Lease buyout statistics for 2026: equity, returns and prices

The short version

• Gas and hybrid leases are ending with equity. Electric ones are not. For three-year-old model-year 2023 vehicles, Cox Automotive puts average lease equity at +$1,604 for gas vehicles and +$2,913 for hybrids, against −$7,544 for EVs and −$7,438 for plug-in hybrids.
• Most lessees no longer hand the keys back. American Honda Finance reported that 272,000 of 279,000 US lease endings in its 2026 fiscal year were vehicles bought at the contract price by the lessee or a dealer. GM Financial says just 26% of its terminated leases were returned in 2025.
• Lease returns are still historically scarce. Lease check-ins at Manheim’s auctions in the first half of 2026 ran 15% above 2025 but 57% below 2019.
• The wholesale market just turned. The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index fell 1% in the first half of September 2026, to 206.2 — enough to turn the year-over-year comparison negative for the first time in 2026.
• Used-car prices are below where they were when a maturing lease was signed. The used cars and trucks CPI is 5.3% lower than in August 2023, when a typical 36-month lease maturing now was written.
• Buyout financing is the expensive part. Experian put the average used-vehicle loan rate at 11.19% in Q2 2026, against 6.35% for new.

Champion Auto Finance arranges lease buyout financing nationwide; we are not a lender, and approvals and terms are subject to lender underwriting. We publish this page because the numbers that decide a buyout are scattered across auction reports, SEC filings and government series. Nothing here comes from our own customer files.

Lease-end equity by fuel type

Cox Automotive publishes an average lease equity figure — what a vehicle is worth at wholesale against the payoff written into the contract. A positive number means the average lessee could buy the car for less than it is worth. These are averages for three-year-old vehicles, by model year and fuel type, as presented in Cox’s Q2 2026 Manheim index call on 8 July 2026.

The spread between fuel types is far wider than the movement between model years. That is the single most useful fact for anyone weighing a buyout: the question is less about the market in general than about what you are driving. Averages also hide a wide range, so the only figure that settles your own decision is your payoff quote against real offers for your exact car, year, trim and mileage.

What the lease companies report about returns

Lessors disclose lease-end behavior in their annual SEC filings. These are counts of what actually happened, not survey estimates.

The filings explain themselves plainly. Ford Credit attributes its lower return rate to the fact that “more customers and dealers are electing to purchase the off-lease vehicles.” GM Financial says its return rates “continued to be lower than historical levels as used vehicle prices have generally remained higher than contractual residual values.” On Honda’s numbers, about 97.5% of its US lease endings in fiscal 2026 were settled at the contract price rather than at auction (our calculation from the table above).

The electric exception shows up in the filings too. Honda recorded $226 million of impairment losses on leased battery-electric vehicles in the quarter ending 31 March 2026, after revising what it expects those cars to be worth. Ally warns that its own remarketing results may stay under pressure partly because of used plug-in hybrid values “following the elimination of federal electric-vehicle tax credits.”

How many leases are out there

Each organization measures lease share slightly differently, so the figures are not interchangeable. What they agree on is direction: leasing is a smaller share of new vehicles than it was in 2024, and the flow of returned vehicles remains far below pre-2020 levels.

The used-car market behind your payoff

A residual value was set years before anyone knew what the car would be worth. These are the series that decide whether that guess is now in your favour.

Two things are true at once, and they are easy to confuse. Wholesale values have flattened and have now dipped below last year’s level, while retail listing prices are still climbing, because there are fewer three-year-old cars to sell. For a lessee, the retail figure is the relevant one when replacing the car, and the wholesale figure is closer to what a lessor expects to net if you hand it back.

What financing a buyout costs

A lease buyout is financed as a used-vehicle purchase, so the used-car rate is the one that applies — a gap of nearly five percentage points against new-car financing in the same quarter. Equity changes that arithmetic, because a car worth more than its payoff functions like a down payment on the loan that buys it.

Sources and method

Every figure was read from the source named beside it and checked on 22 September 2026. Where a percentage change is our own arithmetic on published data, we say so in the table. We have not adjusted, blended or estimated any figure, and no number on this page comes from Champion Auto Finance’s own files.

• Cox Automotive and Manheim — lease equity by fuel type and lease check-ins (Q2 2026 Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index call, 8 July 2026); the mid-September 2026 and August 2026 index reports; used-vehicle listing prices; the Kelley Blue Book transaction price report; and the 2026 forecast.
• SEC filings — Ford Motor Credit, GM Financial, American Honda Finance and Ally Financial annual reports.
• Experian — State of the Automotive Finance Market figures as published in its auto loan rates and average car payment reports.
• Government series — US Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI for used cars and trucks (series CUSR0000SETA02), the Federal Reserve G.19 consumer credit release, and the New York Fed’s Household Debt and Credit Report.

Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these figures; please credit the original source named in each row. If you need a figure clarified, or the underlying table, get in touch.

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