LAX's Economy Lot Is $245 a Week. The Same Agency's Van Nuys Lot Is $42.

Add the FlyAway both ways and the Van Nuys week is $67.50 door to door — $72.50 under LAX's own Budget lot, $177.50 under its Economy lot and $457.50 under valet. We priced every rate the airport and Metro publish themselves, and found the line where parking at the airport starts winning again. It is four travelers.

Los Angeles World Airports runs the parking at LAX. It also runs a parking lot in Van Nuys, twenty miles up the 405, and that one costs $6 a day. The cheapest space the same agency rents at LAX itself is $20 a day, the lot it markets as economy is $35, and the structures across from the terminals top out at $60, $70 and $75 depending on how close to the door you insist on being. Same landlord. Same website. One week, one traveler, and the difference between the two ends of that sentence is $483.

The rungs, and then the argument. Seven days at the posted drive-up maximum: $525 valet, $490 premium, $420 in the terminal structures, $245 at LAX Economy, $140 at LAX Budget, $81.50 parked at Union Station and bussed in, $67.50 parked in Van Nuys and bussed in, and $3.50 if you leave the car at home and tap onto a train. Eight prices for one errand — putting a vehicle somewhere while you are on an airplane — and every one of them comes off a page the airport or Metro maintains itself.

The criteria, stated once

Every figure here is a posted drive-up rate, read on August 25, 2026, from LAWA's own parking page, Van Nuys Airport's rate page, the FlyAway fare page, the FlyAway Union Station page and Metro's fare page. Private off-airport lots are excluded on purpose: they set their own numbers, move them by the week, and none of them is the agency that also decides what the official lots charge. Reserved rates are excluded too, and that is a concession — LAWA advertises reservations at "up to 60% off drive up rates," which is a real discount we cannot print, because the price it produces depends on the dates you enter. The trip priced throughout is seven days and one traveler, and the multi-traveler math gets its own section, because it flips the answer.

One thing the airport does that most sellers in this city do not: the numbers on that page are already all-in. "Fees include 10% Los Angeles City Parking Occupancy Tax," LAWA writes above the table. The sticker is the door price. Hold that thought for two sections, because the gap in this piece turns out not to be fees. It is geography.

$525, $490, $420: the terminal structures

Eight structures, more than 7,000 stalls, directly across from the terminals, and three separate prices for the same asphalt. Drive-up general parking in P1 through P7 is $9 for the first hour or fraction thereof, $7 for each thirty minutes after that, and $60 maximum for each 24-hour period. Premium parking on the arrivals level of P1, P3 and P7 is $11, then $9, capped at $70. Valet in P1, P3, P4 and P7 is $75 for each 24-hour period, and the page adds three words in parentheses that do all the work: 24-hour minimum.

Two structures charge more than their neighbors for the identical service. P3 and P4 bill $11 for the first hour and $9 for each half hour after — the premium rate, in the general lanes — and then cap at the same $60 as everybody else. Which means a short stay in P3 costs a quarter more than the same stay in P2, and a long stay costs exactly the same. We ran the ladder out by the half hour: general parking reaches its $60 ceiling at the five-hour mark, and P3 and P4 reach it at four. Park all day and the surcharge is free. Park for two hours and it is six dollars.

$245: LAX Economy, and the pick we expect mail about

Here is the one readers will argue with, so here is the case. LAX Economy Parking, at 6100 W. 94th Street, is a good facility — more than 4,000 stalls, 514 active EV chargers, a complimentary shuttle to the terminals around the clock — and it is the worst-priced rung on this ladder at both ends of a trip.

At the short end: the lot charges $8 for the first hour and $7 for each thirty minutes after, against $9 and $7 in the terminal structure. Two hours in the Economy lot is $22. Two hours across from your gate is $23. One dollar, and for that dollar you buy a shuttle ride in each direction. The lot hits its $35 daily maximum after three hours, so anyone stopping longer than a lunch has bought the whole day.

At the long end: seven days is $245, which is $105 more than LAX Budget, the airport's other off-terminal lot, at 5455 West 111th Street, where the maximum is $20 a day and the shuttle runs 24 hours a day every 20 to 25 minutes. That is the other half of the case. Budget publishes a headway. Economy publishes "24 hours a day" and stops there. The cheaper lot is the one that tells you how long you will be standing at the curb.

$140: LAX Budget, and the page that disagrees with itself

Twenty dollars a day, more than 2,000 uncovered stalls, no EV chargers, a free shuttle every 20 to 25 minutes. It is the best deal on airport property and it comes with a genuine ambiguity, printed twice on one page in two different forms. In the rate summary near the top, LAWA lists Budget's drive-up rate as "$5 First hour or fraction thereof." In the Budget section further down the same page, it lists "$5 Every hour or fraction thereof." Under the first wording a four-hour stay costs $5. Under the second it costs $20. Both sentences were on flylax.com/parking-at-lax when we read it on August 25; the daily maximum, $20, is the same in both places, so the disagreement only bites the short-stay driver — who is exactly the driver reading a rate table before deciding where to turn.

