Average new vehicle transaction prices have topped $50,000 for the first time. The average transaction price of a new car or truck topped that milestone in September, highlighting the rising costs of getting into a new set of wheels. At least that transaction price isn’t as high as the window sticker asks, which hit even higher levels in the same month.
New Car Season Means New Sticker Shocks
The spike comes at the usual time of year: new car season. As 2026 model year vehicles arrive at dealers, the average price of a vehicle climbs. You can see the same nearly every year, as Cox Automotive and Kelley Blue Book report on transaction prices going back to 2012.
What’s different this time is that they’ve finally broken through $50K, instead of brushing up against it. Those brushes have come in the fall of 2022 and 2024, although 2023 somehow stayed a few thousand below.
The only thing keeping the transaction prices from being even higher was large dealer incentives. Incentive spending, when automakers offer rebates, cash back, or low-interest financing, was 7.4% of average transaction price (ATP), the highest of the year. It added up to $3,700 on the average vehicle. Make that $3,700 off.
EVs, More Luxury Sales Take Blame
KBB put some of the responsibility on electric vehicles. EVs took 11.6% of the US new car market last month, a record high. The ATP for EVs was $58,124. But more expensive vehicles get much of the blame. 7.4% of sales, more than 60 models, had ATPs more than $75,000. That’s 1.6 percentage points higher than the same month in 2024.
According to the KBB data, prices have actually remained mostly flat since mid 2022. The ATP has hovered at around $48,000, with some seasonal spikes. The big jump came between March 2021 and September 2022, when prices spiked from just above $40,000 to around $48,000. In September 2012, the average vehicle transaction was just over $30,000.
If you want a good deal, it’s going to be tough. Incentive spending is still lower than it was for most of the last decade. Cox’s data shows that aside from that Covid bump, average incentives hovered around 10% for most of the last 10 years. They seem to have settled at around 7-8% in the last 2 years.
Tariffs Putting Pressure On, But Not Driving This Change
Erin Keating, Executive Analyst for Cox Automotive, said that “tariffs have introduced new cost pressure to the business, but the pricing story in September was mostly driven by the healthy mix of EVs and higher-end vehicles pushing the new-vehicle ATP into uncharted territory.” Keating said that it was only a matter of time “when you consider the best-selling vehicle in America is a pickup truck from Ford that routinely costs north of $65,000.”
While prices might tumble slightly and seasonally over the next few months, Keating said that “many price-conscious buyers are choosing to stay on the sidelines or cruising in the used-vehicle market.” Finding a bargain in that used vehicle market might not be easy, but there are awesome adventure vehicles available for small and medium budgets, not just large ones.
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