Car Depreciation Calculator
The cost the pump never shows — what the car itself loses each year, month, and mile between the price you paid and the price you'll get.
Car Depreciation Calculator
Results recalculate instantly on every keystroke. Nothing you type is transmitted.
What this result does not account for
- Straight-line convention — real curves are front-loaded, named as such
- Price 100 to 1,000,000; years 1 to 30; salvage below price
In short: A $32,000 car worth $12,000 after five years sheds $4,000 a year straight-line — $333.33 a month, 12.5% of the purchase price annually. At 12,000 miles a year that is 33.3¢ a mile: nearly triple the fuel, and the line item nobody feels at the pump.
Formula
annual depreciation = (purchase − salvage) ÷ years; per mile = annual ÷ miles per year
Straight-line depreciation divides the value gap — what you paid minus what the car will be worth — evenly across the years you own it. It is the linear convention, honest about totals even though real cars lose more in year one than in year four: the curve is front-loaded, the line is not. Spread over your annual miles, depreciation is usually the biggest per-mile cost of driving — bigger than fuel, and completely invisible at the pump.
Worked Example
- Enter the purchase price and the value you expect at resale.
- Enter the years of ownership and your annual miles.
- Read the yearly, monthly and per-mile loss.
Defaults: $32,000 to $12,000 over 5 years at 12,000 miles — $4,000 a year, $333.33 a month, 33.3¢ a mile.
Strengths & Limits Of This Model
Where this engine is strong
- Per-mile truth beside the pump price
- The front-loaded curve named, not hidden
- Refuses a salvage above the price
Where it stops
- No declining-balance schedule — the average is the honest summary
Practical Use Cases
True cost per mile
the line the pump hides
Buy vs lease
what the car itself costs
Sell timing
what another year costs
Methodology & Editorial Standards
Computation runs in IEEE-754 double precision at full internal precision; rounding to two decimal places occurs strictly at the display layer, so no cumulative drift enters the result. All monetary outputs use accounting presentation — grouped thousands, two decimals, negatives in parentheses — so figures can be transcribed directly into a model or working paper. Division-by-zero and out-of-domain inputs return an em-dash rather than a misleading number.
This engine was reconciled against an independent reference implementation and hand-verified for the worked example above before release. Our full five-stage review process is published on the About Us page.
Disclaimer. This calculator is provided for informational and modelling purposes only and does not constitute financial, tax, legal, medical, or engineering advice. Verify all figures with a qualified professional before acting on them.
Car Depreciation Calculator — 8 Expert FAQs
8 analyst-written answers to the questions practitioners actually ask — optimised for voice and answer-engine retrieval.
Why straight-line when cars drop fast at first?
Because the question here is the yearly AVERAGE, and averaging is what the line does honestly. Real curves are front-loaded — the first year takes the biggest hit — so treat the per-year figure as the mean, not the shape.
Where does the later value come from?
From you: a realistic resale estimate for the car's age and mileage. Price guides list them; the arithmetic only needs the two ends of the curve.
Why is per-mile depreciation bigger than fuel?
Because the car's value is the tank that never refills. $4,000 a year over 12,000 miles is 33.3¢ a mile against a fuel line near 12¢ — the depreciation is the quiet majority of what driving costs.
What if I enter a salvage above the purchase price?
The page refuses — a car worth more later than it cost new is not depreciation, and arithmetic that rewards you for owning it would be a lie with decimal points.
Do leases depreciate differently?
A lease IS the depreciation, billed monthly plus a rent charge — the finance pages price the lease itself. This page prices what OWNING loses, which is the number a lease quietly pass-throughs to you.
Does mileage change the loss?
It changes the PER-MILE read, not the total: the car sheds the same value whether it moves or sleeps, which is why the per-mile card divides by YOUR miles — and why idle cars are the dearest per mile.
Is depreciation tax-deductible?
Business use has its own rules and this page prices none of them — the reimbursement page handles what the miles are owed, and the tax pages own the deduction schedules.
Why does the page want miles per year at all?
For the truth card. Annual loss is an abstraction; cents per mile is the figure that stands next to the pump price and shows which of the two has been quietly winning.