The Finding
We took the cheapest published parking rate at every venue in the four leagues and put it next to the cheapest published ticket at the same venue.
At 12 of the 124, parking costs more than the seat.
Nine of the twelve are MLB ballparks. Three are NBA arenas. Not one is an NFL stadium, and not one is an NHL arena — for a plain reason we will get to.
| Venue | Cheapest parking | Cheapest ticket |
|---|---|---|
| Coors Field | $18 | $7 |
| Dodger Stadium | $40 | $20 |
| Nationals Park | $20 | $12 |
| PNC Park | $15 | $10 |
| Comerica Park | $15 | $10 |
| Oracle Park | $25 | $18 |
| Capital One Arena | $20 | $15 |
| Smoothie King Center | $15 | $12 |
| Little Caesars Arena | $15 | $12 |
| loanDepot park | $10 | $8 |
| Rate Field | $10 | $8 |
| Rogers Centre | C$20 | C$18 |
The Two Extremes
Coors Field has the widest gap by proportion. A Rockpile ticket is $7. The cheapest spot in the Coors Field lots is $18 — two and a half times the price of getting in. You can watch a major league baseball game in Denver for less than a third of what it costs to leave your car outside it.
Dodger Stadium has the widest gap in dollars. Top Deck starts at $20; the stadium lots are $40. The seat is half the price of the parking space, and Dodger Stadium's lots are famous enough as a traffic problem that the team runs a shuttle specifically to keep you out of them.
Why No NFL Stadium Is On This List
Because NFL parking is expensive and NFL tickets are more expensive. The cheapest seat at an NFL game clears the cheapest parking spot everywhere, comfortably, at all 32 stadiums.
The same holds in the NHL. What puts a venue on this list is not costly parking — it is a genuinely cheap upper deck. Every ballpark above sells a seat for $7 to $20, which is one of the better things about baseball and also the thing that makes the parking look absurd next to it.
That is worth saying plainly, because "parking costs more than the ticket" reads like a complaint about parking and is at least half a compliment to the ticket.
What To Do Instead
Here is the part that makes this actionable: at 11 of these 12 venues, the car-free option costs less than both the parking and the ticket.
- Dodger Stadium — the Dodger Express shuttle is free.
- PNC Park — the T across the river to North Shore is free, and the Roberto Clemente Bridge walk is the better version of the same trip.
- Smoothie King Center — the streetcar is $1.
- Comerica Park and Little Caesars Arena — the QLine and People Mover run about $2.
- Coors Field, Nationals Park, Capital One Arena, Oracle Park, Rate Field — RTD, Metro, Muni/Caltrain, and the CTA Red Line all land around $3.
- Rogers Centre — TTC or GO, about C$4.
At Coors Field that is the whole trip: $3 on the light rail and $7 for the Rockpile, and you are at a big league game for ten dollars.
loanDepot park is the one exception. We have no car-free option listed for it — the Little Havana lots at $10 are the cheapest way in that we can publish, against an $8 upper-deck ticket.
How We Got These Numbers
Every parking figure is the cheapest rate the venue actually publishes for a car, and that qualifier is doing real work:
- Transit and shuttle entries are excluded from the parking figure, or the comparison would be circular.
- Estimates are excluded. Where a lot is demand-priced and the venue publishes no standard rate, we flag the figure as provisional and it does not appear in a comparison like this one. Coors Field's LoDo lots are exactly that case — the operator's own listing ran from $7.99 to $37.01 for a single game — so the $18 above is the Coors Field lots, which do publish a floor.
- Toronto prices in Canadian dollars, and we compare in US dollars rather than reading C$20 as $20. That mistake overstates all nine Canadian venues by roughly a third.
Ticket figures are the cheapest published regular seat, not a resale price or a promotional night. Both sides of every comparison carry the source page and the date we read it.
The Broader Point
Parking is the most negotiable line on a game day budget and the one people plan last. It is also the line where the cheap option is usually not a worse experience — the free shuttle at Dodger Stadium and the bridge walk at PNC Park are both better than the drive.
Sort every venue by what a full game day costs at the Game Day Price Index, compare two venues side by side with the comparison tool, or see how the ballparks stack up on MLB game day costs.