Blue zone: how long you may park — and how to set the parking disc

Setting the parking disc: the rule almost everybody gets wrong

The arrow goes on the next stroke after your arrival, not on the arrival time itself.

The disc has a stroke every thirty minutes, so: arrived at 13:35, arrow on 14:00. Arrived at 14:00, arrow on 14:30, even when you land exactly on a stroke.

That is Art. 48a para. 3 SSV, and the part-hour is a gift: arrive on the hour and you stand for 90 minutes.

Once set, it stays set. The ordinance says it in so many words: the setting of the parking disc may not be changed before departure. Come back after an hour and turn the dial and you are not parking afresh. You are falsifying your arrival time.

And the disc belongs clearly visible behind the windscreen (Art. 48a para. 4 SSV).

Electronic parking discs are not allowed in Switzerland. The Federal Roads Office has warned about them: such discs are not provided for in Swiss law, and using one can get you fined, even when it was correctly locked while you parked (ASTRA, press release of 5. September 2006). The permitted disc is the one in Annex 3 of the ordinance: at least 11 cm wide, 15 cm high, blue.

You can get one at petrol stations, municipal offices and the motoring clubs; which one you take does not matter, as long as it meets that standard.

Lunchtime, evening, Sunday: when you may stay longer than an hour

The blue zone without an extra sign applies on working days from 08:00 to 19:00. Working day means Monday to Saturday; Saturday counts, without any sign having to say so.

On Sundays and public holidays the limit does not apply, unless an extra sign expressly orders it (Art. 48a para. 2 let. a SSV).

Within those hours the ordinance knows two exceptions, and both sit in a table hardly anyone reads:

• Arrival 11:30 to 13:29 stay until 14:30
• Arrival 18:00 to 07:59 stay until 09:00

The lunchtime rule is the most expensive minute of the day. Arrive at 11:29 and you must be gone by 12:30, which is 61 minutes. Arrive one minute later and you may stay until 14:30: 180 minutes. One minute later is 119 minutes more.

Overnight you may stay put. Between 19:00 and 07:59 you need no disc at all, provided you drive off before 08:00. Stay longer and you set it to the next stroke after your arrival: then you may stand until 09:00. Arrive as early as 18:00 and the disc is required, and it buys you the same deadline of 09:00.

The full table from the ordinance

This is the table the calculator above takes one line from: SSV Annex 3 no. 1, as of 1. July 2026. «Next stroke after A» means: the next half-hour mark after your actual arrival.

And the footnote of the ordinance, word for word: «Zwischen 19.00 und 07.59 muss die Parkscheibe nicht angebracht werden, sofern das Fahrzeug vor 08.00 wieder in den Verkehr eingefügt wird.» In English: between 19:00 and 07:59 the disc need not be displayed, provided the vehicle rejoins traffic before 08:00.

Blue, white, yellow: what each zone means

The colour of the marking says which rule applies. Parking bays are marked with solid lines, and those are white, and blue in the blue zone (Art. 79 para. 2 SSV). Yellow at the kerb means the opposite: do not stand here.

Yellow-marked parking bays are something else again: they are reserved for particular user groups (Art. 79 para. 5 SSV).

• Blue zone

  Disc behind the windscreen, one hour, working days 08:00–19:00. The sign is called «Parkieren mit Parkscheibe» (4.18); as a zone sign carrying the word ZONE it covers a whole neighbourhood.

• White zone

  An ordinary parking bay. Whether it costs anything and how long you may stay is on the sign beside it: a meter, an extra sign, or nothing at all. With no sign and no meter there is no time limit.

• Yellow lines and crosses

  Yellow at the kerb means: do not stand here. The solid line is a no-stopping order, the line with crosses a no-parking order, the yellow bay a reserved space. What each shape means is on no parking and no stopping.

And on private ground? A space in front of a shop or behind a house belongs to its owner; his rules apply there, not the ordinance. A disc may be required without any blue marking on the ground, and the concessions for people with walking disabilities expressly do not apply there (Art. 20a para. 3 VRV).

Staying longer: the day permit

If you have to stand in the blue zone all day, for a job, a visit or a house move, you need a day permit. It comes from the municipality, not from the federal government. That makes it the one thing about the blue zone that differs from place to place.

Depending on the city it is called a Tageskarte, a Besucherkarte, a Tagesbewilligung or a «macaron journalier», usually runs for 24 hours, and is bought through an app almost everywhere now.

The price is the biggest inequality in a rule that is otherwise the same everywhere: across the twenty largest cities in Switzerland a day costs between CHF 5 in Thun and CHF 20 in Geneva, Basel, Lucerne and Vernier.

Four times as much for the same hour that federal law regulates identically everywhere. The full table is further down.

Resident permit and disabled parking permit

The resident permit lets you stand in the blue zone of your own neighbourhood without a time limit. It comes from the municipality, is tied to your home address, and across the twenty largest cities costs between CHF 200 in Geneva and CHF 710 in Winterthur a year.

Some cities ask for proof that no private space is available; Basel grades the price by the length of the car.

