Vehicle Total Cost of Ownership Worksheet (Printable)

Inputs

Result

Illustrative only. See the open used-car TCO dataset (JSON) for segment-level planning ranges.

How to fill this in without fooling yourself

The worksheet is only as honest as the smallest line you enter, so start with the lines you actually know and work outward. Purchase price, down payment, term and rate come straight off the offer sheet. Insurance, fuel and fees are real monthly figures you can get from your current policy, your own mileage and your state’s fee schedule. Maintenance is the line most people round down, and it is the line that decides whether a cheap car is actually cheap.

Two habits make the output trustworthy. First, keep insurance, fuel and maintenance as monthly averages taken over at least a year rather than a single good month. Second, do not leave the term or the rate blank in favour of a “roughly” payment — the interest is where a long term quietly costs you money, and the sheet is designed to show the payment, not to hide it.

What the repair run-rate line is for

The last input asks what you expect to spend on repairs in the coming year; the sheet divides it by twelve and shows it as a monthly run-rate, then puts that figure next to the full replacement cost. This is the comparison that matters when you are deciding whether to keep a car or replace it. If your twelve-month repair expectation is meaningfully below the twelve-month cost of owning a replacement, keeping the car is usually the cheaper path. If the two numbers are close, the replacement is buying you something the repair bill is not: reduced break-down risk.

Estimate that repair figure from at least two years of receipts rather than from memory. Recency bias makes last month’s big bill feel like the whole story when it usually is not — and the reverse is also true, so a single quiet year is not evidence either.

Printing and keeping a copy

Click Print / Save as PDF to produce a clean one-page record: buttons and navigation drop out of the print layout, and the input boxes print with your figures visible. Keeping a dated copy matters more than it sounds. Three or four of these, taken a year apart, turn a vague sense that the car is “getting expensive” into a documented trend — which is exactly the evidence the Repair vs Sell gates ask you to supply.

Three scenarios worth running before you decide

A single set of numbers tells you what one option costs. Changing one input at a time tells you which decision actually matters, which is usually the more useful answer.

First, double the term. Take your current loan term and stretch it. The monthly payment falls, which feels like relief — but watch the total paid across the life of the loan rise. If the difference is large, the term is doing the work your down payment should be doing.

Second, halve the down payment. This shows you what thin equity costs month by month and, more importantly, makes visible how long you would be carrying a loan larger than the car’s value. If the answer is “most of the term”, the deal is fragile no matter how comfortable the payment looks.

Third, add your realistic annual repairs. Set the repair figure to what you actually expect rather than to what you hope, then compare the twelve-month repair line against the full replacement cost. This is the comparison the Repair vs Sell gates are built around, and running it here first makes that decision straightforward rather than emotional.

Where the numbers come from

The starting values in the boxes are representative rather than authoritative: a mid-range purchase price, a five-year term, a rate in the range of current average auto-loan pricing, and plausible monthly insurance, fuel, maintenance and fee figures. They exist so the sheet produces a sensible answer before you touch anything, and you are expected to replace every one.

For published national defaults, see the Total Cost of Ownership Sheet, which uses the AAA national gas average, published loan-rate averages and a state-level insurance figure, and the open used-car TCO dataset for segment-level planning ranges.

What this worksheet does not include

It measures cash out each month, so it leaves out depreciation and the opportunity cost of the down payment — both real, neither a bill. If you want the fuller view, the Total Cost of Ownership Sheet adds sales tax, fees and an expected resale figure so you can see net cost rather than gross, and the depreciation simulator produces the retained-value curve that feeds it.