Parking Design Parameters Across Australia: Victoria vs. Everywhere Else

If you're designing a car park in Australia, the design parameters that apply depend on where your site is: Victoria has its own set of design parameters, while the Australian/New Zealand design parameters generally provide a national baseline for the parking designs. Both cover the same core question — how those spaces should be laid out — but the specific dimensions differ.

Victoria's approach

Victoria's own planning provisions apply state-wide:

• How spaces are laid out — set by Victoria's own design parameters, including its own dimensions. These are used instead of the national approach for Victorian sites unless any special overlay applies, and generally allocates more width to aisles and less to individual bays.

Everywhere else in Australia

Outside Victoria, off-street car parking can generally follow a shared national approach, referenced directly (or with local variations) in planning codes across New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT, and the Northern Territory. It covers the same ground as Victoria's own approach — space and aisle dimensions by parking angle, accessway gradients, sightlines at access points — but with its own set of figures.

Worth checking either way: some councils apply their own local variations on top of the national approach, so it's always worth confirming there's no local overlay before finalising a design.

The trade-off that applies everywhere

Regardless of which approach applies, bay angle is a genuine design trade-off: 90° parking fits the most bays per linear metre but needs the widest aisles; angled bays (60°, 45°) need narrower aisles but fit fewer bays in the same space.

Where Parking Planner fits in

Parking Planner automatically designs and optimises your layout, applying the relevant dimensions in seconds. You can test different configurations, see how many spaces each one achieves, and compare your options before settling on the best layout for your site.

This page covers design parameters — bay and aisle dimensions — which is what Parking Planner calculates. It doesn't calculate how many spaces your development needs, which depends on land use, location, and any local overlay.