What month do used cars sell for the most?

Across the ten years of BLS data through 2025, used-vehicle prices run furthest above their annual trend in August and July and furthest below it in January. The full swing from trough to peak is about 5.0 percent.

Is spring really the best time to sell a car?

Not in the price data. Spring months sit near the middle of the seasonal range; the peak is late summer. The spring folklore likely tracks demand and inventory turnover, which matter to dealers, more than the prices consumers actually pay.

Should I wait for the peak month to sell?

Usually not. The seasonal tailwind works out to roughly 0.7 percent a month at best, and a typical used car loses value faster than that while it waits. Waiting only pays if your car is depreciating unusually slowly.

Data study · BLS price data

The best time to sell a car, from 70 years of price data

Used-car prices peak in August and run lowest in January — and the whole swing is about 5%, which changes the advice entirely.

Used sedan parked on a suburban driveway in bright late-July light, long morning shadows across the concrete - the season the price data actually favors

What the data says

The folklore says spring: tax refunds land, buyers appear, sell in March. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has measured what American buyers actually pay for used vehicles every month since 1953, and its seasonal pattern says something different: prices sit furthest above trend in August and July, and furthest below it in January. Spring is merely the climb between the two.

Each bar is the average ratio of the unadjusted used-vehicle CPI to its seasonally adjusted twin for that calendar month, over the ten full years through 2025. The dashed line is the annual trend.

The swing is real but modest: about 5.0% from the January trough to the August peak. And it survives a robustness check — drop the pandemic years (2020–2022), when used-car prices did unprecedented things, and the pattern barely moves (the table's third column).

Implied seasonal factor by month; 100 = the year’s trend line.
Month	Factor, 10-yr	Ex-pandemic	Reading
January	98.02	98.20	The annual trough
February	98.20	98.39	Below trend
March	99.56	99.66	Below trend
April	100.38	100.38	Above trend
May	100.43	100.47	Above trend
June	101.79	101.68	Above trend
July	102.78	102.49	Above trend
August	102.91	102.47	The annual peak
September	100.09	100.15	Above trend
October	99.17	99.25	Below trend
November	98.68	98.80	Below trend
December	98.33	98.54	Below trend

The part nobody prints: waiting usually loses

The trough-to-peak climb is 5.0% spread across 7 months — about 0.7% per month of seasonal tailwind, and that is the best case: selling in January and somehow capturing the whole climb to August. Meanwhile the car is aging, adding miles, and rolling toward its next registration bill. Unless your particular car is depreciating more slowly than 0.7% a month — and most used cars are not — the season gives back less than the wait takes away. The honest reading of seventy years of data is not “sell in August”; it is “the best month to sell is the month you decide to,” with a small thumb on the scale for summer if you are already there.

What this measures, and what it cannot

The CPI tracks what consumers pay dealers for used cars and trucks across the country — the retail market a private seller competes with, not private-party prices themselves, which no public series tracks. It also says nothing about your model: convertibles and four-wheel-drives have their own seasons. What it settles is the market-wide question, and it is the only public dataset old enough and broad enough to settle it.

Methodology

BLS publishes the used-vehicle CPI twice: unadjusted (series CUUR0000SETA02) and seasonally adjusted (CUSR0000SETA02). Dividing one by the other recovers the seasonal factor BLS itself estimates for each month. We averaged that ratio per calendar month across the ten full years through 2025, and separately with 2020–2022 excluded. Both series were fetched from the BLS public flat files on 2026-08-25; the data is public domain, and the two series plus twelve divisions reproduce every number on this page.

Sources

BLS Consumer Price Index — used cars and trucks — series CUUR0000SETA02 (unadjusted) and CUSR0000SETA02 (seasonally adjusted), monthly since 1953
BLS public data files — the exact files this page was computed from, fetched 2026-08-25

Citing this page. Two public BLS series and twelve divisions reproduce every figure; the methodology above spells them out. A suggested citation: “The Best Time to Sell a Car, From 70 Years of Price Data,” Sell My Car Hub, sellmycarhub.com/guides/best-time-to-sell-a-car/, data as of 2026-08-25. The charts may be reproduced with a link to this page.