What a Car Really Costs Each Month, and Why Lost Value Is the Biggest Line

Ask what a car costs and most people give you two numbers, the loan payment and the gas. AAA, the national motor club, has published a yearly study of driving costs since 1950. It counts six. The 2026 edition, out in September, puts the average new car at $12,863 a year to own and run, or $1,071.92 a month.

The biggest of those six lines never shows up on a bill. It’s depreciation, the value your car loses while it sits in the driveway.

Below you’ll find each cost, how often it hits, where to look up your own number, what pushes the total up or down, and two common extras that rarely earn their price.

A new car averages $1,072 a month

AAA builds its figure from 34 top-selling models in seven categories, from small sedans to half-ton pickups, with a sales-weighted average sticker price of $39,376. It assumes you keep the car five years and drive it 75,000 miles, or 15,000 a year. Spread over 12 months, here’s what you’d pay on each line.

The fine print matters if you want to hold your own car up against it. AAA’s loan is five years with 15% down at the national average rate. The insurance is a full-coverage policy for a driver under 65 with more than six years behind the wheel, no accidents, and an address in a city or suburb.

Your payment isn’t the cost of the car

Experian’s report on auto lending for the second quarter of 2026 put the average new-car payment at $765 a month and the average used-car payment at $542. That’s real money leaving your account, but most of it pays back the price of something you’ll still own when the loan ends.

The part of your payment that’s truly a cost is the interest. AAA puts finance charges for a new car at $1,184 a year, about $99 a month.

The rest of what the car costs you is the value it loses. AAA’s number is $4,422 a year, the gap between the price new and what a dealer would offer on trade-in after five years and 75,000 miles. That’s about $369 a month, more than a third of the whole total.

Your loan statement shows how much of each payment went to interest. Check it once to see your own split.

You’ll never get a bill for depreciation.

It comes due all at once, on the day you sell or trade in and get back far less than you paid. A paid-off car keeps losing value too, only more slowly as it gets older.

Fuel costs more than insurance

AAA prices fuel at 17.3 cents a mile, based on regular gas averaging $4.152 a gallon over the 12 months that ended in May 2026. At 15,000 miles that’s $2,595 a year, or about $216 a month.

Home charging for electric cars was priced at 18 cents a kilowatt-hour, and AAA found charging costs ran 66% to 70% below what gas models spent on fuel.

Full-coverage insurance averages $2,098 a year in the study, about $175 a month. That’s for AAA’s low-risk driver. Your premium can land well past it if you have a teenager on the policy, a recent claim, or a ZIP code with a lot of crashes and thefts. To compare yours, take the premium on your declarations page and divide it by the months it covers.

Repairs, tires and fees add $213

Maintenance, repairs and tires come to 11.7 cents a mile in AAA’s math, about $146 a month at 15,000 miles. That covers the maker’s scheduled service, wear items like brakes, an extended warranty, and one set of replacement tires over the five years.

You won’t see those costs as an even monthly bill. Most months cost you little, and then tires or brakes come due all at once.

You can see the tire bill coming with a quarter. Slide it into a tread groove with Washington’s head down, and if you can see all of his head, you have less than 4/32 of an inch left, the depth at which Consumer Reports suggests replacing tires.

License, registration and taxes average $802 a year, about $67 a month. That includes the taxes and fees you pay once at purchase as well as the yearly renewal.

Parking and tolls aren’t in AAA’s number at all, and if you drive into a big city they can be one of your larger lines.

Where to find your own numbers

AAA’s averages are a yardstick, and your own figures are already sitting in your bank app and your mail.

Driving more costs more, but less per mile

AAA runs its numbers at three mileages. If you drive 10,000 miles a year, the average new car costs you $1.10 a mile, against 86 cents at 15,000 and 74 cents at 20,000.

The fixed costs, like insurance and lost value, get spread across more trips, but your yearly total still climbs, from about $11,000 at 10,000 miles to about $14,800 at 20,000.

The age of the car pulls the other way. AAA’s figures describe a new car’s first five years, when lost value is at its steepest. An older car usually loses less each year but needs more repairs, and once your loan is paid off, the finance line drops out.

Where you live changes fees and tolls

Registration fees and tolls depend on where you live, and the spread is wide.

Texas charges a base registration fee of $50.75 for a passenger car. California charges $76 plus a $34 Highway Patrol fee, then adds a vehicle license fee of 0.65% of the car’s value. On a car at AAA’s average price of $39,376, that last piece alone is about $256 the first year.

Tolls can turn into a monthly bill of their own. Since January 2025, E-ZPass drivers in passenger cars have paid $9 to enter Manhattan at 60th Street and below during peak hours, once a day. Twenty workdays of that comes to $180 a month.

A credit score can cost $252 a month

Experian’s second-quarter report shows how much the loan rate tracks your credit score. Borrowers with scores of 781 or higher paid an average of 4.41% on new cars. Those at 500 or below paid 16.11%.

Run those rates on $43,610, Experian’s average new-car loan amount, over 60 months. At 4.41% the payment is about $811. At 16.11% it’s about $1,063, a gap of about $252 a month and roughly $15,100 more in interest over the five years.

Premium gas buys nothing in most cars

AAA tested this in 2016. Cars built to run on regular showed no gain in performance, fuel economy or emissions on premium, and the club estimated that American drivers had spent more than $2.1 billion extra on premium for those cars over the year before. Higher octane means the fuel resists engine knock better, which only matters in an engine built to need it.

The gap is wide. AAA’s daily national average on October 4, 2026 was $4.37 a gallon for regular and $5.27 for premium, 90 cents apart. Divide AAA’s yearly fuel cost of $2,595 by its $4.152 gas price and you get about 625 gallons, and 90 cents extra on each one comes to roughly $560 a year, about $47 a month.

Your owner’s manual or the inside of the fuel door tells you which grade your engine needs. If it says premium is required, use premium.

Dealer add-ons are optional

The Federal Trade Commission’s car-buying advice names the usual ones: extended warranties, service contracts, credit insurance, GAP coverage and window etching. Its guidance is plain. They’re generally optional, you can say no or ask the price, and unless you pay cash for them, they raise both your payment and the amount you finance.

Some buyers do want one of them. It helps to ask for each one as its own line with its own price, before it disappears into your monthly payment.

Try it this week

• Open last month’s bank and card statements and add up every car charge, from the payment and the gas to insurance, tolls, parking and the car wash.
• Add one twelfth of anything yearly, like registration, and of any repair or tires from the past 12 months.
• Write your rough monthly depreciation next to that sum, using the formula in the table above.

If your total lands far from $1,072, hold it up against the chart at the top, line by line, to see which cost is driving the difference.