Cologne Bonn Airport Parking: the Fourth Day Costs One Euro

Cologne Bonn Airport runs three multi-storey car parks and two surface areas holding, by its own count, more than 12,500 spaces. For an airport of this size that is a great deal of tarmac, and the consequence shows up in the price list: CGN does not have to turn long-stay drivers away, it has to attract them. The tariff ladder in car park 3 does that with a step I have not found stated this plainly at any other German airport.

Every figure below comes from Cologne Bonn Airport’s own parking tariff page, retrieved in September 2026 (as of 2026). Airport prices move; the structure behind them moves more slowly, and it is the structure that carries the decision.

Cologne Bonn Airport car park prices: P1, P2, P3 and Parkplatz Nord

Four facilities are serious candidates for a departing passenger, and they differ less in comfort than in the question of when they become cheap.

Facility	Position per operator	Spaces	1 day	First week	Online from
Car park 1	at Terminal 1	1,120	€43	–	€129
Car park 2	at Terminal 2	3,930	€43	€169	€75
Car park 3	350 m walk	6,547	€36	€109	€39
Parkplatz Nord	150 m walk	80	€43	€180	€125

Car park 1 charges €7 for each hour begun and caps at €43 a day; the price list quotes no weekly rate for it at all, only the online tariff, so P1 is unmistakably built for short stays. Car park 2 charges €6 per hour begun, holds the step-free bays and the women’s spaces, and continues to €229 for fourteen days, then €7 for each further day.

Car park 3, at 6,547 spaces, is larger than the other three combined: €4 per hour begun, €36 a day for the first three days, €165 for fourteen. Parkplatz Nord is the smallest area at 80 spaces, yet at a 150-metre walk it sits closer to the terminals than P3; it meters the first four days separately at €43 and charges €9 for every day after the first week — the most expensive week on the official list. Alongside these sits an exclusive product with its own secured compound at €55 a day and €205 a week.

CGN parking P3: 350 metres, and a fourth day for one euro

Work out car park 3’s ladder rather than reading it. Three days at €36 come to €108. Four to seven days cost a flat €109.

The fourth day therefore costs one euro. The fifth, sixth and seventh cost nothing.

That is not an arithmetic slip but a deliberately placed edge, and it works in most travellers’ favour: fly on Thursday and come back on Sunday and you pay practically what someone pays who does not land until the following Wednesday. Whether a trip runs three days or seven is no longer a parking question at CGN.

The same edge exists elsewhere, more bluntly cut: in P2 the fourth day costs €40 and the three that follow cost nothing, while at Parkplatz Nord the fifth day costs €8 and the sixth and seventh nothing at all.

The price of that ladder is the 350-metre walk the airport itself publishes. Measured from the coordinates on the official airport map, P3 sits roughly 700 metres from Terminal 2 as the crow flies and a good kilometre from Terminal 1; the 350 metres clearly describe the signposted access, not the distance to a check-in desk. If the walk does not put you off, seven days in P3 cost exactly €60 less than in car park 2 — same week, same site.

Long-stay parking at Cologne Bonn: what the second week costs

Beyond the first week the arithmetic calms down without becoming linear. Fourteen days cost €165 in P3 and €229 in P2. In P3 that is just under €11.80 a day across the whole stay — a figure German airports usually leave to off-site operators to advertise. The second week therefore costs €56 in P3 and €60 in P2. For any day beyond the published rungs the list quotes €5 (P3), €7 (P2) and €9 (Parkplatz Nord); if you are away for three weeks, check the total in the booking system rather than extrapolating, because the ladder is written as a list of products, not as a formula.

How differently the same problem can be solved is clear further south, where the daily rate runs on to a weekly cap and then drops to a heavily reduced figure, worked through under parking costs at Frankfurt Airport. Cologne reaches a comparable outcome by a flat rate that bites early instead.

Cheap parking at Cologne Airport: the online rate and the three-euro Sunday

The largest single lever is not which car park you choose but how you book it. In car park 3 the same week costs €109 at the barrier and from €39 online: a gap of €70, for the same building, the same dates and the same walk to the terminal. In P2 it is €169 against €75. The online tariff is published as a from price and therefore moves with demand — in the North Rhine-Westphalian summer holidays it sits higher than on a Tuesday in February. That does not change the direction of the finding.

CGN also runs something I have not seen in this form anywhere else: the Shoppingtarif. On Sundays and public holidays, every entry and exit in car parks 1, 2 and 3 costs a flat €3 — provided you enter after 9:00 and leave before 19:00.

