True Cost of Car Ownership Calculator
The car, the miles, and the six lines it costs
Your result will appear here
Fill in the fields on the left and this updates as you type.
Know what this estimate is based on
- Jurisdiction
- General mathematical model
- Scope and limitations
- Planning estimate only. Enter complete, current figures and keep an appropriate buffer for irregular or unexpected expenses.
- Source links checked
- Jul 30, 2026
Built and regression-tested by Smart Tools Lab. It has not been individually reviewed by a licensed financial, tax, or legal professional.
How to use
- 01
Enter what you paid for the car, how many years you will keep it, and the miles you drive a year — those three drive every line on the page.
- 02
Add your own insurance premium and your license, registration and taxes. AAA's 2025 averages are $1,694 and $813 a year, but both vary enormously by state and by driver, so use your renewal notice.
- 03
Enter the amount financed, the rate and the loan term. The page charges you only the interest actually paid inside the years you own the car, not the whole loan.
- 04
Check the two benchmark fields under them: fuel at 13.00c a mile and maintenance, repair and tires at 11.04c a mile, both from AAA's 2025 edition. They are the only two lines that scale with mileage, and both are yours to correct.
- 05
Read the annual total, then the mileage table beneath it — the same six lines at 10,000, 15,000 and 20,000 miles a year, beside AAA's own published per-mile figures of $1.00, 77c and 66c.
Formula
Six lines, added. Depreciation = the price less what the car is worth at the end, divided by the years you keep it, where the value curve comes from AAA's own five-year figure ($4,334 a year on a $38,938 car) rescaled to your price. Fuel = miles a year × 13.00c. Maintenance, repair and tires = miles a year × 11.04c. Insurance and registration are annual figures you enter. The finance charge = the interest actually paid on the loan inside the years you own the car, divided by those years — principal repayment is not a cost. Cost per mile = the annual total ÷ miles a year, which is why only the two per-mile lines scale and the other four do not.
Example
A $42,000 car kept five years and driven 13,500 miles a year, insured at $1,694, registered at $813, with $33,600 financed at 6.39% over 69 months. Depreciation runs $4,675 a year — AAA's five-year loss share rescaled to a $42,000 car — fuel $1,755, maintenance $1,490, insurance and registration $2,507, and the finance charge $1,300, being $6,501 of interest spread across the five years. Total: $11,727 a year, $977 a month, $32 a day, 87c a mile. The loan payment is $583, so the payment understates the true cost by $394 a month. Against AAA's 2025 average of $11,577 the car is $150 a year dearer. Drive 20,000 miles a year instead and the annual cost rises to $13,290 but the cost per mile falls to 66c — exactly AAA's own published figure at that mileage.
Definitions
- Depreciation
- The value the car loses while you own it. The largest ownership cost for most drivers and the only one with no bill attached, which is why it is routinely left out of car budgets.
- Cost per mile
- Annual cost divided by miles driven. It falls as mileage rises because only fuel and maintenance scale with use — the other four lines are fixed per year.
- Finance charge
- The interest on the car loan, and only the interest. Principal repayment buys equity rather than being spent, so it is not a cost of ownership.
- Trade-in basis
- AAA measures depreciation against the estimated trade-in value of the car, not its retail resale price. A trade-in typically comes in below what a private sale would fetch.
- Your Driving Costs
- AAA's annual study of vehicle ownership costs, built from the five best-selling models in each of nine categories. The 2025 edition is the current one; the 2026 edition is due in mid-September 2026.
Good to know
The largest line is the one with no invoice
Every cost of owning a car arrives with a bill except the biggest one. Fuel is a card swipe, insurance a renewal notice, registration a state letter, maintenance a service invoice — and depreciation is nothing at all until the day you sell, when it presents itself as a disappointing offer rather than as a cost you incurred over years. AAA's 2025 edition of Your Driving Costs puts it at $4,334 a year on its average new car, against $1,950 of fuel, $1,694 of insurance, $1,656 of maintenance and tires, $1,131 of finance charge and $813 of license, registration and taxes: more than fuel and maintenance combined, and about 37% of that car's $11,577 total. Move to a dearer car and the share grows: $42,000 kept five years loses $4,675 a year, roughly 40% of its $11,727. What fills the gap in most people's heads is the loan payment, and the payment is wrong twice over. The principal half of it is not a cost — it moves money from a bank account into equity in the car — while depreciation, which is a genuine cost, is nowhere in the payment at all. On these defaults the payment is $583 a month against a true cost of $977, so it understates by two-fifths. The two errors point the same way rather than cancelling. Cash buyers get the purest version of the illusion: no payment arrives at all, so a paid-off car feels free while it quietly loses several thousand dollars a year. The honest test is not whether you can make the payment. It is whether you could write a check each year for what the car actually consumed, and depreciation is most of that check.
What AAA is measuring, and what its assumptions carry
The benchmark on this page is not a survey of what drivers spend; it is a modelled cost for a specific hypothetical car, and the assumptions inside it decide how much of it transfers to you. AAA builds each year's edition from the five best-selling models in each of nine categories, prices them new, and runs them for five years and 75,000 miles — 15,000 miles a year. The car is financed on a five-year loan with 15% down. Insurance is full coverage for a driver under 65 with six or more years of experience and no accidents. Fuel is priced over the twelve months ending May 2025, at an average of $3.151 a gallon. Depreciation is measured against estimated trade-in value, not retail resale. The 2025 edition was published on 16 September 2025 and the 2026 edition is due in mid-September 2026, so on any date near this one the defaults are within days of being a full year stale — and gasoline has moved most, the EIA's national average for the week ending 31 August 2026 standing at $4.071 a gallon, roughly 28% above a year earlier. Two assumptions matter more than the rest. The 15,000-mile basis sits above what most American households actually drive, which is why AAA publishes a table rather than a number: $1.00 a mile at 10,000 miles a year, 77c at 15,000, 66c at 20,000. And the new-car basis means every line describes a vehicle in years one to five of its life. Buy the same car at eight years old and the shape inverts — depreciation collapses toward nothing while maintenance and repair climb — so the total is lower but the composition is entirely different.
