Illustration of rows of parking bays and a few stylized cars, against cogwheels in red and black.

It sounds like a simple question, but the answer depends on what you count. The same parking space can be given as 12, 15 or 25 square meters depending on how you measure. Here are the most common ways.

The bay itself

A standard car bay is 2.5 meters wide and 5.0 meters long, that is 12.5 square meters. The measurements are not fixed in national law but come from practice and recur in municipal parking standards. Strömstad’s parking standard, for example, states that a bay may not be narrower than 2.5 meters or shorter than 5.0 meters. In tighter locations narrower bays occur, down to about 2.3 meters.

Not all bays are the same size. According to the City of Malmö’s guidelines, a bay for people with reduced mobility should be 5 meters wide, twice as wide as a standard bay, so that a wheelchair fits beside the car. The same measurement, with the option of narrowing to 3.6 meters if there is free space alongside, recurs in several municipalities’ technical handbooks. At a house with a garage, the space in front of the garage should be at least 6 meters, so the door can be opened.

The bay plus the driving areas

In a parking lot the bays rarely stand alone. Each space also needs its share of the driving areas, that is the space for driving up to and turning into the bay. This means that a space on private land in practice takes about twice as much land as the bay itself. A common planning figure is around 25 square meters per space. Four hundred spaces then become about one hectare, that is 10,000 square meters.

For curbside parking on the street the figure is lower. There the street itself serves as the driving area, so you essentially count only the marked strip, about 15 square meters. Such a space is usually somewhat narrower but longer than a standard bay, since the car has to be reversed in. That is the measurement we use when we show how four Stockholm streets could look without cars.

In building permits, size is counted in a third way. Since December 1, 2025, a new building permit framework applies, and Boverket (the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning) has established from it that only the bays themselves are to be counted when calculating the size of a parking area. Access roads, driving lanes between the spaces and maneuvering space between the bays are not included.

This has practical consequences. Under the Planning and Building Act, a building permit is required when parking on a property occupies more than 50 square meters within a detailed development plan, or more than 100 square meters outside one. Since only the bays are counted, a parking area with access roads and driving lanes can in practice take considerably more land than what triggers the permit requirement.

Three measurements, three answers

The three measurements answer different questions. The bay, 12.5 square meters, describes how big the space itself is. The land take including driving areas, around 25 square meters on private land and 15 on the street, describes how much land a parking space actually claims. The building permit definition, where only the bays are counted, determines whether a parking area requires a permit. The same space can thus be given as 12.5, 15 or 25 square meters, depending on which question you ask.

And all of them together?

One space is hard to get a feeling for. All the spaces together are easier. There are just over 35,000 on-street parking spaces in Stockholm’s inner city, and at 15 square meters per space that makes 52.5 hectares, a square with 725-meter sides.

In Parkeringsytan (in Swedish) you can drag that area across the map and place it over your own district. You can also switch the per-space figure between 12, 15 and 18 square meters and see how much the answer moves.

Sources: municipal parking standards and technical handbooks (among others Strömstad, Malmö and Gothenburg); Boverket, PBL kunskapsbanken, and government bill 2024/25:169; the Planning and Building Act, chapter 9, section 22. The figures 15 and 25 square meters are established planning rules of thumb for land take, not measurements fixed in any official document.