Eight Chiswick streets give 30 minutes free, but you must still start a session or risk £110. Car park tariffs by emissions band, permits and station spaces.
What you pay to park in Chiswick depends on your car’s carbon dioxide emissions. Hounslow moved to a seven-band system, so two cars in the same bay for the same hour can be charged £1 and £3.60. The band comes from DVLA data against your registration, which means it applies whether or not you know what band you are in.
The other thing to understand is the free parking, because it is free in a way that still requires you to open an app. Everything below was read from Hounslow Council’s own pages and its approved fees schedule on 31 August 2026.
The 30 minutes free, and the catch
Eight stretches of road in Chiswick give 30 minutes’ free parking. The council lists them as:
- Devonshire Road, eastern side, next to 163 Chiswick High Road, at 2A, and outside 38 to 44
- Turnham Green Terrace, outside 5 to 63, excluding all disabled and loading bays
- Burlington Lane, opposite Station Parade 1 to 3
- Park Road, outside 159 and at the side of 206 Sutton Court Road
- Fauconberg Road, from 2 to 30
- Grove Park Road, from 1 to 11
- Strand on the Green, from 106 to 109
- Thames Road, from 64 to 68
Now the catch, in the council’s own words on the guide to parking in Hounslow: “you still need to start the parking session via the app or in a PayPoint shop.”
The free half hour is not free-standing. It is a discount applied to a session you have to open first. Park without opening one and you are not inside a free period, you are parked without payment, which is a £110 penalty charge, reduced to £55 if you pay early. None of the eight locations above is a car park, so there is no barrier or machine to remind you.
Note also that the Chiswick car parks are not on the free-30-minutes list. Hounslow’s two free-half-hour car parks are Albany Parade in Brentford and Bethany Waye in Feltham.
The car parks, and what they cost
Chiswick has four council car parks:
- Chiswick Common Road
- Welstead Way, off Bath Road
- Chiswick Town Hall
- Chiswick House and Gardens
Hounslow does not publish a plain tariff page. The charges sit in Appendix 3 of its Parking Strategy, approved by Cabinet in July 2024, which sorts car parks into five pricing structures. Chiswick Common Road and Welstead Way are in structure 1, the borough’s most expensive. Chiswick Town Hall is in structure 3, which is cheaper but caps you at two hours. Dukes Meadow has a structure of its own and is by a wide margin the cheapest place to leave a car in the borough.
Charges for Chiswick Common Road and Welstead Way, by emissions band:
| Stay | Band 1 (0g/km) | Band 4 (101-130g/km) | Band 7 (over 226g/km) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 30 minutes | £0.50 | £1.30 | £2.20 |
| Up to 1 hour | £1.00 | £2.40 | £3.60 |
| Up to 2 hours | £2.20 | £4.90 | £6.40 |
| Up to 3 hours | £3.50 | £7.80 | £9.60 |
| Up to 4 hours | £4.90 | £10.80 | £12.90 |
| Up to 5 hours | £6.75 | £14.80 | £17.20 |
| Over 5 hours | £8.50 | £18.60 | £21.30 |
A diesel surcharge is added on top, from £0.20 for half an hour to £2.40 for a stay over five hours. Chiswick Town Hall runs on the same per-band rates but stops at the two-hour row.
Dukes Meadow is the outlier, and it is also the one the council leaves off its own list. The guide page names four Chiswick car parks and does not mention Dukes Meadow at all, but the fees appendix gives it a pricing structure of its own. An hour there is £0.35 in band 1 and £0.80 in band 7, and a stay over five hours is £7.10 to £9.80. That is roughly a third of the Chiswick Common Road rate for the same car.
On-street pay-by-phone bays are priced separately again, at £1.60 an hour in band 1 up to £4.00 an hour in band 7, with a £0.40 hourly diesel surcharge.
Check your own band against the emissions band table, which runs from band 1 at 0g/km to band 7 above 226g/km. Your car’s figure is on the V5C or the DVLA vehicle enquiry service.
Paying
There are just over 4,800 cashless spaces across the borough, and the app is PayByPhone. If you do not use a smartphone there are around 140 PayPoint shops that will take the payment instead.
Contactless terminals are being trialled at 13 car parks and seven park-and-shop locations. In Chiswick the trial covers Chiswick Common Road and Welstead Way car parks, plus on-street bays at Strand on the Green (106 to 109) and the west side of Turnham Green Terrace between Chiswick Common Road and Chiswick High Road. The terminals offer six languages and handle the free Blue Badge and 30-minute sessions as well as paid ones.
