Ask anyone what a mile in their car costs and the answer is almost always the price of gas divided by their mpg: 15 or 20 cents. The real cost per mile of a car is about four times that. AAA’s 2025 study puts it at 77 cents for a new car driven 15,000 miles a year, before this year’s jump in gas prices. The difference is everything that never shows up at the pump, and it is the biggest line most households never look at.
Cost per mile of a car: the six lines AAA counts
Since 1950, AAA has published a yearly study called Your Driving Costs. It takes the most popular new models, follows them over five years and 75,000 miles, and breaks the total into six lines. The 2025 edition, published in September 2025, found an average of $11,577 a year to own and operate a new car, down $719 from 2024, for an average sales-weighted price of $38,938 (AAA fact sheet).
Here is how that total breaks down, per year and per mile at 15,000 miles:
| Cost line | Per year | Per mile |
|---|---|---|
| Depreciation | $4,334 | 28.9¢ |
| Insurance (full coverage) | $1,694 | 11.3¢ |
| Maintenance, repair and tires | $1,656 | 11.0¢ |
| Gas (at $3.151 a gallon) | $1,950 | 13.0¢ |
| Loan interest | $1,131 | 7.5¢ |
| License, registration and taxes | $813 | 5.4¢ |
| Total | $11,577 | 77.2¢ |
A note on the insurance line: the fact sheet describes the policy (full coverage, driver under 65 with more than six years of experience, no accidents, living in a city or suburb) and the figure of $1,694 is what remains once the five other published lines are subtracted from the total.
Two things jump out. Depreciation alone costs more than twice as much as gas. And the three lines you pay whether or not you drive, depreciation, insurance and registration, make up more than half the total.
Adjusted to September 2026 gas prices
AAA’s gas line assumed regular at $3.151 a gallon, the average for the twelve months ending in May 2025. At 13.0 cents a mile, that implies a fleet averaging a little over 24 mpg. Gas has since moved a long way: the EIA’s national average was $4.478 for the week of September 21, 2026.
Keeping everything else equal and changing only the gas price, the gas line rises from 13.0 to about 18.5 cents a mile, and the total from 77 to about 83 cents a mile, or $12,399 a year at 15,000 miles. Even then, gas is only about 22% of the cost of a mile. Every other line is still bigger than it or close to it, except registration.
That is the reason the IRS rate sits where it does. The business standard mileage rate is meant to reimburse the full cost of using a car, and the IRS lifted it to 76 cents for the second half of 2026: very close to AAA’s full cost, and four times the gas figure most people have in mind.
The spread between vehicle types
The 77-cent average hides a wide spread by vehicle type. AAA’s 2025 study gives the cost per mile for each category it tracks:
Chart
Cost per mile by vehicle type, AAA 2025
New vehicle, 15,000 miles a year, all costs included, gas at $3.151 a gallon.
Source: AAA, Your Driving Costs 2025
The electric category is interesting because it lands in the middle: AAA found it the cheapest for maintenance, repairs and tires, but the most expensive for depreciation, which is why an EV is not automatically cheaper per mile. The full comparison, with your own car and your own charging, is in the article on whether an electric car is worth it.
Your own cost per mile, line by line
AAA’s figures describe a new car bought with a loan. Yours may be eight years old and paid off, in which case the depreciation and interest lines are far smaller. Start from your gut feeling, then replace the averages below with your own numbers.
Mr Deal's calculator
What does one mile in your car really cost?
Start with your gut feeling, then replace the example figures with yours. The examples are AAA's 2025 averages for a new car driven 15,000 miles a year.
Example values: AAA, Your Driving Costs 2025 (new vehicle, 15,000 miles a year). Gas: U.S. Energy Information Administration, weekly average for your state. IRS standard mileage rate: 76 cents per business mile from July 1, 2026.
