Ask most people what their car costs and they will quote the loan payment. That answer is usually off by several hundred dollars a month.
The most widely used benchmark for the full picture is AAA’s Your Driving Costs study, which has tracked ownership expenses for more than 70 years. The most recent edition, released in September 2025, put the total cost of owning and operating a new vehicle at $11,577 a year, or $964.78 per month, for a driver covering 15,000 miles annually. That was actually a $719 improvement over the prior year, but it still means the average new-car household spends nearly a thousand dollars a month to keep one vehicle on the road. The federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics republishes the same series in its National Transportation Statistics tables, where you can see how the number has climbed over the decades.
Here is where that money actually goes, and which pieces you can control.
1. Depreciation is the biggest bill you never see
The single largest cost of a new car is not gas or insurance. It is the quiet loss of resale value. In AAA’s analysis, vehicles in the study lost an average of $4,334 in value per year, about $361 a month, over a five-year, 75,000-mile ownership period. That was down from $4,680 the year before, a rare bit of relief.
Nobody writes a check for depreciation, which is why it gets ignored, but it shows up in full the day you trade in or sell. It is also the strongest argument for buying a lightly used vehicle: someone else has already absorbed the steepest part of the value curve.
2. Financing: the cost of borrowing the sticker price
AAA estimated average finance charges at $1,131 a year in its latest study, down about 15 percent from $1,332 the year before, helped by somewhat lower rates and cheaper vehicles in the study mix. Your own number depends heavily on your credit score, the loan term, and whether you shop the loan. Getting pre-approved by a bank or credit union before you talk numbers at a dealership gives you a rate to beat, and keeping the loan term shorter cuts total interest sharply even when the monthly payment looks bigger.
3. Fuel: the line item you feel every week
Fuel is the cost people watch most closely, and in the latest study it averaged 13.0 cents per mile, with regular gasoline averaging $3.151 a gallon across the study period, down from $3.539 the year before. At 15,000 miles a year, that works out to roughly $160 a month, though it swings with prices at the pump and with what you drive. You can compare specific models’ fuel costs, gas, hybrid, and electric, at the government’s fueleconomy.gov, and track current pump prices in the Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail gasoline survey.
One wrinkle from the latest data: electricity for home charging averaged 16.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, up slightly year over year, and AAA found that while EVs still cost less to fuel and maintain, lower gas prices narrowed the gap enough that EVs came out more expensive overall in every category it studied that year once depreciation, insurance, and financing were included.
4. Insurance, maintenance, and fees fill out the bill
The remaining slices are insurance, maintenance, repairs and tires, and license, registration, and taxes. These vary so much by state, age, driving record, and vehicle that your own numbers may sit far from any national average; AAA’s study assumes a low-risk driver with full coverage. Insurance in particular has been one of the fastest-rising household costs of the past few years, which makes it worth re-shopping every renewal rather than letting the policy auto-renew. Maintenance is the piece most within your control: following the factory schedule is consistently cheaper than deferring work until something fails.
The vehicle you pick moves the number more than anything else
The spread between vehicle types is enormous. In AAA’s comparison, a small sedan cost 55.87 cents per mile to own and operate, while a pickup truck cost about 43 percent more, an extra $6,402 per year on average. That is more than $500 a month of difference driven purely by the choice of vehicle category. If a truck does real work for you, that premium may be worth it. If it mostly commutes, it is the single most expensive habit in the household budget after housing.
AAA publishes a free Your Driving Costs calculator that estimates the full cost for specific models, including used vehicles up to five model years back, which is a more honest way to compare two cars than comparing sticker prices.
How to run the math for your own driveway
Take your actual loan payment, add your insurance premium divided by twelve, your average monthly fuel spending, one-twelfth of your annual registration and taxes, and a maintenance reserve, then add roughly $300 to $400 a month in depreciation if the car is newish. For many households the honest total lands between $700 and $1,000 per vehicle, per month, which matches the national data.
That number is worth knowing before the next purchase, not after. A car that costs $200 a month less to own frees up $12,000 over a five-year loan, and unlike most cost-of-living pressures in 2026, this is one line of the budget where the biggest decision is still entirely yours.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
Leave a Reply