Let App WinIt fight your parking ticket.

Each year, NYC parking enforcement officers issue between 9 and 11 million parking tickets. The prices on those tickets fall between $35 and $515. Each year, drivers lose around half a billion dollars to parking tickets.

On the other hand, the city writes off hundreds of millions of dollars in parking tickets each year. Your chances of getting off with a parking ticket are a lot higher than many people think. In fact, fighting your parking ticket is much more affordable than paying it. That’s especially true if you’re using the WinIt app.

As of December of 2020, there were almost 45 million outstanding parking tickets in NY. For many people, that means either paying or fighting the ticket. But not everybody handles their tickets in the right way at the right time.

If you forget to pay your ticket or just plain choose not to, you could be in for some serious consequences. Unpaid parking tickets will most likely be referred to the DMV, which then has a large choice of options for penalties. What those penalties might be will depend on your specific circumstances.

To get the best possible answer to your question of “do parking tickets go on your record,” you’ll need to know what your driving record means. 

Information Contained On Your Driving Record in NY

NY has three different kinds of driving records: standard, lifetime, and commercial. Each of these three records contains different information. For example, the standard driving record only contains information that the law requires the DMV to keep, such as traffic violations, whereas the lifetime driving record contains everything.

When people talk about your driving record abstract, they’re talking about your standard driving record. That’s the record that the state gives to insurance companies and investigators. Fortunately, it doesn’t include every violation you’ve ever committed.

Standard Driving Record

Standard driving records do not include parking tickets. No matter how many parking tickets you get, you will not have to worry about them going on your driving record. However, if you fail to pay them and get your license suspended, that suspension will show up on your record.

Your standard driving record includes only the information that the law requires the DMV to keep. That includes the following information:

• Traffic convictions and accidents for up to four years.
• Suspensions and revocations for up to five years from the date that it ended.
• DWIs for 15 years.
• DWAIs for 10 years.
• More “temporary” information.

After the given period of time, this information will be removed from your standard driving record. You could say it “expires.” The same is not true for your lifetime record.

Lifetime Driving Record

Your lifetime driving record is the most comprehensive record available. It contains all of the information that the DMV has on you, which can be far more than just what the law requires them to keep. Not only does this information not expire with time, it stays even after you pass away.

Your lifetime driving record can contain everything from your eye color to a record of the first day you ever applied for a driver license. That includes the following information:

• All driver license information.
• All non-driver ID information.
• A list of all documents issued to you by the DMV.
• All suspensions and revocations you’ve ever received.
• All accidents you’ve ever reported.
• Much, much more.

Commercial Driving Record

A commercial driving record is an expanded version of the standard driving record intended to show all information relevant to a commercial driver. That includes much of the same information as your standard driving record but adds a great deal more information. Here’s a list of some of that added information:

• Any violation committed in any state with any vehicle.
• Medical certification status.

Do Parking Tickets Go On Your Record?

No, parking tickets do not go on your record. The NY DMV treats parking tickets like most non-moving violations, including stopping and standing. No parking tickets will appear on your driving record abstract nor on your lifetime record.

The same goes for other non-moving tickets like camera tickets. With a few exceptions, NY treats traffic, speeding, and red light cameras the same as they treat parking tickets. That is to say that none of these tickets will go on your driving record.

However, if you do not pay your parking tickets, that failure to pay may be reported to the DMV. If that happens, you risk having your driver license suspended, among other penalties.

What Happens If You Don’t Pay a Parking Ticket?

Failure to pay a parking ticket can result in a long list of potential penalties ranging from higher costs to the loss of your vehicle.

The moment the court convicts you, you will be hit with additional costs. These are called surcharges. The cost of the surcharge depends on the circumstances surrounding your parking ticket.

If you do not pay your parking ticket within 100 days, it will start to accrue interest. That makes it more expensive to pay in the future. If you still don’t pay your ticket after that, the DMV might decide to sell your ticket debt to a collection agency.

One of the more severe—and more common—penalties for unpaid parking tickets is the suspension of your driver license. This is an indefinite suspension, meaning it does not go away until you take the required actions. In this case, the required action is paying your parking ticket.

