Car Lease Deal Calculator – 2024 Edition
Evaluate Any Car Lease Deal – Good or Bad
Be aware that advertised car lease deals assume the customer has excellent credit. If you have a less-than-excellent credit score, the payment amount can be higher than advertised.
* Lease payments are partially determined by a lease finance rate, which depends on a customer’s credit score.
If you don’t know your current credit score , you should get it before you go shopping for a lease.
Add your positive utility payment history to instantly increase your FICO® Score. Results may vary, see website for details.
Vehicle PRICE is the most important factor in a car lease deal. Find the best car prices and lease deals in your area using our
Car Deal Finder.
Evaluate those deals for yourself using this Lease Deal Calculator.
How Lease Deals are Evaluated by This Calculator
This Lease Deal Calculator is a unique kind of lease calculator that evaluates any car lease deal against industry-average leases. It compares total lease costs with a car’s MSRP, given the length of the lease and down payment, if any — and any rebate or allowance that can be combined with the lease. The result is a RLV (Real Lease Value) score that instantly tells you whether the lease is considered to be a good deal or not.
Car lease deals cannot be evaluated by monthly payment amount alone. What seems to be a low payment could easily be a bad deal.
To accurately evaluate a lease deal, the total cost of the lease must be compared to the initial value of the vehicle — MSRP sticker price. The lower the total lease cost measured against MSRP, the better the deal.
The cost of a lease is reflected in the monthly payment, which is the result of a combination of factors such as capitalized cost (cap cost), lease-end residual value, money factor (related to interest rate), down payment (cap cost reduction), and lease term (months).
This Lease Deal Calculator assigns each evaluated deal a RLV score that is inversely related to the results of this comparison. That means that the lower the costs, the higher the score, the better the car lease deal. If you are evaluating and comparing multiple lease deals, the deal with the higher score is the best deal.
Scores have a broad range of values but generally fall between 50 and 100. A RLV score below 50 is considered a POOR car lease deal, and a score of 90 or higher is an OUTSTANDING deal (some deals can score 100 or more). Scores are rated on a 5-level scale of Poor / Average / Good / Excellent / Outstanding.
Normal customer-negotiated lease deals typically rate AVERAGE to GOOD. Limited-time “subvented” car lease deals offered by car manufacturers through its dealers will typically rate GOOD to EXCELLENT, occasionally reaching the OUTSTANDING level.
Be aware that when scores fall near the value that changes from, say, Good to Excellent, it simply means that the deal can be considered either very Good or only slightly Excellent – not enough difference to be meaningful. When on the edge, a couple of dollars difference in one of the numbers might swing the evaluation one way or the other.