One useful escape hatch: if you enter the wrong registration or the wrong bay code on PayByPhone, you can cancel within five minutes by texting FINISH to 65565 from the registered number, which voids the session and the payment.
Permits
Resident permits are annual, priced by emissions band, and get steeply more expensive for each extra car in the household.
| Emissions band | First vehicle | Second | Third | Fourth | Fifth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | £60 | £150 | £245 | £335 | £425 |
| 2 | £70 | £160 | £255 | £345 | £435 |
| 3 | £80 | £170 | £265 | £355 | £445 |
| 4 | £90 | £180 | £275 | £365 | £455 |
| 5 | £100 | £190 | £285 | £375 | £465 |
| 6 | £120 | £210 | £305 | £395 | £485 |
| 7 | £140 | £230 | £325 | £405 | £505 |
A £75 diesel surcharge applies at every level. Note that the council’s resident permit page still heads this table “2025/26”, so it is publishing last year’s label on the prices it is currently charging. The figures match the schedule Cabinet approved, so they are the live prices, but the year on the page is wrong.
Cancelling costs money too. Refunds are only possible with three months or more left to run, and there is a £25.50 administration fee.
Other permits:
- Visitor permits: £28.50 for 30 sessions of one hour each, and you may buy up to ten of these permits in a 12-month period. Applications are still on a paper form returned by post or email to the NSL office at Bridge Road Depot, Pears Road, Hounslow TW3 1SQ.
- Temporary resident permit, four weeks, for short stays or while you gather the proof for a full one.
- Business permits, £645 to £1,294 a year for a private vehicle by band, £380 to £1,019.50 for a commercial one.
- Resident motorcycle permits, £40 to £120 a year, priced £20 below the equivalent car permit.
Season tickets for car parks, including Bath Road in Chiswick, run three, six or twelve months. Twelve months costs £1,310 in band 1 rising to £1,730 in band 7, with a £75 diesel surcharge. There is one discrepancy worth flagging: the council’s season ticket page prices a multi-vehicle permit at £1,730 for twelve months, while the approved strategy appendix says multi-vehicle permits are charged at the band 6 rate, which is £1,650. That is £80 a year.
Blue Badge
Hounslow is generous to Blue Badge holders compared with several neighbouring boroughs. With the badge and, where required, a parking clock displayed, you can park free:
- in on-street pay-to-park bays
- in resident permit and shared-use bays, for unlimited periods
- in every Hounslow Council car park, in pay-to-park or disabled bays
- on single or double yellow lines for up to three hours, where there is no loading ban and you are not causing an obstruction
Applications cost £10, refunded if you are turned down, and the council says the process normally takes 12 weeks. Misuse carries a £1,000 fine and confiscation. The eligibility criteria and the online form are on the Blue Badge page.
Station parking: there is almost none
If you were planning to drive to the train, do not. Chiswick station on Burlington Lane has five parking spaces, one of them accessible. National Rail lists the tariff as £1 an hour, £4.30 for the day, £2.20 on Saturdays and Sundays, £17.10 a week and £598 a year, with Blue Badge holders parking free. The same station has 50 cycle spaces, ten times its car capacity.
Kew Bridge station has no car park at all, and 20 cycle spaces. Both stations are run by South Western Railway.
That is the whole of the station parking supply on the Chiswick side of the borough, which is a large part of why the streets around Turnham Green and Chiswick Park are controlled.
Penalty charges and controlled parking zones
PCNs come at two levels. The higher rate is £160, or £80 if paid early, and covers yellow lines, parking in a resident bay without a permit, suspended bays, disabled bays and footway parking. The lower rate is £110, or £55, and covers overstaying, a lapsed session, and not parking within the bay markings.
Three contraventions apply across London without any signs at all, because they come from primary legislation rather than a local order: parking with a wheel on the footway, parking more than 50cm from the kerb outside a marked bay, and parking across a dropped kerb. You are entitled to park in front of your own dropped kerb, as long as it is not shared with a neighbour and you are not obstructing anyone, and you may not charge visitors to use it.
To check whether an address sits inside a controlled parking zone, use the council’s CPZ map. Being inside a zone does not guarantee a permit: some newer flats carry a planning condition that bars the occupiers from getting one.
If your road has no zone and you want one, the council will not act on a single street. It asks for a petition of at least ten signatures from residents of more than one road before it will consider it.
More Chiswick local information: bin collection days, council tax bands, roadworks and travel and things to do in Chiswick.
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