The Cumulative Cost of Car Maintenance

How much can you expect to spend on regular car maintenance over its lifetime?

That will most likely depend on what kind of car you drive and how many miles you drive it, but if you want a generic estimate for an average car driven in the U.S., you’ve come to the right place because we’ve built a tool to estimate the cost!

To do that, we’re drawing on data that YourMechanic published in 2016 using data from the roving car maintenance service provider’s “huge dataset”. And then, we took inflation for car repairs into account to make the numbers current for 2019.

That all happens in the tool below, which if you’re accessing this article on a site that republishes our RSS news feed, you’ll likely want to click through to access a working version of the tool on our site. To run the tool, just enter mileage mark you want to consider, and we’ll give you the average cumulative cost of maintenance up to that point based on YourMechanic’s inflation adjusted numbers.

Overall, the tool is optimized to estimate average regular maintenance costs between 0 and 200,000 miles.

If you want to estimate the cost of maintenance between two mileage thresholds, try running the tool with the higher mileage first, then with the lower mileage, the result for which you’ll need to subtract from your previous result. If you choose 25,000 mile intervals, the results will be similar to the data YourMechanic provided in their “How Do Maintenance Costs Vary With Mileage?” table, although after adjusting for three years of inflation.

Now, how might you use this information to determine when it would be time to replace your car? Would it be when the cumulative cost exceeds the cost of a new car? Or would it when the cost of maintenance between a certain mileage interval exceeds the resale value of your car?