Lease-end decision tool
Four ways your lease can end.
Which one costs you least?
Every guide on this subject tells you what the options are. None of them do the arithmetic with your numbers. This one does: enter what you actually owe and what the car is actually worth, and all four paths get costed at once — including the state tax nobody mentions until the paperwork.
The four paths
Two of these leave you with a car and two leave you needing one, so they are grouped rather than ranked against each other. Within each group, lower net cost is better.
You keep the car
You give the car up
What this does and does not count
It counts: your payoff, the tax your state charges on a buyout, title and registration where we have the official schedule, the purchase-option fee, the disposition fee, mileage overage, excess wear, and the interest on a loan at the rate and term you enter.
The two groups are not ranked against each other, deliberately. Crediting a car you keep at its market value and a car you give up at nothing puts them on one scale, and on that scale selling wins almost any time you have equity — which is true on paper and no use to someone who has to get to work on Monday. Compare within a group, then decide whether you want the car.
It does not count depreciation over the life of the loan. The value you enter is what the car is worth today, and a car you finance for five years will be worth considerably less by the end of them. That affects the two buyout rows equally, so the ranking holds, but the gap between them and the others narrows over time.
Nor does it count what you drive next. Returning the car is the cheapest line on this page and the most misleading one, because handing back the keys leaves you needing a vehicle. Compare the return column against the full cost of whatever replaces it, not against zero.
It is an estimate, not an approval. Champion Auto Finance is not a lender, and this page is not tax advice. Your real tax is set by your state and your real rate and payment depend on lender underwriting.
Why the gap between two numbers decides this
Almost every lease-end question collapses into one comparison: your payoff figure against what the car is worth on the open market. That gap is your lease equity, and it was fixed years ago by whoever set the residual value when you signed — a forecast made before anyone knew what used cars would be worth today.
When the car is worth more than the payoff, that difference belongs to whoever exercises the purchase option. Buy the car and you keep it. Hand the keys back and you hand it over too. That is the whole reason the four columns above can differ by thousands of dollars on the same vehicle.
When the car is worth less than the payoff, the arithmetic inverts: the lease has protected you from depreciation you would otherwise have absorbed, and returning it is usually the sensible move. The purchase option is exactly that — an option. You are never obliged to take it, and nothing bad happens if you don't.
The one thing worth checking before you decide anything is the payoff figure itself. Ask your lender for it directly rather than accepting a number quoted to you by someone who would like to buy the car — and confirm what your own lender allows, because policies on third-party buyouts vary and change. Work out who actually holds your lease first; it is often not the brand on the grille.
