The Cheapest and Most Affordable Cities for Used Car Shopping

Used car buyers face a rocky road ahead — but the steepest incline is now behind them.

The price of a used car has risen 49% in the U.S. since June 2020. However, that rise is now slowing and even beginning to fall in some respects: “At the online marketplace Cars.com, the median price for a used vehicle in October decreased more than 3% from a year earlier to $23,499,” reports the Financial Times.

The supply chain crisis (particularly re: semiconductor chips) is easing while interest rates are rising. That means there are more cars on the market, but buyers are less keen to take a loan. Supply and demand is gradually shifting to favor buyers, but more than ever, buyers need a good deal.

The landscape isn’t even from one end of the country to the other. So, The Clunker Junker decided to compare prices between cities and states to find the places that are getting the best deals: the cheapest used cars and the best affordability relative to local incomes.

What We Did

The Clunker Junker analyzed thousands of Cars.com listings for America’s most popular car models across every state and the cities with the most ads. We averaged the prices in each area and ranked the cities and states to find the cheapest markets. And then, we did the same for the most affordable markets by comparing average prices against local average wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.