When Do New Car Prices Actually Drop? A Month-by-Month Look at Dealer Discounts

Plan on a new car this fall and you’ll keep running into one figure. In August 2026 the average new vehicle sold in the United States went for $50,089, as Kelley Blue Book’s monthly transaction-price report shows. That’s up 1.9% from a year earlier. The record still belongs to last December, at $50,612 in Cox Automotive’s current numbers, so August came in about $500 under it. On a fixed income, a purchase that size gets planned for months, and sooner or later every plan runs into the same question. When are the discounts real?

A year of data gives a plain answer: discounts never disappear, and they never get dramatic either. Cox Automotive owns Kelley Blue Book, and each month it works out how much of the transaction price, meaning what buyers actually paid, came from the automaker. Those are the incentives: rebates, subsidized financing and lease support, which is automaker money that brings a lease payment down. Across the nine monthly reports in the table below, the share never went lower than 6.4% or higher than 7.5%. Put that on a $50,000 vehicle and you’re looking at around $3,200 at the low end, about $3,750 at the high end.

So for the average buyer, the gap between the best and worst month was a few hundred dollars. Not a few thousand. The bigger swings happen on particular vehicles at particular dealers, and those depend mostly on how long a specific car has been sitting unsold and whether a newer version of it has shown up. The calendar matters less than the model year.

No data set can tell you what a specific car will cost. What it can show is where the pressure on dealers builds, and roughly when.

What the past year looked like

Cox publishes its transaction-price report about ten days after each month ends, and when you line the months up, a pattern does show, though it’s a much softer one than the “year-end blowout” ads would have you believe. The table uses each month’s first report. Cox revises as more sales data comes in, which is why December, first reported at $50,326, is now listed at $50,612.

March, April and May are missing from the table. Those three reports haven’t been checked for this table yet, and guessing at them would defeat the purpose. Every month shown sits inside the same narrow band, and the broad pattern holds either way.

December had the highest incentive share and the highest price at the same time. Sounds like a contradiction until you look at who buys in December. Cox reported that nearly 20% of December buyers chose luxury vehicles, the peak for the year, and its executive analyst Erin Keating said prices are typically elevated in December because of that high-end mix. Rich incentives and expensive cars arrived together, so the December discount was real but spread across a lot of $70,000 vehicles.

January fell back. Prices dropped more than $1,100 from December, a typical seasonal pattern according to Cox, and incentives fell as automakers cut them to help protect margins. The quiet month after the holidays isn’t automatically a cheap one.

Summer 2026 was tighter than summer 2025. July incentives were 6.4% of the price, against 7.3% a year earlier; August was 6.5% against 7.2%. Automakers spent less to move cars this summer because they didn’t have to. Inventory was falling for a third straight month, and the sales pace in August rose 3.3% from July.

In August 2026, dealers had 73 days’ supply of new vehicles, the lowest since April 2025. Vehicles priced above $60,000 sat at more than 90 days’ supply. Vehicles at $30,000 or less were at 54 days.

That last line is the most useful number here. Days’ supply is how long the current stock would last at the current sales pace, and supply is the pressure behind every discount. A $65,000 SUV that’s been on the lot for three months is a candidate for a real deal; a $28,000 compact that’ll sell in seven or eight weeks with no help isn’t.

The changeover is running late this year

Every fall the new model year arrives, and last year’s version becomes the leftover. It’s often mechanically identical. It’s also worth a little less the day the new one shows up, and both the dealer and the automaker financing the inventory know it.

In 2026 the changeover is behind last year’s pace. At the end of August, 2027 models made up 12.4% of new-vehicle inventory, up from 5.6% in July. At the same point in 2025, the new model year was already 23% of inventory. Nearly nine in ten vehicles on dealer lots at the end of August were still 2026s, or older.

Read cautiously, that means the pressure to clear 2026 models hasn’t fully arrived yet, and the widest gaps between a 2026 and its 2027 twin are most likely still ahead, somewhere between October and the end of December. It may also mean a clearance that’s spread thinner and later.

Spring offered a preview. In April 2026, the supply of remaining 2025 models fell 36% in a single month, and by month-end about 93% of new vehicles on lots were 2026 models. Cox said automakers aimed incentives at specific vehicles, mostly older model years, while keeping prices firm on newer models. The money went to the vehicles that were piling up, not across the board.

Expect the same this fall. The 2026 models that get real support will be the ones a brand has too many of, and you can find those without inside information.

