Lease vs. Buy Calculator

Deciding whether to lease or buy a car comes down to comparing what you'll actually pay under each option over the same stretch of time, plus accounting for the fact that buying leaves you with something to show for it afterward: the car itself.

The cost of leasing is the easier half of the equation. You pay a down payment (sometimes called a drive-off fee) up front, then a fixed monthly payment for the length of the lease, and at the end you hand the keys back with nothing further owed and nothing left to sell. This calculator adds your down payment to your monthly lease payment multiplied by the lease term to get your total lease cost.

The cost of buying is calculated the same way, but the monthly payment comes from amortizing a loan instead: the vehicle price minus your down payment, financed at your loan's interest rate over your loan term, using the standard formula lenders use to calculate fixed monthly payments. Because a loan term is often longer than a typical lease term, this calculator compares costs over the length of the lease, so you're looking at an apples-to-apples time period rather than the full life of the loan.

The piece leasing doesn't give you is resale value. A financed car is still yours to sell or trade in once you stop making payments (or even before, though you'd need to pay off what's left on the loan first). This calculator estimates that value using a simple depreciation assumption of about 15% per year, a commonly cited average — though real-world depreciation varies widely by make, model, mileage, and condition, so treat this figure as a ballpark rather than a guarantee.

Put together, these three numbers let you weigh a lower monthly lease payment against the ownership and equity you'd build by financing instead, based on how long you actually plan to keep driving the car.