If you want a sanity check on your result, compare it with the IRS figure. The business standard mileage rate, 76 cents from July 1, 2026, is set to reimburse the full expense of driving a typical car for work: fixed charges and running expenses together. If your result is far below it, you probably drive an older, paid-off car, or you left a line at zero; if it is far above, you are paying for a large or new vehicle over relatively few miles. Neither is wrong. The point is to know which case you are in, because the levers differ. A low result means your money goes mostly to fuel and repairs, which respond to how you drive and how you maintain the car. A high one means it goes mostly to owning the vehicle, which only changes with the next purchase, and that purchase is where the real decision is.
Most people who run this calculator find their guess was off by a factor of three or four. That is not a failure of arithmetic. It is that the expensive lines arrive once a year, or at resale, and the cheap one, gas, arrives every week.
Track it for a year and the average becomes yours
The averages above are a starting point. Your own cost per mile only exists once you write it down: every fill-up, every oil change, every repair, the insurance renewal and the registration fee, next to the odometer reading. After twelve months you no longer need AAA’s table; you have your own. A complete service history also tends to help when you sell the car, since a buyer can see what was done and when.
Best for: knowing what your car really costs
Vehicle maintenance and mileage log book
- Fill-ups, repairs and fees in one place, next to the odometer
- Your own cost per mile after a year, instead of an average
- A dated service history to show a buyer at resale
- No app, no battery, no subscription
The catch: It only works if it is filled in every time you pay for the car.
Current price and availability on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate, this site earns from qualifying purchases. It costs you nothing extra, and it does not change the verdict: when the numbers say a purchase never pays for itself, that is what you will read.
If you drive for work as an independent contractor, the log does double duty. The IRS standard mileage rate can only be claimed on miles you can document, and a dedicated mileage log book for taxesaff., kept in the glove box, records date, destination, purpose and odometer for each business trip. The tax rules themselves are out of this site’s scope: check them with the IRS or a tax professional.
An older, paid-off car: the same method, different weights
AAA’s study is about new cars, and most cars on the road are not new. The method still works for an older one; only the weights change. Take a car that is ten years old and paid off. The loan interest line disappears. Depreciation shrinks a great deal, because a ten-year-old car has already lost most of its value and loses little more each year. Insurance often falls too, if you drop collision coverage on a car worth less than the deductible would make sensible, which is a decision to take with your insurer, not with this site.
What grows is the maintenance line. Wear items come due one after another as the odometer climbs: brakes, suspension parts, belts, a battery. That is also what the Consumer Price Index is showing this year, as the next section explains. For an older car, the honest way to fill in the calculator is to add up the last twelve months of repair bills rather than using AAA’s average.
The result is usually a cost per mile well below 77 cents, often by half, and that is the strongest financial argument for keeping a sound car longer. It is also why replacing a paid-off car “to save on gas” rarely adds up: the new car’s depreciation and interest start from zero again, and they are far larger than the gas you would save. The EV article runs exactly that comparison with a monthly payment on one side and a paid-off car on the other.
What went up and down this year, according to the BLS
AAA’s figures are a snapshot from 2025. The Consumer Price Index tells you which way each line has moved since. Over the twelve months to August 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics measured gasoline up 27.4%, motor vehicle maintenance and repair up 5.2%, and, on the other side, motor vehicle insurance down 5.1% and used cars and trucks down 2.3% (BLS).
That mix matters for the calculator. The two lines that rose are the ones tied to driving: fuel and upkeep, which you pay per mile. The one that fell is insurance, which you pay per year whether you drive or not. If you have not shopped your policy since premiums peaked, this is the year to get a second quote; if you drive a lot, the per-mile lines are where this year’s increase landed.
Why driving more makes each mile cheaper, and the bill bigger
Because so much of the cost is fixed, the average cost per mile falls as mileage rises. AAA’s 2025 study gives 77 cents a mile at 15,000 miles a year and 66 cents at 20,000. At lower mileage the effect runs the other way. Spreading AAA’s fixed yearly costs (depreciation, insurance, interest, registration: $7,972 in total) over fewer miles shows the mechanism:
Chart
The fixed part of a mile, by annual mileage
AAA 2025 fixed yearly costs, $7,972, spread over the miles driven. Real depreciation also falls a little at low mileage.
