Wellington City Council is set to repay motorists who were overcharged for city parking due to a parking meter software error.
The Council says a number of motorists will receive refunds after the error resulted in overcharges for short-term on-street parking during weekends in central Wellington.
A software update applied to the city’s 396 on-street parking meters by a third-party vendor in April resulted in some motorists being incorrectly overcharged by 50 cents if they used a credit- or debit-card to pay at the meter.
“The error affected some weekend card transactions made between 5 April and 12 July 2026. At this stage, it appears this affected less than one in five weekend parkers. Wellington City Council is working with the software vendor to determine the number of transactions affected and why the error happened,” Council said in a statement.
The error occurred in two specific parking payment scenarios on weekends:
• Motorists selecting 20 minutes of parking were charged $1.80 instead of $1.30 and received 30 minutes of parking instead of 20;
• Motorists selecting 50 minutes of parking were charged $3.30 instead of $2.80 and received 60 minutes of parking instead of 50.
In both cases, motorists received the full parking time they paid for, even though it was not the amount of time they selected, Council said.
“The error only occurred during weekend parking. Weekday parking was unaffected. Motorists who paid by cash or through the PayMyPark app were not affected.”
“We are working with the software vendor to fix the issue and to have the meters operating normally from this coming weekend (18-19 July). Council staff will manually check the meters across the weekend.”
All affected motorists can expect to receive refunds in the coming weeks. Those affected will have the 50-cent overpayment credited back to the card that they used to purchase their parking session(s). This will happen automatically and motorists do not need to do anything.
Acting Mayor, Ben McNulty says the Council apologises for the error and any frustration it has caused.
“Wellingtonians expect our parking systems to work as expected. This hasn’t happened here, and we’re sorry,” he said.
“While the amount involved in each transaction was small, motorists should be able to trust they will be charged the correct amount.
“The expectation of this council is when things go wrong, we front up, fix it and learn from it. That’s why we’ll be refunding affected motorists as soon as we can and putting in place additional checks to minimise the chance this will happen again.”
Cr McNulty said the vendor has acknowledged the error and apologised for the inconvenience caused.
If motorists have questions they can either get in touch with the Council through our Contact Centre on 04 499 4444 or e-mail parkingenquiries@wcc.govt.nz.
