Getting to Gatwick by road

The M23 approach, why you need to know your terminal before you set off, and how to build a driving plan that survives the traffic.

Last reviewed 6 September 2026. Prices and car park rules change often — confirm the current details before you travel.

Gatwick sits just off the M23 in West Sussex, south of the M25. For most of the south east it is an easy drive on paper. The reason people still arrive flustered is rarely the distance — it is the last few miles, the terminal turnings, and the M25.

The approach

The airport has its own signposted spur off the M23, and once you are on the approach road the North and South Terminals are separately signed. The turnings come at different points, and the signage is written for people who already know which terminal they want.

This is where things go wrong. If you commit to the wrong terminal turning you are not lost — the road system will bring you back round — but you will lose time, and you will lose it at exactly the point in the journey where you have the least of it to spare.

So: confirm your terminal from your airline booking before you leave the house. Not from memory, and not from what was true the last time you flew with that airline. Terminal allocations change.

Use the car park's postcode, not the airport's

Gatwick is a large site with two terminals, several official car parks and a ring of independent compounds on the surrounding roads. "Gatwick Airport" as a satnav destination is close to useless — it drops you somewhere on the site and leaves you to work out the rest from signs while driving.

Your booking confirmation will carry the specific address and postcode for the car park you have booked. Put that in instead. For off-airport operators this matters even more, because their compounds are on ordinary roads around the perimeter, and some of them are genuinely hard to find without accurate directions.

Timing the drive

The M25 is the variable that ruins schedules. It is heavily used, incidents on it cause long delays, and those delays are not predictable far enough ahead to plan around. The M23 itself is generally better behaved but inherits whatever the M25 is doing.

A sensible approach is to work backwards:

• Start from your airline's check-in and bag drop deadline, which is the hard constraint.
• Add the time to get from your car park to the terminal — a few minutes for short stay, considerably more for a long stay or off-airport car park with a transfer bus.
• Add time to park, unload and find the bus stop.
• Add your satnav's journey estimate.
• Then add a real contingency on top for traffic.

The contingency is the part people cut, and it is the part that saves the trip. Arriving early at an airport costs you a coffee. Arriving late costs you the flight.

Overnight and very early flights

Gatwick runs a lot of early morning departures, which means a lot of people either drive through the night or stay locally the night before. Both are reasonable; driving tired to catch a dawn flight is not.

If your check-in time would mean setting off in the small hours after a working day, a night at a hotel near the airport with parking included is worth pricing up. It is often less expensive than it sounds once you account for the parking you would have paid for anyway, and it removes the single biggest safety risk in the whole journey.

Fuel before you arrive

Fill up before you get to the airport. Fuel prices in the immediate vicinity of any major airport are not competitive, and more to the point you do not want to be looking for a petrol station when you are already tight for time. It also means you come home to a car you can simply drive away, which matters after a long flight.

Dropping off versus parking

If someone is driving you and not flying themselves, they have a choice between the terminal forecourt drop-off zones, which carry a charge, and the free alternative in the long stay car parks with a bus transfer. Which makes sense depends on how much the convenience is worth on the day. That decision is covered in more detail in our guide to Gatwick's drop-off arrangements.