Read that curve carefully, because it is easy to draw the wrong conclusion. Driving more does not save money: the total bill always rises with every mile. What falls is the average. The practical lesson is the opposite one for low-mileage households. If you drive 5,000 miles a year, most of what you pay is for having a car, not for using it, and that is exactly the case where the question “do we need two cars?” is worth asking.
Three ways to cut the cost per mile you actually control
The lines you control week to week are gas and maintenance, and the cheapest lever on both is attention. Keeping tires at the right pressure costs nothing: the article on tire pressure and gas mileage shows it is worth a few dozen dollars a year in gas and more in tire life. A digital tire pressure gaugeaff. is the only tool it needs.
Maintenance is the second. The dashboard’s check engine light is a prompt to understand before you pay: a basic OBD2 code readeraff. plugged in under the dashboard reads the fault code in seconds, so you arrive at the shop knowing what the car has reported rather than hearing it for the first time on the estimate. It does not replace the mechanic; it lets you ask better questions.
The third lever is the biggest and the least comfortable: miles and cars. A trip combined with another, a second car sold, a commute shared two days a week. Each of those removes miles at the full cost per mile, not at the price of gas. The complete ranking of these levers, from free to structural, is in the guide to driving for less, and the smaller services around the car, like washing it at home instead of paying a car wash, are run through the same kind of calculation.
To see where your car sits in your overall cost of living, the personal inflation calculator weighs gas against rent, groceries and the rest, and this week’s gas prices by state give the current figure for your area.
Frequently asked questions
- What is the average cost per mile to own and drive a car?
- AAA's Your Driving Costs 2025 study puts the total cost of owning and operating a new car at $11,577 a year for 15,000 miles, which works out to about 77 cents a mile. That figure was built on gas at $3.151 a gallon. Adjusting only the gas price to the EIA national average of $4.478 for the week of September 21, 2026, the same car costs about 83 cents a mile.
- What costs the most per mile: gas or depreciation?
- Depreciation, by far. In AAA's 2025 figures for a new car driven 15,000 miles a year, depreciation is $4,334 a year, about 29 cents a mile, against 13 cents a mile for gas. Insurance adds about 11 cents, maintenance, repairs and tires 11 cents, loan interest 7.5 cents, and license, registration and taxes about 5.4 cents.
- What is the IRS mileage rate for 2026?
- The IRS set the 2026 business standard mileage rate at 72.5 cents per mile from January 1, then raised it to 76 cents for July 1 through December 31, 2026, citing the increase in fuel costs. The rate is meant to cover the full cost of using a car for business, not just gas, which is why it sits close to AAA's cost per mile.
- Does driving more lower the cost per mile?
- Yes, because a large share of the cost is fixed per year: insurance, registration and much of the depreciation. AAA's 2025 study gives 77 cents a mile at 15,000 miles a year and 66 cents at 20,000. The total bill still rises with every mile; only the average per mile falls.
- How do I calculate my own car's cost per mile?
- Add up what the car costs you in a year: the value it loses, insurance, loan interest, registration and taxes, then gas and maintenance for the miles you drive. Divide by your annual miles. The calculator on this page does it with AAA's averages as a starting point and your state's gas price, and you can replace each line with your own figure.
- What is a short trip really worth?
- At about 83 cents a mile, a 10-mile round trip costs about $8.30 in total, of which only about $1.85 is gas. That is the number to have in mind when you decide whether a trip is worth making, not the price of the gallon.
Who wrote this
Baptiste S.
Founder and writer · bs-media
I am not a financial adviser or an economist. I keep the books of an ordinary household, and I got tired of tip lists that never put a number on anything. So I work the other way round: I start from the expense, find the public data that says what it really costs, work out how long the object meant to cut it takes to pay for itself, and publish the result — including when it says to buy nothing.
- I start from public data — federal fuel prices, the Consumer Price Index, Energy Star ratings — and I say where every figure comes from.
- Every calculation shows its assumptions. If your usage differs from my example, the calculator gives you your own break-even point.
- I say when a purchase never pays for itself, including the best-selling product in its category.
- Credit, investing, insurance and public benefits are out of scope and referred to the competent body.
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