The Largest Parking Lots in the World

Somewhere in Alberta there is a parking lot you could lose a small town in. It holds 20,000 cars, and on a busy Saturday every one of those spaces is taken by a person who will, three hours later, stand in the cold trying to remember whether they parked near the whale, the polar bear, or an entrance that no longer exists. Enormous parking lots are a peculiar kind of human achievement: vast, ugly, oddly moving, and engineered entirely around our collective refusal to take the bus. These are the biggest on Earth, ranked by how many cars they can swallow, with the usual warning that a parking lot is a slippery thing to measure.

1. West Edmonton Mall, Edmonton, Canada

The reigning champion has held its belt since 1981, when Guinness World Records crowned the West Edmonton Mall lot the largest on the planet at 20,000 vehicles. When that fills, an overflow lot next door takes another 10,000, which is less a parking lot than a contingency plan. The mall it serves is the largest enclosed shopping center in North America, pulling around 32 million visitors a year and up to 200,000 shoppers on a single day, so the asphalt earns its keep. There is one asterisk. Because half the spaces sit indoors and half sit out in the Alberta weather, purists insist it is really two parking lots wearing a trench coat, which sets up a fight we will get to shortly.

2. Universal Orlando Resort, Florida

Universal's answer to crowds was to build two colossal garages and bolt them together with a circular hub in the middle, producing a single complex with room for more than 19,000 cars. The contractor that poured it calls the result one of the largest parking complexes in the United States, and presumably they are still finding cars in it. The walk from the far corner to the theme park gates is long enough that the garages come with moving walkways, which is the parking equivalent of a hotel installing a phone in the bathroom.

3. Disneyland Mickey and Friends and Pixar Pals, Anaheim

When the Mickey and Friends structure opened in 2000 with 10,281 spaces, it was the largest parking structure in the country and could reportedly process 60 cars a minute, a statistic that sounds invented until you have watched Disney move a crowd. In 2019 the resort connected a second structure, Pixar Pals, by a series of bridges and added roughly 6,000 more spaces, lifting the combined complex past 16,000. Together they cover so much ground that one writer worked out the footprint could comfortably house 400,000 ducks, which is precisely the sort of fact you turn over in your head while circling level 4 for a spot.

4. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Washington

Here is the fight we promised. The Sea-Tac garage holds about 13,000 cars entirely under one roof, and by the same logic that disqualifies West Edmonton's indoor-outdoor split, that makes this the largest single parking structure in the world. Edmonton keeps the trophy on a technicality, Seattle keeps the moral high ground, and the rest of us keep losing our cars in both. The footprint is wide enough that an entire NFL stadium, the shared home of the Giants and the Jets, could settle on top of it with seats for 82,500 fans.

5. Walt Disney World Magic Kingdom, Florida

The Magic Kingdom lot opened with 9,000 spaces and was pushed past 12,000 within a year, with the Epcot lot adding roughly another 11,000 down the road. The famous part is the naming scheme. Rather than rows numbered like a normal facility, Disney labels its lots after characters, so you do not lose your car in section J7, you lose it in Zurg, or Heihei, or the one ominously named Medical. It is a cheerful coat of paint over the daily tragedy of forgetting where you left the minivan.

6. Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, Michigan

The McNamara Terminal garage stacks about 11,500 spaces across ten levels, with an enclosed moving walkway feeding travelers straight into the terminal so nobody has to brave a Michigan January on foot. Airport-wide, Detroit advertises more than 18,000 spaces and a smart-parking system of sensors that, it says, helps you find an open spot up to 63 percent faster. That is a marvelous number with no obvious way to check it, which has never once slowed an airport down. Electric-vehicle chargers are dotted throughout, for the small but growing class of traveler who plugs in and prays.

7. Chicago O'Hare International Airport, Illinois

The O'Hare main garage is a brutalist slab of a thing with a reported 9,266 spaces, a figure specific enough to sound official and round nowhere enough to be comforting. It is the rare garage old enough to have earned real affection and real complaints in equal measure, usually from the same person on the same day. From here down, the list becomes a tight scrum of airport garages clustered in the same range, so treat the rankings less as a podium than as a parking dispute.

8. Toronto Pearson International Airport, Terminal 1, Ontario

The Terminal 1 Parkade holds about 8,400 cars, making it one of the largest airport garages in Canada and, by reputation, one of the pricier places in the country to leave a vehicle for a week. It is a clean, efficient, deeply Canadian structure that seems to apologize to you on the way in and charge you handsomely on the way out.

9. Baltimore/Washington International Airport, Maryland

The BWI Daily Garage also lands right around 8,400 spaces, putting it in a dead heat with Toronto and turning the back half of this ranking into a photo finish nobody asked for. If you want to break the tie, you will need a tape measure, a free afternoon, and a high tolerance for being asked to leave by airport security.

10. Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, Terminal D, Texas

Rounding out the list, the Terminal D garage parks about 8,100 cars, which by sheer square footage works out to roughly the footprint of the Chrysler Building laid flat on its side. Call it the polite reminder that everything is bigger in Texas, including the structures built for no purpose other than holding the thing that got you there.

The Biggest Parking Lots at a Glance

The Last Word on Asphalt

For all their bulk, these lots share one design flaw they cannot engineer away: they are miserable to stand in. Acres of dark pavement soak up the sun and throw it back, turning a summer lot into its own little heat wave, and each one leaks a faint sheen of oil and gasoline toward the nearest storm drain whenever it rains. They are monuments to the automobile, built at tremendous expense, and not one of them will spare you from circling for twenty minutes and then forgetting your row anyway. Park near something you will remember. A whale, ideally.