Want to find a lightly used Toyota RAV4 for under $20,000? It’s almost certainly not happening.
Analysts, media outlet and independent pundits across the board have been beating a familiar drum for years now: Cars are getting far more expensive. Okay, so what? Water’s wet, the sky is blue and doppelkupplungsgetriebe still takes me three or four attempts to (badly) pronounce as an English speaker. It’s not just new cars where buyers are feeling the strain, though — a knock-on effect from hampered new car production since the pandemic days is affecting used car supply in turn. That’s especially true at the sub-$20,000 part of the market, where deals on the ground for 3-year-old examples are practically non-existent, according to a recent iSeeCars study.
We’re now in the period where trying to find a decent deal on a car built in that pandemic-restricted period is tough, to put it mildly. In analyzing 2.6 million 3-year-old used cars in 2025, research firm iSeeCars determined the average used price jumped a whopping $9,476 from where it was in 2019. In other words, buying a 2022 model vehicle now will set you back an average of $32,635. Back in 2019 (when you’d be looking at a 2016), you’d have to fork over around $23,159.
As you’d probably expect, best-selling new cars tend to make up the lion’s share of supply in the used car market as well. That means people snap up cars like the Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Toyota Corolla. Rewind five years to 2019, and nearly all examples of these cars could be had for under $20K, thanks to depreciation. Of course, with their new MSRPs largely in the $20K-$30K range, they didn’t have far to fall to land in this relatively affordable segment.
Now, the share of passenger cars (i.e. sedans, hatchbacks, coupes) with an asking price under $20K have from 70.7% in 2019 to just 28.1% today, a drop of 60.2%. It’s a similar story with SUVs, although market share in this price point has fallen off an even larger cliff. Sure, the proportion of sub-$20K examples was just 39.2% in 2019, but now it’s 8.1%…so finding a deal on a 3-year-old example has gone from “feasible” to “pretty much impossible”.
“Affordable” is a relative term, but buying power simply isn’t as strong as five years ago.
Even though researchers crunch a huge amount of data to lay out just how much less affordable new and used cars have become over the years, you don’t necessarily need all this information to see that play out with your own eyes. Even by the anecdotal evidence, cars have gotten pricier — as pretty much everything else has.
This upward shift in pricing puts the squeeze on consumers, when wages and salaries are increasing at a slower rate (according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).
iSeeCars‘ study documents the increasing prices across a relatively narrow price band. It looks at sub-$20K, $20K-$30K, $30K-$40K then cars and SUVs above $40K. While the lower end of the market has virtually disappeared, the upper end of the market has significantly grown in share. These days, that $20K-$30K segment represents about half of the used market (48.4% for SUVs and 49.5% for passenger cars), while the higher segments have doubled or more in market share thanks to ballooning prices.
So what can you do?
Unfortunately, it seems you’ll wind up paying proportionally more money for what were the cheapest cars on the market. You can thank supply and demand for that, as models like the Nissan Sentra, Honda Civic, Toyota Camry and Toyota Corolla have increased in average price by 37-45% over the past six years. That means while you would have paid $12,504 for your run-of-the-mill 2016 Sentra back in 2019, you’ll now pay $18,224 for a 2022 model (and both cars are part of the same generation…the Sentra hasn’t changed that much in the past six years). That example is still obviously under $20K, but it’s a far cry from just over $10K that you would have shelled out a few years ago.
The study points out all the data, but there’s a lingering question the numbers on their own won’t answer: What should you do?
Well, there are a couple practical solutions with the understanding that this situation isn’t going to get better anytime soon. The first is probably the most obvious, in that you could shop for an older car to get back down to that more affordable sub-$20K price point. However, the older you go and the higher mileage at which you buy in, you could face higher maintenance bills that will offset the potential up-front savings.
If you do want to stay in that 3-year-old ball park, there are still a few more affordable options out there. In terms of overall market share, a significant portion of Toyota Corollas, for example, are still being sold for under $20K (62.9%, according to iSeeCars data). The latest Chevrolet Trax is also a surprisingly good buy for the money, though you will want to stay in a 2023 or newer model. Those were a major improvement over the older Trax, which definitely felt like a bargain basement little crossover.
As ever, if you are in the market for a new or lightly used car, I wish you the best of luck in finding a stellar deal. Right now, that prospect is getting rarer and rarer by the week.
Of course, you could go really cheap and get a car for well under $2K like we did for our latest series…these cars aren’t exactly trouble free, however.