The parking card for people with disabilities is a different thing: it comes from the canton, not the municipality, and is issued to anyone who proves a serious walking disability with a medical certificate, and to anyone who keeps a vehicle demonstrably used to transport such people often (Art. 20a para. 5 VRV).

It allows three things, and the ordinance lists them one by one:

• Standing in parking baysno time limit
• Where parking is prohibited by sign or markingup to 3 hours
• In encounter zones outside the baysup to 2 hours

«No time limit in parking bays» includes the blue zone, so no disc is needed there. Three conditions always apply: other traffic must be neither endangered nor unnecessarily obstructed, no unrestricted parking space may be free in the immediate vicinity, and anyone who is not disabled themselves may use the card only while actually driving and accompanying a person who is.

The card belongs clearly visible behind the windscreen. On privately managed parking areas the concessions do not apply.

Standing properly in the bay: parallel, in reverse, all the way in

Does the whole car have to be inside the bay? Yes, and the ordinance says so in so many words: where parking bays are marked, vehicles may be parked only inside those bays (Art. 79 para. 6 SSV). Anyone sticking out over the line is standing outside it, and therefore where parking is not allowed.

That counts front and back just as much as to the side.

Parallel parking is taught in reverse during driving lessons, and that is no accident: driving in forwards needs a much bigger gap, because the front wheels have to have finished steering before the rear is anywhere near the kerb.

Reversing swings the rear into the gap while the front wheels are still steering. That is why a noticeably smaller gap is enough. It comes back in the exam: manoeuvring, parking and securing the vehicle is one of the criteria of the practical driving test.

Reversing into a bay is almost always the better choice in a residential street: you drive out forwards, with a view of the road. In the blue zone there is one more reason. Standing nose-out, you read the extra sign as you get out instead of hunting for it in the mirror.

That is the sign that decides whether one hour applies or two.

What a first driving lesson is like and what gets practised in it is on the first driving lesson.

Parked wrong: what it costs

Overstaying the parking time is a fixed-penalty fine, and its size depends on how long the car stood there too long. It is set in the federal Ordnungsbussenverordnung, not by the municipality. The amounts are not here but in the fines calculator, which works them out for every offence and keeps them current when the federal government changes them.

Two questions that get asked a lot are deliberately not answered on this page. Whether a fine can be challenged depends on the individual case and is a legal question. An unpaid fixed-penalty fine ends up in ordinary proceedings, and no calculator can say what makes sense there. And a charge on private ground is not a fine at all: there a private company issues an invoice, and whether it is justified is a matter of contract law.

In both cases: ask the municipality or a legal adviser, not us.

Your city: what a day permit and a resident permit cost

The rule is the same across Switzerland. The price is not. The hours and the parking time are federal law and apply identically from Geneva to St. Gallen; what a municipality sets for itself is the price of staying longer. We read it on 21. September 2026 for the twenty largest cities in Switzerland, on their own pages: 14 of 20 publish a day price, 11 a yearly one.

Where nothing stands, the city did not publish it where you would look for it; we then write nothing.

The cities are sorted by the day price, those without a published price at the end. Hours are entered only where the city states them itself; otherwise the federal rule above applies. Prices change; the sign at the bay and the municipality's own page come before this table. Found a mistake: write to us and we will update it.

Where these figures come from

Research and calculation: Dima Makukha, ToDrive · sources read on 21. September 2026

The rule comes from federal law and sits in the code exactly once, with its reference, the date of the version and the date it was read. The cities' prices were read one by one on each city's own page, not taken from a guide; every row of the table links the page it stands on. Where the day price and the yearly price sit on two different pages of the same city, it links both.

The rule

Signalisationsverordnung (SSV), SR 741.21, Art. 48a para. 1–4 (parking disc), Art. 2a (zone sign), Art. 65 para. 5 and Art. 79 (markings), as of 1. July 2026.

The times

Signalisationsverordnung (SSV), Anhang 3, SR 741.21, no. 1, table «Zulässige Parkdauer in der Blauen Zone» and its footnote, as of 1. July 2026.

Disabled­permit

Verkehrsregelnverordnung (VRV), SR 741.11, Art. 20a para. 1–5, as of 1. July 2026.

The fine

Ordnungsbussenverordnung (OBV), SR 314.11, Annex 1 no. 200, exceeding the permitted parking time, as of 1. January 2025.

Electronic discs

Bundesamt für Strassen (ASTRA), press release «Unzulässige Parkscheiben im Umlauf», as of 5. September 2006.

Which cities

Bundesamt für Statistik (BFS), permanent resident population by commune, table su-d-01.02.03.06, the twenty largest communes, as of 31. December 2024.

The cities

Twenty municipalities, each read on its own page on 21. September 2026. Every row of the table names its source. It is updated yearly; a price that was not on the city's page is left out, and nothing is estimated.

Parking-zone index

The ToDrive parking-zone index counts at which times of day this calculator is really used. It appears here once 500 queries have been counted (so far 18 since 21 September 2026). Only the hour of arrival, working day or Sunday, and the duration on the extra sign are counted: no address, no cookie, no place, no minute. Until then no statistic of our own stands here.

This page reproduces the rule of the ordinance. It is not legal advice and does not say whether a fine can be challenged. The sign at the bay beats anything written here.