The average mile and the marginal mile are different numbers
Only two of the six lines move with use. Fuel at 13.00c a mile and maintenance, repair and tires at 11.04c a mile scale with every trip; depreciation, insurance, registration and the finance charge are owed whether the car leaves the driveway or not. That produces two true cost-per-mile figures that answer different questions, and almost everybody uses the wrong one. The average mile — 87c on these defaults at 13,500 miles a year — is the right unit for deciding whether to own the car at all, or which car to own. The marginal mile is 24c, the two variable lines added, and it is the right unit for deciding whether to make a particular trip. Confuse them and you get two characteristic errors. The first is refusing a 40-mile round trip because it "costs $35 of car" when the additional cost is about ten dollars; the fixed lines were spent before you picked up the keys. The second, and far more expensive, is the second-car fallacy: judging a rarely driven second vehicle by its fuel bill, which is trivial precisely because it is rarely driven, while its insurance, registration and depreciation run at full rate regardless. This is also why per-mile cost falls so steeply with use. The same car at 10,000 miles a year costs $10,886 and $1.09 a mile; at 20,000 miles it costs $13,290 and 66c. Nothing about the car changed. One number worth not confusing with any of these is the IRS business standard mileage rate — 70 cents for 2025. It is a tax construct set by rule, deliberately generous and deliberately uniform, and it measures nobody's actual costs.
Six lines, and what still sits outside them
Even a complete ownership cost is not a complete cost of the decision. Sales tax and fees are the first omission: a 6.5% rate on a $42,000 car is $2,730, and title, registration and documentation charges add several hundred more — money paid once, recovered never, and absent from every annual figure on the page. The second is the cost of the capital itself. A cash purchase carries no finance charge, which makes it genuinely cheaper, but $42,000 spent on a car is $42,000 not invested, and the honest comparison prices that forgone return rather than calling it zero. The third is lumpiness. An annual average implies a smooth stream, and ownership costs do not arrive smoothly: the maintenance line includes one set of tires spread across five years, so the year they are actually bought is far above the average and the years around it below. Beyond routine maintenance sits genuine tail risk — a transmission, a turbocharger, a hybrid battery — a single event worth a large fraction of the car's value, which an average both includes and hides. Then there is everything that is transport rather than the car: parking, tolls, the occasional citation, and the hours spent in it. And finally the shape after year five, where AAA's model simply stops. Depreciation keeps falling in absolute dollars while maintenance rises, and for most vehicles the total cost per year of ownership continues to decline for several years past the point where the car starts to feel old. That is the real financial argument for keeping a car, and it lives entirely in the years this benchmark does not model.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it really cost to own a car?
AAA's 2025 edition of Your Driving Costs puts the average new car at $11,577 a year — $965 a month — at 15,000 miles a year. That splits into depreciation $4,334, fuel $1,950, insurance $1,694, maintenance and tires $1,656, the finance charge $1,131 and license, registration and taxes $813. Note the year: those figures describe 2025 model-year vehicles at 2025 prices, and the 2026 edition is due in mid-September 2026.
Why is depreciation the biggest line when I never pay it?
Because you pay it once, in full, on the day you sell — and by then it feels like a low resale price rather than a cost you incurred. It is roughly 40% of the annual total on the default figures here, more than fuel and maintenance combined, and it is the only line that never sends a bill. That is precisely why it is the line people leave out when they decide whether a car is affordable.
Which costs go up when I drive more?
Only two: fuel and maintenance. Depreciation, insurance, registration and the finance charge are owed whether the car leaves the driveway or not, which is why the cost per mile falls so sharply with use. On the default car this page shows $1.09 a mile at 10,000 miles a year and $0.66 at 20,000 — the same car, the same costs, a 40% difference in the per-mile figure.
Why does the fuel default look low against today's gas prices?
Because AAA priced it over the twelve months ending May 2025, at an average of $3.151 a gallon. The EIA's national average for the week ending 31 August 2026 was $4.071, roughly 28% higher. At that price and the EPA's model-year 2024 fleet average of 27.2 mpg, fuel runs about 15c a mile rather than 13c. Raise the field — that is what it is there for.
Does this page tell me what my car will be worth?
No, deliberately. It consumes one depreciation figure — AAA's dollars per year, spread across the years you keep the car, measured against estimated trade-in value — and never draws the resale curve. The resale curve is measured on a different basis entirely (retail resale prices of cars that actually sold), so it lives on the car depreciation page and the two are never reconciled here.
How much does the kind of car change the answer?
More than anything else you can control. AAA's 2025 cents-per-mile figures run from 55.9c for a small sedan and 63.9c for a hybrid, through 68.5c for a compact SUV and 71.2c for an electric car, to 83.9c for a medium SUV and 98.5c for a half-ton pickup. That is a 43c spread per mile — nearly $5,800 a year at 13,500 miles — decided entirely at the point of purchase.
Should I count the loan payment as the cost of the car?
No, and this is the most common mistake in car budgeting. The principal part of a payment moves money from your bank account into equity in the car; only the interest is a cost. Meanwhile depreciation, which is a real cost, is nowhere in the payment at all. On the default figures the payment is $583 a month while the car is genuinely costing $977 — the payment understates it by two-fifths.