The DMV might also prevent you from renewing your vehicle’s registration. Ironically, failure to renew your vehicle’s registration can get you even more tickets [VTL §401.1(a)].

Although parking tickets do not go on your driving record and thus your insurance company cannot see them, the DMV may report delinquent parking tickets to your insurance company. “Delinquent” just means any parking ticket that is past due.

Probably the worst of all penalties for not paying a parking ticket is the confiscation of your vehicle. The state government authorizes itself to confiscate any vehicle whose owner has a large outstanding parking ticket debt. The government will then auction it off and take the cash. And, no, you will not receive any of the extra funds.

Can My Vehicle Insurance Go Up From Parking Tickets?

Like many non-moving violations, parking tickets do not affect your car insurance. That’s because they do not appear on your driving record abstract, which is the document that insurance companies use to investigate your driving history.

Traffic tickets, on the other hand, do appear on your driving record abstract. As opposed to parking tickets, which don’t increase your insurance, traffic tickets do. And they do so by quite a bit.

A single traffic ticket in NY can increase your insurance by up to 82.2%. If you’re paying the average for insurance in NY ($1,688), that amounts to an extra $4,162.61 over three years.

While parking tickets do not increase your car insurance premiums, they do still cost a pretty penny. Parking tickets in NY can cost as much as $515 before additional financial penalties. One such penalty that has become common in recent years is the $25 surcharge on top of certain parking ticket convictions.

Fortunately, there are ways to reduce your parking ticket’s cost.

Can You Reduce Your Parking Infraction?

In most of NY, there is no plea bargaining—not even for traffic tickets. For parking tickets, the odds of securing a plea bargain are even worse. In fact, many places outlaw the practice of plea bargaining for parking tickets altogether. For the most part, the only way to reduce a parking ticket is to beat it in court.

Depending on where you receive your parking ticket, you might have to contend with either a local county court or the Traffic Violations Bureau (TVB). The largest TVB locations are in NYC, but other counties around the state have established similar facilities.

All parking tickets are under the jurisdiction of the New York State Department of Finance (DoF). The DoF sets guidelines and protocols by which parking tickets can be dismissed, according to the relevant laws. The most relevant law is the Vehicle and Traffic Law (VAT or VTL), which is thousands of sections long.

If you successfully contest your ticket while working alone, you won’t have to pay a penny. But that means taking off from work, missing out on hourly income from your job, and spending hours researching the law and examining the facts. All this, and you still don’t have a great chance of winning.

With a lawyer, the nominal cost increases slightly. WinIt helps set you up with a lawyer who will handle all the court processes for you in exchange for half of the ticket’s cost. Ironically, hiring a lawyer—the more expensive option—is quite often cheaper than fighting the ticket yourself.

That’s because lawyers have significantly higher success rates, you don’t have to miss out on work, and you don’t have to waste time researching the law.

In fiscal year 2016, lawyers and independents successfully defeated $600 million worth of parking tickets

Is It Worth Fighting a Parking Ticket?

Fighting a parking ticket with WinIt can save you countless hours of work, lost wages, and more. When you go it alone, it’s not quite that positive.

Fighting a parking ticket by yourself can be a hassle. You’ll have to take time off work to go to court, spend time studying the law, and other kinds of legal work. All this, and you still most likely won’t win your case.

However, if you hire a lawyer, you don’t have to lift a finger. Depending on the ticket, you won’t have to go to court, you won’t have to do much paperwork, and you can monitor your lawyer’s progress directly in the WinIt app. Lawyers also have much higher success rates than people who fight alone, making them even more helpful.

Fighting a parking ticket can reduce the cost by up to 100%. Fighting it alone tends not to have great odds, though. In fact, you could end up missing out on work and therefore losing even more money.

Lawyers on the other hand tend to only take 50% of the ticket’s cost after they win it. To find out how much you can save, look at the ticket’s cost and divide it by two. And with WinIt’s money-back guarantee for parking tickets, you don’t have to pay us a penny unless we WinIt!

So what are you waiting for? Hop on over to Google Play or the App Store and get started fighting your tickets today.