photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

A "No Parking" sign is pictured on Massachusetts Street south of downtown Lawrence on Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2026.

If you get a ticket for illegal parking in areas outside of downtown Lawrence, be prepared to pay nearly double the fine you would have earlier this year.

That’s according to a recent social media post from the Lawrence Police Department. LPD announced that as of Oct. 23, fines for parking tickets outside of downtown had nearly doubled, from $55 to $100, plus $39.50 in court costs.

According to the city’s fines schedule, the violations that these apply to are things like being double-parked, parking too close to a fire hydrant or in a fire lane, parking anywhere that there’s a “no parking” sign, or similar offenses.

But Brad Harrell, the city’s parking manager, said that the increase was only for parking violations handled in Lawrence Municipal Court, and that it didn’t apply to those who overstayed their allowed parking time in the downtown business district.

As the Journal-World has reported, within the past few years, the city changed its process for downtown parking violations to treat them like civil infractions instead of criminal misdemeanor offenses. That means citations for meter violations downtown, as well as for staying too long in free parking areas like the two-hour lots, will still be handled the way they were before, and the fines will stay the same at $10.

“These citations are still adjudicated though our city civil parking process rather than the municipal court citations that are still handled thought the legal process,” Harrell said.

The parking fines outside of downtown aren’t the only fines that have gone up in Lawrence this year. At the start of the year, the minimum fines for certain traffic infractions and the fines for speeding rose, as well, as the Journal-World reported.