$81.50 and $67.50: park somewhere else, ride in

The FlyAway is LAWA's own bus. Two routes still run — LAWA lists the Hollywood and Long Beach services as suspended — and both of the survivors come attached to a parking lot that undercuts everything at the airport. A one-way FlyAway fare is $12.75, so a round trip is $25.50 a head.

From Union Station, LAWA's page puts the daily rate in the garage under the bus plaza at $8, with a 30-day limit — $56 for the week, $81.50 door to door. Buses leave for LAX hourly from 3 a.m., then every thirty minutes from 5:30 a.m. until 11:30 p.m. Coming back, the last bus out of LAX is 1:10 a.m. and the first is 5:40 a.m., which is a four-and-a-half-hour hole in the night that a red-eye lands squarely inside.

From Van Nuys, the number is the story. Public parking at the FlyAway terminal is $2 per hour and $6 maximum per day, open to FlyAway passengers only — $42 for the week, $67.50 door to door. That is $72.50 less than the cheapest week LAWA sells at the airport, $177.50 less than its Economy lot, and $457.50 less than valet, and it is the same agency's asphalt with the same agency's bus running off it. Van Nuys Airport also asks that anyone leaving town for more than 30 days get dropped off instead. The LAX lots handle the same situation differently: vehicles parked over 30 days are subject to impound at the owner's expense, under Los Angeles Municipal Code sections 87.35 and 89.41.

$3.50: no lot at all

Metro's base fare is $1.75, transfers are free within two hours when you tap, and the fare-capping rules mean you never pay more than $5 in a day or $18 in a week. A trip out and a trip back a week apart are two separate days, so the round trip is $3.50. The rail connection is real: the LAX/Metro Transit Center station opened June 6, 2025, joining the C and K lines to six Metro bus lines and eight municipal ones, and LAWA runs a free shuttle from there to the terminals — every ten minutes, per Metro, "as riders await access to the APM," the automated people mover still being built above the station. That people mover connects "in 2026," in Metro's words on the same page, and no month is attached to it. Until it arrives, the last mile of the train trip to LAX is a bus.

Sticker vs. door

The door price at the airport is the sticker, tax included, which is more than most sellers in this county manage. What the sticker does not tell you is the clock. Every maximum LAWA posts is "for each 24-hour period," not per calendar day, so the meter starts when the arm goes up. Leave at 9 a.m. and come back a week later at 4 p.m. and you have bought eight periods, not seven. Ten minutes are free in the terminal structures, and the Cell Phone Waiting Lot on 96th Street just east of Sepulveda is free for as long as the arriving passenger takes — the only free product on the airport's price list that lasts longer than ten minutes.

The FlyAway's fine print runs the other way — it is on the ticket, not the parking arm. A ticket is valid 60 days from purchase and three hours from the moment you activate it, so activate at the bus and not in the terminal. Two children under the age of five ride free with each paying adult. There are no reservations at all; LAWA says to arrive ten minutes early and takes riders first come, first served. Cash does not work on board, and non-contactless cards do not either.

The comparable

Everything above prices one person, and one person is where the Van Nuys answer is strongest. Parking is billed per car. A bus is billed per head. So the ladder inverts as the party grows, and it inverts at a specific number.

Two travelers, seven days, Van Nuys: $42 plus $51 in fares, $93 — still $47 under LAX Budget. Three: $118.50, still $21.50 under. Four: $144, which is $4 over Budget's $140, and the argument is done. Four is the line. On a three-day trip the line moves to two people, because the parking half of the bill shrinks and the fares do not: two travelers pay $69 through Van Nuys against $60 at Budget. And Metro's $3.50 a head never loses to anything, at any party size, on any trip length — a family of four rides for $14 round trip, which is two-fifths of one day in the Economy lot.

What none of this prices is time, and we will not pretend otherwise: the FlyAway from Van Nuys and the train from anywhere both cost minutes that a car parked across from the terminal does not. Those minutes are worth something. They are not worth $457.50.

Rate of the month

Valet, and it is the parenthesis rather than the number. Seventy-five dollars a day is steep and legible. "24-hour minimum" means a driver who hands over the keys at P1, walks a relative to the door and comes back forty minutes later has bought a full day of valet parking at LAX. There is no shorter valet product on the page. The airport sells the service by the day and only by the day, in the four structures where people are most likely to want it by the hour.

One honorable mention, not a fee. LAWA's ground transportation page — the page a first-time traveler is sent to for every option here — stated, when we read it on August 25, that "Lyft and Uber have suspended operations in the state of California," and then named Lyft, Opoli and Uber as the airport's authorized ride-app providers in the following sentence. We are not pricing rideshare in this piece, because LAWA publishes no rideshare price to check. The one thing it did publish about ride apps was a sentence its own next sentence contradicted. Check the date before you check the rate.