What Car Maintenance Actually Costs by Year

Two numbers, both correct

Search for annual maintenance costs and you will find figures ranging from about $230 to over $1,650 a year. Both ends come from credible sources. They are measuring different things, and understanding the difference is most of what you need.

Consumer Reports asks members what they actually paid out of pocket over the previous twelve months. Its 2025 survey, covering 2014–2023 model years across 28 brands, found $1,160 across years one to five — about $232 a year.

AAA models the full economic cost of running a new car. Its 2025 edition puts maintenance, repair and tires at 11.04 cents per mile, which at 15,000 miles a year works out near $1,656. But AAA's category explicitly includes a comprehensive extended warranty and a set of replacement tires.

So the honest summary is: your out-of-pocket cost in the early years is low, because the warranty is absorbing what would otherwise be repair bills. The economic cost is not low; it is just being paid by someone else, having been priced into what you paid for the car.

The curve: years 6 to 10 are the expensive ones

This is the single most useful finding in the data. Consumer Reports' brackets:

• Years 1–5: $1,160 total, about $232 a year
• Years 6–10: $4,100 total, about $820 a year
• Ten-year total: $5,260

The second five years cost roughly three and a half times the first five. Consumer Reports attributes the inflection to warranty and free-maintenance periods expiring, typically after the third to fifth year.

This is why the third or fourth year of ownership is where budgets break. Nothing about the car changed; the coverage did. Buyers who set their expectations during the free-maintenance period experience the transition as the car "starting to have problems," when it is mostly the bills becoming visible.

It is also the strongest argument for buying a lightly used car and keeping it a long time. The first owner pays the steepest depreciation; the second owner pays the maintenance. Neither is free, but the maintenance bill is smaller.

Brand matters more than almost anything else

Consumer Reports' 10-year maintenance and repair totals, cheapest first:

• Tesla: $5,050
• Lincoln: $5,200
• Buick: $5,300

And the most expensive:

• Land Rover: $17,450
• Porsche: $16,000
• Mercedes-Benz: $13,100
• Audi: $11,050

Land Rover costs roughly three and a half times Tesla over a decade. That $12,400 gap dwarfs anything you will achieve by negotiating well, shopping for cheaper oil changes, or timing your purchase.

The steepness of the curve varies by brand too, not just its height. Jeep runs $1,220 in years 1–5 and $5,250 in years 6–10 — a 4.3x jump. Land Rover goes from $3,700 to $13,750. If you plan to sell before year six, you will never experience the expensive half of a brand's curve. If you plan to keep the car twelve years, it is the only half that matters.

What individual services cost

National averages from RepairPal's mid-2026 estimator, which reflects shop pricing including labour:

• Oil change: $158–$186 at a repair shop. Quick-lube chains run considerably less, though we could not find a well-documented national survey of quick-lube pricing.
• Brake pads: $330–$390
• Battery: $423–$460
• Spark plugs: $281–$394
• Coolant change: $437–$508
• Transmission fluid: $281–$340
• Timing belt: $887–$1,302
• Cabin air filter: $86–$114
• Engine air filter: $77–$97

Treat these as orientation, not quotes. The model-to-model spread is enormous: spark plugs run $150–$229 on a Toyota Camry but $305–$399 on a Ford F-150. A battery is $243–$264 on a Honda Accord and $811–$831 on a Camry. Before assuming a service is overpriced, check what it costs on your car.

You will see confident figures for bundled 60,000 or 90,000-mile service packages. We could not source a credible national average for those, so we are not going to invent one. Build your estimate from the individual items your manufacturer's schedule actually calls for.

Tires are a bigger share than people expect

Consumer Reports surveyed 47,706 members in October 2025 and found an average of $212 per tire. Installation ran a median $31 per tire among those charged for it — though more than half paid nothing.

That puts a set of four somewhere around $850 to $975 installed. Spread across the 75,000 miles AAA's model covers, that is roughly 10 to 12% of the entire maintenance figure — from a single purchase most people forget to budget for.

Worth noting: AAA's model assumes one replacement set across five years and 75,000 miles. If you keep a car ten years and 120,000 miles, you will buy more than one set, so the per-mile figure understates your lifetime tire cost.

The EV maintenance question

The widely-repeated claim is that EVs cost half as much to maintain. That figure comes from a Consumer Reports analysis published in October 2020, and the newer data does not support it.

AAA's 2025 study compared like-for-like classes and found the EV advantage to be much smaller — between 1 and 24% depending on the segment:

• Medium sedan: $1,358 electric vs $1,786 gas
• Compact SUV: $1,449 vs $1,746
• Medium SUV: $1,632 vs $1,769
• Pickup: $1,685 vs $1,703 — essentially identical

Consumer Reports' 2025 brand data points the same way: Tesla was the cheapest of 28 brands at $5,050 over ten years, but the all-brand average was $5,260. That is a 4% advantage, not 50% — and Tesla being one brand rather than a proxy for all EVs complicates it further.

The mechanical logic for EV savings is real: no oil changes, no spark plugs, no timing belt, far fewer moving parts, and less brake wear thanks to regenerative braking. But maintenance is also the category where EVs do best. AAA's 2025 study found EVs more expensive overall, with notably higher depreciation and insurance.

Repair costs are rising fast right now

CarMD analysed more than 39 million recommended repairs from 2025 and found the average check-engine-light repair hit $554 — a 33% jump in a single year, after more than a decade drifting between roughly $334 and $428.

The breakdown matters: labour rose 51% while parts rose 23%. This is a labour-cost story more than a parts-cost story.

The most common individual repairs were catalytic converter replacement (averaging $1,511 and accounting for 7.4% of all repairs), oxygen sensors at $287, and ignition coils with spark plugs at $480.

Broader inflation confirms the direction. The federal price index for motor vehicle maintenance and repair was running about 7% above the prior year as of mid-2026, well ahead of headline inflation. Any maintenance figure you read that predates 2026 — including several in this guide — is understated by roughly that much per year since publication.

How to actually budget for this

1. Set aside money from year one, even while it is free. The expensive years are coming, and they arrive precisely when the warranty stops absorbing them.
2. Budget by age, not a flat annual figure. Something like $250 a year for years 1–5 and $850 a year for years 6–10 tracks the real curve far better than one average.
3. Check the brand before you buy, not after. A $12,000 ten-year difference between brands is decided at purchase and cannot be optimised later.
4. Treat tires as a scheduled expense. Roughly $900 every few years, entirely predictable, almost never budgeted.
5. Get model-specific quotes. National averages hide five-fold differences between vehicles.

The calculator will take a maintenance estimate as an input. Using an age-appropriate figure rather than a flat national average is the single change that will make its output resemble your actual bank statement.