Starting this summer, for the first time in over 20 years, it’s going to cost more to park at Richmond International Airport. This week the Capital Region Airport Commission voted to approve increasing the airport’s daily parking rates as well as its rental car fee. As of July 1, daily parking at the garages nearest the terminal at RIC will be increased from $12 to $15, and daily rates at the economy lots west of Airport Drive will go from $7 to $10. The price hikes are being implemented to help finance two new parking decks the airport is planning: a 5,500-spot deck for the general public that would be built at the current Economy A lot, and an additional two-story deck for rental cars. The Commission voted unanimously to approve the changes at its meeting Tuesday. The changes were outlined in a committee meeting earlier this month, where studies showed that facilities like the current rental car garage are already at capacity, and RIC’s parking rates are much lower than those of its competitors. Further increases are also planned for the coming years. A second increase is scheduled for next year that would bring garage and economy rates to $18 and $12, and by 2035 the garage and daily rates could reach $30 and $18, respectively. Also set to increase is the airport’s Customer Facility Charge (CFC), the fee imposed on rental car companies at the airport. The current rate of $2 per day per rental vehicle will rise to $8.25. The airport hadn’t raised its daily parking rates in 22 years. Bobby Ukrop, a local businessman who serves on the commission, expressed trepidation about the price increases at Tuesday’s meeting but said, “The reality is, if we don’t do this, we’re stuck.” “We have to move this way even though it is painful,” Ukrop said to his fellow commissioners. Both the new Economy A deck and rental garage are still in the planning phase, and are expected to take around three years to design and build. The airport is also planning to use the revenue from the price increases to add a parking reservation system that’ll allow customers to pre-book spots at a discount. A change to RIC’s security screening facilities was also put into motion at Tuesday’s meeting, as the commission voted to authorize the design of a new 159,000-square-foot checkpoint. The new checkpoint would consolidate the two that currently service RIC’s A and B concourses, and add at least two security lanes. The two existing checkpoints each have four lanes, and the new one would have 10 lanes, with room to grow to 14. Preliminary designs show the new checkpoint would be at the end of the hallway after ticketing, before the three-way intersection where the current atrium splits off into concourses A and B. The commission voted to authorize Gresham Smith, a Tennessee architecture firm with a Richmond office , to begin designing the consolidated checkpoint, a process it anticipates will take six months. Lastly, the airport reported its latest monthly passenger data at Tuesday’s meeting. In February 2025, RIC saw an 8.2 percent decrease in passengers from the same period last year. The airport attributed the downturn in part to an influx of canceled flights: this February it saw 100 canceled flights, compared to 23 last February. A spokesman for the airport said that while airlines don’t disclose reasons for cancellations, most of February’s canceled flights came around inclement weather events.
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