Owning and operating a new vehicle cost an average of $11,577 a year in 2025, according to AAA’s Your Driving Costs study. That works out to 77 cents per mile at the study’s assumption of 15,000 miles a year, and it represents a decrease of $719 from the year before.

A car payment is the part households track. It is not the largest part. Here is what the primary sources report, category by category.

The AAA breakdown for 2025

AAA models a five-year ownership period covering 75,000 miles, across nine vehicle categories, using a sales-weighted average manufacturer’s suggested retail price of $38,938. Its 2025 figures divide as follows:

  • Depreciation: $4,334 a year, or 28.9 cents per mile. The single largest cost, and the one no driver writes a check for.
  • Fuel: 13.00 cents per mile, which comes to $1,950 at 15,000 miles. AAA assumed regular gasoline averaging about $3.15 per gallon over the twelve months ending in May 2025, and electricity at about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour for electric vehicles.
  • Insurance: $1,694 a year.
  • Maintenance, repair, and tires: 11.04 cents per mile.
  • License, registration, and taxes: $813 a year.
  • Finance charges: $1,131 a year, or 7.5 cents per mile, down from $1,332 in 2024.

Depreciation alone exceeds insurance, registration, and finance charges combined. AAA put depreciation at $4,680 in 2024, so that category fell by $346. Finance charges fell by about $200 more. Together the two account for roughly three quarters of the $719 decline in the headline number.

Per-mile costs by vehicle type

The 77-cent average conceals a wide spread. AAA’s 2025 per-mile figures run from about 56 cents for a small sedan to about 99 cents for a half-ton pickup. A household that drives a pickup 15,000 miles a year spends roughly $6,400 more annually than one driving a small sedan the same distance.

Mileage changes the per-mile math in the opposite direction from what most drivers assume. AAA reports $1.00 per mile at 10,000 miles a year and 66 cents at 20,000. Fixed costs, meaning depreciation, insurance, registration, and financing, spread across fewer miles when the car sits. Driving less lowers the annual bill and raises the cost of each trip.

What households actually spend, according to federal data

AAA models a new vehicle. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures what real households report spending on transportation of every kind.

Its Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2024, released in December 2025, put average annual transportation spending at $13,318 per consumer unit. That is 17.0 percent of the $78,535 an average household spent in total, second only to housing at 33.4 percent.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks that total into four top-level components:

  • vehicle purchases, net outlay: $5,337
  • gasoline and motor oil: $2,411
  • other vehicle expenses: $4,206, up 9.4 percent
  • public and other transportation: $1,131

Vehicle insurance sits inside that third line rather than alongside it. The Bureau reported household spending on vehicle insurance at $1,993, up 12.3 percent, which makes it close to half of the other-vehicle-expenses category on its own.

The insurance and other-vehicle-expenses increases were both large enough to register as statistically significant, which most year-to-year movements in that survey are not. Household transportation spending rose 1.1 percent overall in 2024, an increase the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself describes as not statistically significant. The composition shifted more than the total.

Reading the two sources together

AAA’s $11,577 and the federal survey’s $13,318 are not competing estimates of the same thing. AAA prices one new vehicle under fixed assumptions. The Consumer Expenditure Survey captures every household, including those running two cars, those running none, and those keeping a paid-off vehicle for a decade.

Used the right way, the gap is informative. AAA describes what a household signs up for when it buys new. The federal survey describes what the category consumes across the population, including public transit and vehicles already owned outright.

The costs that never appear on a statement

Three of AAA’s six categories are close to invisible in monthly budgeting.

Depreciation, at $4,334 a year, shows up only when the vehicle is sold or traded. A driver experiences it as disappointment at a trade-in quote rather than as an expense.

Finance charges, at $1,131, sit inside the monthly payment, blended with principal. A buyer comparing two monthly payments a few dollars apart is often comparing loan terms rather than vehicle prices.

Maintenance, repair, and tires arrive in lumps. AAA’s 11.04 cents per mile averages out to roughly $1,650 a year, but no household spends it that way. It shows up as nothing for eleven months and the whole year’s worth in the twelfth, which is why it breaks budgets that are otherwise sound.

That lumpiness is getting worse rather than better. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded motor vehicle maintenance and repair up 5.2 percent over the twelve months ending August 2026, and motor vehicle maintenance and servicing up 7.9 percent, against 3.4 percent for all items. Repair prices have outrun general inflation for several years running, and a driver keeping an older vehicle to avoid a payment is trading a predictable cost for an unpredictable one in the fastest-inflating category of the three.

Why this matters beyond the car

Transportation takes 17.0 percent of household spending in a country where most jobs require reaching a fixed location at a fixed time. That expense is close to mandatory for the majority of American workers, and the largest slices of it, depreciation and insurance, respond to nothing an individual driver does.

Fight For A Living Wage, a nonpartisan grassroots 501(c)(3), states its thesis in these terms: the crisis is affordability rather than the minimum wage alone, because housing, healthcare, childcare, food, transportation, education and retirement all outran wages. Wages have not kept pace. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its Real Earnings release for August 2026 that real average hourly earnings fell 0.3 percent over the preceding twelve months.

Anyone using these figures should carry the vintage with them. AAA’s most recent study reports 2025. The Consumer Expenditure Survey’s most recent year is 2024. Both are the newest available from their publishers, and neither describes what a car costs today.