Do I Need Parking for a Secondary Unit in Ottawa?

Written by

ogcadmin

Published on

August 16, 2026

No, in almost all of Ottawa. The City's own guidance on additional dwelling units is blunt about it: no additional parking space is required, but where a new one is provided, it cannot be located in the front yard, and tandem parking in the existing driveway is permitted.

There is one significant exception, and a set of rules that kick in the moment you decide to add a space voluntarily. Both are covered below.

Minimum Parking Rates Are Gone in Ottawa

This is one of the larger practical changes in Zoning By-law 2026-50. Part 6 of the new by-law, which covers parking, queueing and loading, contains no citywide minimum parking rate for residential uses at all.

What it contains instead:

Section 602, Maximum Parking Space Rates. A ceiling, not a floor, and it only applies where the lot is within 600 metres of an existing or planned rapid transit station.
Section 603, Visitor Parking. A rate of 0.1 spaces per dwelling unit in certain areas, but with the first 24 dwelling units on a lot exempt in Areas B and C, and the first 12 exempt in Area D. A house with a secondary suite never reaches that threshold.
Section 614, Village Residential minimums. The one place a minimum survives.

The direction of travel had already started under the old rules, where Section 133 of Zoning By-law 2008-250 dealt with parking for additional dwelling units through location rather than through a required count.

The Exception: Village Residential Zones

If your property is in a V1, V2, V3, V4 or V5 Village Residential zone, which covers communities like Manotick, Richmond, Greely, Carp and Osgoode, Section 614 requires a minimum of one parking space for each dwelling unit.

That means adding a secondary unit in a village adds a required space. Two conditions attach:

The required space must not be located in a required front or required exterior side yard.
No parking spaces are required for a group home, retirement home, rooming house or residential care facility.

Note also that front yard parking, which is allowed elsewhere in the Greenbelt and rural transects beyond the required front yard setback, is not permitted in the V1 to V5 zones or the Village Mixed-Use zone. Village lots are the one place where parking genuinely constrains the design of a suite project.

If You Do Add a Space: The Rules That Apply

No front yard parking

Under Section 604, no parking space may be established in a front yard, an exterior side yard, or the extension of a required or provided exterior side yard into a rear yard. There are three carve-outs:

Existing front yard parking. Spaces associated with a residential use established as of September 30, 2007 that are perpendicular to the street and conform to the Traffic and Parking By-law are permitted as they existed on that date.
Greenbelt and rural transects. In Area D (Greenbelt) and Area F (Rural), a space may be established in a front yard beyond the required front yard setback, except in the Village Residential and Village Mixed-Use zones.
Neighbourhood zones in Area B on Schedule A5. Front yard parking is permitted where the lot is greater than 6 metres wide, the space is perpendicular to the street, the driveway width complies with Section 606, and the vehicle sits entirely on the lot or else at least 1.5 metres from an abutting roadway and 0.6 metres from an abutting sidewalk.

Tandem parking is allowed

You do not need a second, separate driveway. Under Section 609, where a dwelling unit has a driveway accessing its own parking space, parking may be located in tandem in that driveway. The City's permit guidance says the same thing in plainer language: tandem parking in the existing driveway is permitted.

The old by-law was even more direct on this point. Section 133 required that a parking space for an additional dwelling unit or coach house be located in a permitted driveway associated with the principal dwelling, and allowed it to be in tandem with the principal dwelling's space. So a two-car-deep driveway serving both units is the normal, expected arrangement.

Corner lots get an extra option

On a corner lot, Section 133 allows a new driveway to be created in a yard that abuts a street and does not already contain a driveway for the principal dwelling. If you have a corner lot and want genuinely independent access for the suite, this is the provision to look at.

Driveway width limits

A driveway serving one to three parking spaces must be at least 2.6 metres wide. Maximums:

Areas A, B and C (Downtown Core, Inner Urban, Outer Urban): 6 metres.
Everywhere else: 50 per cent of the lot width for a front yard, or 50 per cent of the lot depth for an exterior side yard.

The cumulative width of all walkways leading to a front lot line, plus all driveways and parking spaces in the front yard, must not exceed 50 per cent of the lot width. A walkway leading to a front or exterior side lot line is capped at 1.8 metres.

Narrow lots must share a driveway

In Areas A, B and C, an individual driveway is not permitted on a lot less than 6 metres in width, and any driveway on such a lot must be shared with an abutting lot. This affects a real number of properties in the Glebe, Hintonburg, Old Ottawa East and similar older neighbourhoods. In Neighbourhood zones, the by-law explicitly permits a driveway to be shared between two or more lots that front the same street.

Parking cannot block the entrance

Section 604 states that no part of a parking space may obstruct a walkway or an entrance of a building. If your suite has a side entrance beside the driveway, the two need to be laid out together, not designed separately. See do I need a separate entrance for a basement suite in Ottawa.

Surface requirements

In Areas A, B, C and E, parking spaces, aisles and driveways must be paved with asphalt, cement, permeable pavement, honeycomb block, turf block, cobblestones or a similar stable dust-preventative material, and may include wheel strips. In Areas D and F, the surface simply has to be usable in all seasons.

Should You Add a Space Even Though You Do Not Have To?

The zoning answer and the business answer are different. Reasons to add one anyway:

In suburban Ottawa, a suite without parking rents for less and rents more slowly.
Ottawa's on-street winter parking restrictions make street parking unreliable from November through April.
A tandem space costs very little when the driveway already exists.

Reasons not to:

Downtown, Centretown, the Glebe and Westboro have strong transit and cycling access, and tenants there often do not own cars.
More paving means more stormwater runoff, less soft landscaping, and a worse-looking front yard.
On a narrow lot, the space may simply not fit within the driveway width limits.

The Short Version

No minimum parking is required for a secondary unit anywhere in Ottawa except the Village Residential zones, where one space per dwelling unit still applies.
If you add a space, it cannot go in the front yard, with narrow exceptions.
Tandem parking in the existing driveway is permitted, and is the normal solution.
Driveway width caps and the shared-driveway rule on lots under 6 metres are the constraints that most often bite.

Plan the Whole Site, Not Just the Suite

Driveways, entrances, walkways and setbacks interact, and getting them wrong is expensive to fix after the fact. Ottawa General Contractors designs the full site alongside the unit on every project. See our income suite contractor services and coach house building services, or get a free quote.

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