How much should you budget for car maintenance?

The national floor: 11.04 cents a mile

AAA’s 2025 Your Driving Costs study puts maintenance, repair, and tire spending at 11.04 cents per mile on a new vehicle, averaged over five years of ownership. That figure already blends the cheap years, an oil change here, a cabin filter there, with the expensive ones, brakes, a full set of tires, an unplanned repair. Use it as your floor. It is a real national average, not a best case number, so budgeting below it is optimistic rather than realistic.

Why the number swings so much by vehicle

The AAA figure is a national average across every make and model, and individual vehicles land well above or below it. RepairPal’s reliability data on the Honda Civic is a useful illustration of how wide that spread can be: the Civic’s average combined repair and maintenance cost runs $368 a year, compared with $526 for the average compact car and $652 for the average vehicle across all classes. That is not a coincidence, it tracks with the Civic’s 4.5 out of 5 reliability rating, third of 36 compact cars RepairPal tracks. A vehicle with a strong reliability record and cheap, widely available parts will consistently cost less to maintain than one without those advantages, and that gap compounds every year you own the car.

The lesson is not “buy a Civic.” It is that the model you choose is doing as much to set your maintenance budget as anything else on this page, so if you are still shopping, a vehicle’s repair and reliability track record deserves real weight before you sign anything.

Building your own number

A flat annual figure is a starting point, not a plan. Maintenance cost is not evenly distributed across a car’s life, it usually arrives in stages:

• Early ownership. Mostly routine items, oil changes, tire rotations, filters, an occasional inspection. This is typically the cheapest stretch, and if the car is still under warranty, some of it may be covered outright.
• The middle stretch. Tires wear out, brakes need attention, batteries age out, and fluid services that were easy to ignore start mattering. This is where the AAA per mile average earns its keep as a planning tool, multiply it by your expected annual mileage and you have a reasonable working budget for this phase.
• High mileage. Bigger ticket items become more likely, and it is worth periodically asking whether continued repair still makes financial sense for that specific car.

Turning those stages into an actual habit is simpler than it sounds. Open a separate savings account or a dedicated line in your budget, fund it monthly using the AAA per mile figure as your guide, and let it carry a balance rather than sweeping it to zero every time something small comes up. The point of a maintenance reserve is that the middle and high mileage stages above draw down a balance you have already built, instead of forcing a scramble every time a bill lands that your checking account was not expecting.

Adjusting the number for a used car

Everything above is anchored to AAA’s new vehicle figure, and a used car changes the math in two directions at once. On one hand, a used car has already absorbed its steepest depreciation, which is not part of this maintenance conversation but does free up budget elsewhere. On the other hand, once a vehicle is out of its factory warranty, more of what would have been a covered repair becomes an out of pocket one, which tends to push actual maintenance and repair spending above the new vehicle baseline, not below it. Treat the AAA figure as a floor for a used car that is out of warranty, not a ceiling, and lean more heavily on a specific vehicle’s documented reliability record, the way the Civic numbers above illustrate, than on the fact that it is simply older and therefore assumed to be cheaper to run.

Mistakes that blow up a maintenance budget

Skipping a fluid or filter service to save money today almost never saves money, it usually converts a small scheduled cost into a larger unscheduled one later. Treating tires as optional when money is tight is the riskier version of the same mistake, tires and brakes are safety equipment, not an upgrade, and worn ones belong in front of a qualified technician on schedule, not whenever the budget allows. If you are not sure whether a tire, brake, or suspension issue is urgent, that is a professional inspection, not a guess.

The other common mistake is budgeting off a vehicle’s marketing reputation instead of its actual repair data, or assuming a used car with no service history will perform like the fleet average. A neglected car does not average out, it tends to hand its new owner a lump sum of deferred maintenance instead.

Where you get the work done matters too. If you are weighing dealership pricing against an independent shop, that decision affects your real annual number as much as the vehicle does, and finding a shop you trust before something breaks puts you in a much stronger position than shopping for one during an emergency.

Next steps

Start with 11.04 cents per mile times your realistic annual mileage as a baseline, then adjust it using your specific vehicle’s repair reputation the way the Civic ownership cost numbers illustrate. Rebuild the estimate once a year, and sooner if the car crosses into high mileage territory or starts needing repairs outside routine service.