How to find the vehicles dealers want gone

1. Sort the inventory by model year. Every dealer’s website lists new vehicles with the model year, and most let you filter. Look for 2026 models where the 2027 version is already on the same lot. The two cars side by side are the dealer’s own comparison, and the older one has to be priced to make sense.
2. Check how long a listing has been up. Some listing sites show days on lot. If not, note the stock number and check back in a week. A car that was there three weeks ago and is still there is a car the dealer’s thinking about.
3. Look at the brands with the most stock. Cox’s August report put Stellantis brands, Buick and Lincoln at the high end of days’ supply, and Toyota, Lexus and Honda at the low end, with Toyota at 33 days. A brand with 30 days of supply doesn’t need to discount. One with 90 or more does, and its dealers know it.
4. Check the manufacturer’s own offers page. Automakers list current rebates, financing rates and lease offers by ZIP code, usually with an end date. Many offers change around the start of a month and run through the last day of a month or quarter.
5. Price the same vehicle at three dealers. Inventory differs, and so does pressure. A dealer with six leftover 2026s of one model will move on price sooner than a dealer with one.
6. Ask for the out-the-door price in writing. Advertised discounts often sit next to fees added back at signing. A written total, including taxes, documentation fees and everything else, is the only figure you can compare.

A few things the calendar really does affect

Most “best day to buy” advice is folklore. Two calendar effects have a real mechanism behind them.

Automakers often offer a choice: a cash rebate, or a reduced rate through their own finance arm. You usually can’t have both. Which one’s worth more? That depends on the loan.

Bankrate works through an example worth borrowing. Take a $41,500 vehicle financed over 60 months. At 0%, the payment is $692 and you pay no interest at all. Now run the same loan at 6.35%, which happens to match Experian’s average new-car rate for the second quarter of 2026, and the payment climbs to $809. Over the five years, interest comes to $7,045. That’s the figure a cash rebate would have to beat, and rebates that big are rare. On a shorter loan, or a smaller balance, the rebate wins more often.

Two cautions, though. Subsidized rates go to strong credit, and Bankrate says the best ones usually take a score of 781 or higher, even if competitive rates sometimes turn up above 670. The other caution is that true 0% is scarce. Of the new-vehicle buyers who financed in the second quarter of 2026, only 1.2% got it, by Edmunds’ count. You’re far more likely to see a low rate on a 36- or 48-month term than zero on 60 or 72.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s advice for the finance office fits every one of these deals. Get preapproved for a loan from a bank or credit union before you shop, so you know what rate you can get on your own. Then compare the automaker’s rate against it, and the rebate against the interest you’d save. I’d negotiate the price first, the trade-in second and the financing last, as three separate numbers.

Where prices aren’t falling

Is anything actually getting cheaper? Not new cars in general. The average transaction price in August 2026 was 1.9% higher than a year earlier, and the average sticker price rose 2.2% over the same stretch.

Monthly payments haven’t eased either. Cox’s affordability index put the typical one at $770 in August. The average loan rate on Cox’s own measure was 9.49%, and Cox figures a household at the median income would need 35.5 weeks of pay to buy the average new car. That’s more than half a year of work.

If you were hoping to spend under $30,000, you’ve probably noticed the problem already. Those cars were only 7.5% of sales in November 2025, a slide from 10.3% the year before, and this August the low price bands had some of the thinnest supply anywhere on the market. If your budget sits at the low end, then, waiting for a clearance won’t help as much as widening the search to a nearly new used car, where the market sets prices instead of an automaker’s incentive calendar.

Electric vehicles are the exception. Automakers were still putting 12% of the transaction price on EVs in August. A year earlier it was 14.6%, so that’s down, yet it’s nearly double the industry average. EV prices moved the other way from the rest of the market, too, with the average one costing 2.7% less than a year before. So if an EV suits the way you drive, look hard at the leftover 2026s. That’s where the biggest automaker-backed discounts have been.

Shopping the 2026 clearance

If you plan to buy before year-end, the first job is getting the list down to two or three models. After that, find out where each one was built. The window sticker names the final assembly point, and a U.S. plant could pay off at tax time: interest on a loan for a new, U.S.-assembled vehicle bought for personal use may be deductible through 2028. Once the list is set, search for leftover 2026 versions within driving distance, and at each lot, see what the dealer wants for the 2026 compared with the 2027 parked nearby.

Look at the automaker’s current offers for each model while you’re at it, lease deals included if you keep cars only a few years. Lease support can be where a manufacturer puts its biggest subsidy on a slow seller. Those numbers look harder to compare than they are, once you have the residual value (what the car is assumed to be worth when the lease ends) and the money factor (the lease’s interest rate, written as a small decimal) in writing.

Bring a preapproved loan, so the dealer’s financing has a rate to beat. Ask each dealer for a written out-the-door price on a specific stock number, and make your best offer in the last week of the month. If nobody takes it, the 2027s will still be there in January, and the leftover 2026s will be three months older.