That condition is not small print, it is the whole point. The airport states it explicitly: enter before 9:00 or leave after 19:00 and the regular tariff applies to the entire stay. Arrive at 8:50 on a Sunday and leave at 18:00 and you pay not €3 but the full daily rate — ten minutes of impatience costing €40. Read the other way, the shopping tariff is unbeatable for an afternoon on the visitors’ terrace or a pick-up, as long as you watch the clock. Which terminals and times apply at CGN is set out in an overview of departures from Cologne Bonn.

Drive further, park cheaper? The check against Düsseldorf

The Rhineland rule of thumb holds that Cologne Bonn is the cheap airport and Düsseldorf the dear one. Roughly 70 road kilometres separate them — far enough that it is worth asking whether the parking price is worth chasing. The check comes out differently from what the rule promises.

Two sources are available on the Düsseldorf side. Düsseldorf Airport advertises on its own holiday-parking page (as of 2026) a week’s parking “from €50”, naming as specific online offers seven days in P5 for €75, in P7 for €95 and in P3 for €115. The barrier prices come from our own account of parking at Düsseldorf Airport, published in August 2026: there the weekly rate for the official car parks starts at around €105 in P8 and runs to about €190 in P1.

So the comparison reads: €39 online at Cologne Bonn against from €50 at Düsseldorf — eleven euros apart. At the barrier, €109 against roughly €105, which makes Cologne Bonn marginally the dearer, with the caveat that the Cologne figure is the fresher one and the two do not come from the same month.

The rule of thumb does not survive that. Eleven euros online is real, but it does not cover the extra drive: 140 kilometres there and back, at seven litres per 100 kilometres and an assumed €1.75 a litre, burn around €17 of fuel before anyone counts the time. What distinguishes CGN is not its price level but the shape of its ladder — the flat rate that starts on day four, and the three-euro Sunday.

Kerbside drop-off: ten minutes free, then very steep

For dropping off and collecting there is the Terminalvorfahrt, the kerbside forecourt, with a maximum stay of one hour. Up to ten minutes are free, but only once a day. After that the ladder climbs hard: €8 to fifteen minutes, €11 to twenty, and €3 for every further five minutes begun. From the second entry on the same day, every five-minute unit costs €5 from the outset.

That is a deliberate barrier against circling: go round again because nobody was out on the first attempt and the second pass costs markedly more than the first. If you are expecting a delay you are better off in a car park — or, on a Sunday, paying €3. For short stops there are also P1K on level 0 and P1A and P20 on level -1 at Terminal 1, each €5 up to thirty minutes and €2 per further ten.

If someone else is driving, it is worth knowing the counter-calculation: distances and indicative taxi ranges for hundreds of destinations around CGN are broken down by kilometres and driving time, and for journeys from further out in the region the order of magnitude of a fifty-kilometre ride is a better yardstick than instinct.

1.95 metres: the number that comes before any price

Before you compare a single tariff, measure your car. The airport gives the maximum height in its multi-storey car parks as 1.95 metres and directs larger vehicles explicitly to Parkplatz Nord or car park 1.

That restriction costs more than it sounds. Parkplatz Nord has 80 spaces and charges €180 for five to seven days; for a week, P1 publishes only the online rate from €129. Arrive with a roof box, a roof-mounted bike rack or a high-roof estate and you are shut out of the airport’s cheapest product altogether — competing for eighty spaces. Booking ahead is then not a recommendation but the precondition for arriving at all. Anyone parking off-site should also settle a question that has nothing to do with price: handing over a key creates not a contract for a space but a contract of bailment, with different consequences if the car comes back damaged — taken apart under valet parking and liability.

If you are not flying yourself but only dropping someone off, the cheapest move is often not to reach the airport at all: Cologne’s park-and-ride network is free of charge but requires a valid ticket and caps the stay at 24 hours, with the conditions set out under park and ride in Cologne. And if you want to leave the car at home entirely, CGN offers something many German airports do not: by its own account it has its own ICE station in the immediate vicinity of both terminals. How a long-distance station of that kind meshes with the terminals at the far end of the line is explained platform by platform in the Frankfurt example.

In the end the choice at Cologne Bonn Airport comes down to three numbers, and the weekly rate is not among them: 1.95 metres decides which buildings are open to you at all; the fourth day decides whether a longer trip costs more than a short one, and in P3 it does — by one euro; and 9:00 to 19:00 decides, on a Sunday, between €3 and €43. The weekly rate itself, as the Düsseldorf check shows, is the least distinctively Cologne thing about this airport.