For new apartments, the research found that building required parking adds roughly $50,000 to $100,000 per unit, and disproportionately increases the cost to build smaller apartments
Across the United States, zoning codes require new developments to provide a minimum number of parking spaces, which carry substantial construction costs.
In this report, we use 2025 construction cost estimates from Rider Levett Bucknall to calculate the cost per space in 17 U.S. cities and combine these data with local minimum parking requirements to estimate how parking mandates increase total construction costs across building types.
We find that parking construction costs have risen substantially faster than inflation since 2012 and that required parking can account for a large share of total project costs—adding tens of thousands of dollars per housing unit and, in some cases, increasing total construction costs by more than 50%
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