The number you budget against is your car payment. The number that is actually leaving you is $1,071.92 a month.
That is AAA’s 2026 figure for owning and operating a new car: $12,863 a year, across five years and 75,000 miles, on vehicles averaging $39,376 of sticker. AAA has published this study since 1950, and the useful part is never the headline. It is the line items.
Here they are. Depreciation, $4,422 a year. Insurance, $2,098. Finance charges, $1,184. License, registration and taxes, $802. Fuel, 17.3 cents a mile. Maintenance, repair and tires, 11.7 cents a mile.
Look at the top of that list again.
Depreciation is the single biggest cost of owning your car, more than double your insurance, and nobody ever sends you a bill for it. It is the gap between what you paid and what the car is worth at trade-in five years later. You do not feel it monthly. You feel it once, in a dealer’s office, when somebody hands you a number you were not expecting and you decide they are lowballing you.
They might be. The math still happened.
Which is why “I only pay $480 a month” is not a statement about what a car costs. The payment covers your loan. It does not cover the value coming off the hood, the insurance, the fuel, or the tires.
Now the part you can do something about. Of those six lines, two are set on the day you sign and stay set for years.
Insurance, at $2,098 a year, is the second largest line in the study and the most shoppable thing in your financial life. AAA assumes full coverage for a driver under 65 with more than six years of experience and no accidents, in a suburb or a city. A good driver, paying over two grand. Pull three quotes. Our insurance estimator gets you a ballpark first, so you know whether the quotes coming back are any good.
Finance, at $1,184 a year, comes with an assumption worth reading twice. AAA builds that number on a five-year loan with 15 percent down at the national average interest rate. If you put less than 15 percent down, or stretch past 60 months, your finance line is bigger than AAA’s, possibly much bigger. We ran the 84-month version of this math and it came out about $3,500 worse.
AAA’s own advice on this is blunt and correct: “Get pre-approved by a financial institution, such as a bank, credit union or AAA, before discussing financing with the dealer.” Walking into the finance office without a rate in your pocket means the dealer sets the rate and keeps the difference. Not optional.
Two more numbers worth keeping.
Category matters more than options do. Small sedans run 61.73 cents a mile. Half-ton pickups run $1.10. That is a 48 cent gap, on the same roads, and it dwarfs whatever you negotiate off the sticker.
And EVs did not win this one. Charging cost 66 to 70 percent less than gas, but AAA says those savings were often outweighed by higher depreciation, fees and finance costs, with medium-sedan EVs landing 29.1 percent more expensive a year than comparable gas models. Hybrids came out cheaper in several categories. “By looking at EVs, hybrids and traditional gas-powered vehicles within the same categories, consumers can better understand how total ownership costs vary by powertrain,” said Greg Brannon, AAA’s director of automotive engineering.
One caveat AAA raises itself: methodology updates make this year’s $12,863 not directly comparable with last year’s $11,577. Changed measuring stick, not a measured 11 percent jump. Use the breakdown, not the trend.
Then run yours. Our loan calculator will tell you what your actual finance line looks like at your rate and your term, which is the only version of this number that pays you anything to know.
How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.