The State of US Valet & Parking 2026

The same job, under the same federal labor laws, nearly doubles in pay depending on which city you stand in. In San Francisco the average parking attendant makes $22.51 an hour. In Shreveport, Louisiana, it is $11.59. In Puerto Rico's San Germán, the true national floor, it is $10.77.¹ A worker can move a thousand miles across the mainland and watch the value of identical work fall by half.

Three forces stack up to produce that gap. The first is the local minimum wage. The floor in a high-cost coastal city can sit at nearly double the federal one, and a job paid near the floor rises with it. The second is what a city's wealth supports. The dense thicket of hotels, fine-dining rooms, hospitals, and event venues that actually demand valets clusters where there is money to spend, and that demand bids up pay. The third is tipping culture, which the federal number cannot see at all. A wage map like this one usually gets read as trivia. It reads better as a picture of how American pay gets set: by policy, by density, and by wealth at the same time.

That $22.51 carries an awkward asterisk. Adjusted for what it costs to live where it is earned, the highest wage on paper stops being the highest wage in practice. By the federal government's own regional price measures, a dollar in the Bay Area buys far less than a dollar in Denver or Salt Lake City. Once rent enters the math, San Francisco's chart-topping pay compresses toward the mountain-metro wages that look lower in the table, and sometimes drops below them.⁴ Measured by what the paycheck buys, a mid-cost mountain metro can beat San Francisco outright.

Automation is already inside this business, and it is arriving from two directions at once.

The first direction is the back office, and it moved while almost no one was watching. In May 2024 an AI startup called Metropolis took the largest parking operator in North America, SP+, private for about $1.5 billion, the biggest venture-backed acquisition of that year. Metropolis sells computer-vision parking: you drive in, cameras read your plate, and you drive out with no ticket, no booth, and no cashier. The combined company now runs more than 4,000 locations and processes around $4 billion in payments a year, and by 2026 it was valued at roughly $5 billion and described as an AI infrastructure business that happens to own the lots.⁷ The booth attendant, the commodity half of the job, is being engineered out of existence by people who think of parking as a data problem.

The second direction is the obvious one, and it is further along than most people realize. Waymo now gives roughly 500,000 paid driverless rides every week across ten US cities, up from 50,000 a week just two years ago, with a fleet of more than 3,000 robotaxis and plans to enter twenty more cities in 2026.⁸ A car that drives itself does not need a person to park it. A robotaxi that never stops circulating does not need to be parked at all. Push that curve out two decades and the demand side of this whole industry starts to look different.

Among Waymo's ten live cities are San Francisco and Los Angeles, with Denver and San Diego next on the map. Set that against the top of the wage table and the overlap is hard to miss. The country's two biggest high-wage parking markets already have driverless fleets on the street, and two more near the top are next in line. The timing follows the money: automation goes where the revenue is densest, which puts the high-wage end first.

The likeliest outcome is divergence. The single job filed under one federal code is pulling apart into two trajectories. The commodity tier, the booths and gates and self-park decks, gets automated from the back office outward, and the people in it are the most exposed workers in this report. The hospitality tier, the hotels and galas and dining rooms, grows more valuable, and the operators and workers concentrated there are the most insulated. The wage chasm earlier in this piece is the first visible sign of that split. The high-touch, high-wage, high-tip end and the commodity, low-wage end were always different businesses. Automation will simply force everyone to admit it.

For anyone weighing whether to enter this trade, to work in it or to build one, the data and the analysis point the same way. The defensible end is the human one. The lots worth owning are the ones automation makes more efficient rather than obsolete. And the question that opened this report, whether anyone will still park cars by hand in twenty years, has an answer that is starting to show up in the numbers. Yes, but fewer of them, paid better, doing the half of the job that was never really about the car.

We cannot tell you the exact shape of that curve yet. No one can. What we can do is more useful than a prediction. Every year we will run this report again, against the same federal data, and show you which way the line has actually moved. The baseline is on this page. Come back and watch it bend.

The federal data on this page captures the labor side of valet and parking: how many people are employed, what they earn, where they work. It does not capture pricing.

For day-rates and hourly garage rates, see the Parkopedia and SpotHero indexes. For wedding valet, see The Knot's Real Weddings Study. Independent observation across markets: event valet runs $15 to $75 per vehicle depending on city, duration, and staffing ratio. Treat that as a range, not a benchmark.

SOC 53-6021 ("Parking Attendants") is the labor proxy. It covers all parking lot and garage attendants, a reliable measure that includes valet workers as the primary occupational category. It does not isolate valet-only workers from attendants who manage self-park facilities.

NAICS 812930 ("Parking Lots and Garages") is the business establishment proxy. It captures all commercial parking operations, broader than valet-only operators. The 12,189 establishment count reflects the full parking industry, not valet-exclusive businesses.