How many bus lane Penalty Charge Notices Sheffield City Council issues, from which cameras, how much it raises, and how often challenges succeed — from Sheffield City Council's Data Mill North parking account and an FOI release (ref 3141708).
438,353
PCNs issued in 5 years2021/22–2025/26
£13.72m
gross income, 5 yearsnet of costs not held
88,577
PCNs in 2025/26across 21 cameras
69%
paid at the £35 discount2025/26
36%
of challenges upheld2025/26
This page combines two sources. The penalty counts, the money and the site-by-site table come from Sheffield City Council's own Parking Account dataset on Data Mill North, published annually as one spreadsheet per financial year. The council refused those three questions in our freedom of information request under section 21, on the ground that the figures were already published there — so this page follows the signpost rather than the refusal. The discount, challenge and appeal figures, and the enforcement start dates, come from the council's response to that request (ref 3141708). Both are released under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Figures are the council's own. BusLaneCheck is independent and not affiliated with the council. Compare every UK authority →
Bus lane PCNs issued per yearGross PCN income per year
Sheffield issued 438,353 bus lane penalties over these five years and collected £13.7m. Almost all of the movement comes from one camera. The bus gate on Arundel Gate, by the St Paul's Place service road, began enforcement on 3 April 2023 and issued 65,496 penalties in its first year — 55% of everything the city issued that year, and the reason 2023/24 stands out at 118,699 penalties and £4.2m. It has since settled to roughly half that rate, and the city total fell back to 78,624 in 2024/25 before rising again to 88,577 in 2025/26.
Which cameras issue the most fines
Camera-enforced bus lane locations ranked by PCNs issued in 2025/26. The last column is the 5-year total.
Arundel Gate alone accounts for 125,002 of the five-year total — more than the next three cameras combined, and it only appears from 2023/24 onwards. Three sites appear twice in the council's 2021/22 spreadsheet under slightly different names (Blonk Street, Furnival Gate and Queens Road); the two rows are added together here, since both describe the same stretch of road. Two locations in the data have no page on this site — a Surrey Street bus gate, which issued 481 penalties in 2022/23 only, and a Bridge Street bus gate, which issued 8. Three roads run the other way: Abbeydale Road, Moore Street and Bolsover Street have pages here but appear neither in this dataset nor in the council's own camera list, so their enforcement is not confirmed by either record. The four London Road cameras switched on in June 2026 are too recent to appear in any of these years.
Challenges & appeals — do they work?
Formal representations to the council. Drivers made 69,047 formal challenges over 5 years.
Year
Challenges
Upheld
Rejected
Success rate
2021/22
12,468
4,998
7,015
40%
2022/23
11,489
3,945
7,033
34%
2023/24
17,482
3,680
13,228
21%
2024/25
12,763
4,108
8,403
32%
2025/26
14,845
5,284
9,273
36%
The council's own figures show the share of challenges upheld went from 40% in 2021/22 to 36% in 2025/26 — so a well-grounded challenge is worth making. Sheffield cancels a large share of the penalties it issues — 20,735 in 2021/22, a quarter of that year's total, falling to about 5,400 a year by 2023/24 and rising again to 9,895 in 2025/26. Two warnings the council attached to its challenge figures have to travel with them. Representations are counted from correspondence recorded against a case, so they may mix different stages of the process; and the "rejected" column includes cases where the council actually accepted the representation in order to transfer liability to a new keeper or hirer, so it overstates the number of drivers turned down. Accepted and rejected do not add up to received in any year, falling short by between 252 and 574. See our guide to appealing a bus lane PCN for the grounds that win.
The fine itself
A bus lane PCN from Sheffield City Council is £70, reduced to £35 if paid within 21 days. It is a civil penalty — there are no licence points. £70, halved to £35 if paid within 21 days, is the standard charge for a bus lane contravention outside London. The council confirmed that the discounted amount was £30 until June 2022, when it rose to £35, so the earliest figures here were collected under the lower rate.
What the council does not hold or publish
Income net of operating costs. Every money figure here is gross — what drivers actually paid, not what the council kept. Sheffield's published Parking Account does separate income from expenditure, but only for the parking operation as a whole: it carries a single "Penalty Charge Notice income" line covering parking and bus lane penalties together, and no expenditure line for bus lane enforcement on its own. There is no published basis for a net bus lane figure.
A split between individual cameras at one site. The council publishes its figures by location, and some locations have more than one camera. Where the council's own camera list names two cameras on one road — London Road is the clearest case — the penalties for both sit in a single row here and cannot be separated.
The bus lanes behind these cameras
Each of these locations has a full page with operating hours, permitted vehicles and the governing traffic order: