckstop is buying a shower, a hot meal and a shop. If you are not providing those, you are not selling the same product, and pretending otherwise gets you a bad review rather than a good rate.

You are not a truckstop, and that cuts both ways

What you lose is the facilities premium. What you gain is everything a truckstop cannot offer.

You are probably where the work actually is, rather than where the motorway happens to be. You can offer a reserved space rather than a scramble at nine in the evening. You can do a long-term arrangement at a sensible rate, which no truckstop will. And you have no £12 meal voucher to fund out of the headline price.

For a secure yard with hardstanding, fencing, lighting and gates, somewhere near the truckstop rate is defensible. For an unlit field with a padlock, it is not, and asking for it wastes everybody's time.

Work out what the space actually costs you

Whatever the market says, you need a floor, and most owners have never worked one out.

Count the business rates attributable to the area, any increase in your insurance premium for taking third-party vehicles, lighting and power, the wear a loaded artic puts through a surface, and your own time answering the phone and opening gates. Divide by the spaces you can realistically let.

If that number is close to what you were planning to charge, you are not running a parking business, you are subsidising one. Better to know in October than to find out in March.

The scarcity you are pricing into

This is not a soft market, and owners routinely under-price because they do not realise that.

The Road Haulage Association puts utilisation of lorry parking spaces at 83 per cent nationally, and as high as 100 per cent on some key routes. A hundred per cent is not a statistic, it is a driver at eleven at night with nowhere legal left to stop.

If your yard sits on one of those routes, you are not competing for scraps. You are supplying something that is genuinely short, and your price should say so.

Per night, per week, per month

Quote all three if you can, because they attract different tenants and the quiet money is in the longer ones.

A nightly rate catches passing trade and is the number people compare you on. A weekly rate suits a driver working a regular run. A monthly rate, at a proper discount against the nightly, is what an operator basing vehicles with you will want, and that is the arrangement that fills the yard in January without you doing anything.

A rough shape that works: take your nightly rate, make the weekly about five nights, and the monthly about eighteen to twenty. You are trading rate for certainty, which is the right trade when the alternative is empty hardstanding.

What actually loses you a tenant

Not the price. Hauliers are used to paying for parking.

What loses them is a price that moves, a charge that appears afterwards, or access hours that turn out to be narrower than advertised. A driver who is quoted thirty and charged thirty-five does not negotiate, they go somewhere else and tell the yard manager why.

Be specific and be boring about it. Say what the rate covers, say when the gate is open, say whether a trailer can be dropped. The yards that keep tenants are the ones with nothing left to find out.

The honest summary

Anchor on what the truckstops near you publish, discount honestly for the facilities you do not have, add back for location and a reserved space, and never go below what the ground costs you to provide.

And whatever you land on, the price is yours. We take no cut of it — there are no booking fees on this site, and HGV-Parking.co.uk is free to use for your first 12 months. Put your yard in front of the operators looking for exactly it.

https://hgv-parking.co.uk/register?role=owner