Best Time to Sell a Car: The Calendar vs. Your Car

The used-car market does have a season. Prices sag from November through March and firm up as the weather warms, so the same car faces a stronger market in May than it does the week after Christmas. That is the calendar answer, and it is worth something. The answer that moves more money is that your car runs four clocks of its own: the odometer, your registration renewal date, the California smog cycle, and the repair that is coming whether you sell or not. Those clocks usually decide more dollars than the month on the wall does.

I'm Joe. I'm a licensed California dealer and I buy cars in people's driveways across the San Fernando Valley, Ventura County, and West L.A. Some version of this question comes up every week, usually phrased as "should I just wait until spring?" Here is the honest answer, with the market data behind the seasonal half and the California costs behind the rest.

What is the best time of year to sell a car?

Late spring through early summer. April through July is the strongest stretch for a seller, and January and February are the weakest.

The cleanest data on this comes from iSeeCars, which analyzed more than 40 million used-car sales from 2024 through October 2025 and measured how often a buyer could find a good deal, defined as savings of at least 10%, or $2,689, off the $26,889 average price. Their summary of the pattern: "Used car prices follow the average temperature, with both falling between November and March and bottoming out between December 31 and February 28" (iSeeCars, 2025).

Here is their full monthly ranking, read from the seller's side of the table:

Read that table the way I read it. The spread between June and January is not a spread in what your car is worth. It's a spread in how much room the average buyer has to push. That matters if you're selling to a private buyer comparing your listing against four others. It matters much less with a dealer, because a dealer's number comes off auction data, and auction values move on wholesale supply rather than on whether it's sweater weather in Ohio. So the season is real, and it is still the smallest lever in this article.

Why iSeeCars and Edmunds name different months

iSeeCars puts the bargain peak in January. Edmunds names October and November as the best months to buy and calls January one of the worst. Both are honest, and they are counting different things.

iSeeCars counts deal frequency, meaning how often a listing shows up priced well below what the car is worth, and that count jumps in January because lot traffic dies after the holidays and leftover year-end inventory gets marked down to move it. Edmunds tracks what buyers actually paid once the sale closed, and on that measure the floor lands in the fall. Ivan Drury, Edmunds' director of insights, puts it plainly: "the best discounts still occur near the end of the year, in October and November" (Edmunds).

For a seller, use the transaction-price view, because you get paid a price and not a frequency. The table above shows how much room buyers have across the year. Edmunds tells you where the money bottoms out, a little earlier than the deal-hunting data suggests.

At what mileage is it a good time to sell a car?

Before 100,000 miles. That is the single number that reliably changes what a buyer will pay for an ordinary used car.

The reason is structural. Most large retail buyers won't put a six-figure-odometer car on their lot, so those cars get sent to wholesale auction and the offer you get reflects auction money instead of retail money. The full set of breakpoints, and which brands hold up past them, is in my guide to selling a high-mileage car.

Two things about that number are worth saying out loud. First, nobody credible publishes a value-drop figure for 60,000 or 75,000 miles. Look through iSeeCars, Edmunds, CarEdge, and Kelley Blue Book and there isn't one, and Edmunds' own analysis puts the steepest loss in the first 20,000 miles, with 40,000 to 100,000 as the flattest stretch of the curve. Second, the six-figure line is about what buyers believe more than what the car is doing. Edmunds' Ivan Drury calls it a "psychological barrier" and found values fell "only incrementally" between 100,000 and 150,000 miles (Edmunds analysis, 2017), old enough that I'd flag the date rather than hand it to you straight. The one recent named number belongs to CarEdge, which says crossing 100,000 miles "can reduce its value by up to 20%" because buyers read six figures as maintenance risk (CarEdge, October 2024). Take that as a guideline instead of a measurement: it's a consumer guide with no sample size or method published behind it.

None of that softens the line. Buyers respond to the round number, most retail buyers won't cross it, and your offer moves either way. What matters for timing: the odometer only runs one direction, and it runs every month you wait.

That is the reason I wrote this article. If your odometer reads 94,000 and you're thinking about holding out for spring, price the trip. Six thousand miles is about five months of normal driving. Waiting five months for a better season can land you on the wrong side of a cliff that costs more than the season was ever going to pay you. Factory warranty coverage that transfers to the next owner draws a similar line, on a date you can look up in your own warranty booklet.

Should I sell my car now or wait?

Stop thinking about the month and go through your car's signals. If any of the "sell now" rows below is true, the calendar has already lost the argument.

That last row is there on purpose. There is a real scenario where waiting wins, and I'd rather tell you than pretend every car needs to sell today.

What does waiting actually cost you in California?

Three things, and two of them are specific to this state.

Depreciation. iSeeCars' 2026 value-retention study looked at over 950,000 five-year-old used cars sold between March 2025 and February 2026 and put average five-year depreciation at 41.8%, which they note is "a 3.8 percentage point gain over 2025" (iSeeCars, 2026). A $40,000 car on that curve gives up about $16,700 in five years, most of it in the first two. Be careful applying that to an older car. Depreciation is front-loaded, so a 2018 Camry in a Woodland Hills driveway is not shedding 10% a year, and it is not the reason to sell it. The odometer and the DMV are.

The registration bill. California renewal isn't one number, it's a stack. The DMV lists a $76 registration renewal, $34 to the CHP, a Transportation Improvement Fee that runs from $33 to $231 depending on what the DMV values your car at ($66 covers the $5,000 to $24,999 band), and a vehicle license fee of 0.65% of that value (CA DMV). County fees stack on top. On a car the DMV values around $12,000, you're looking at roughly $250 before county add-ons, paid on a car you already decided to sell. Let it lapse while you think it over and the penalty starts at 10% of the vehicle license fee plus $10 to registration and $10 to CHP in the first ten days.

Insurance on a car nobody drives. No state angle here, just arithmetic. If the car is parked, every month of premium buys you nothing.

Put those together and a five-month wait for a better season costs a renewal cycle, five months of insurance, and 5,000 miles on the odometer. The season would have to move the price several percent just to break even.

How does California's smog cycle change your timing?

Most California cars are on a two-year smog cycle tied to registration renewal, and your renewal notice tells you which cycle owes a check. The DMV is direct about the sale side: "If you are selling your car, you need to give the new owner a valid smog certification when you sell the car" (CA DMV).

The timing lever is the 90-day window. California Vehicle Code section 4000.1(d)(1) waives the certificate on a transfer when "the initial application for transfer is submitted within the 90-day validity period of a smog certificate" (Veh. Code § 4000.1(d)(1)). In plain English: if you passed smog at your last renewal, you have a free three-month window where selling costs nobody a test. Miss it and the certificate is on you.

There's an exemption for newer cars too. Section 4000.1(d)(7) exempts a transfer where the vehicle is "four or less model-years old," except for diesels, and charges the buyer an $8 fee instead.

Selling to a licensed dealer changes who carries the smog obligation, and there are other exemptions worth knowing (family transfers and planned non-operation cars among them). I walked through all of them in smog check when selling a car in California.

Does the season even matter in Southern California?

It matters less than the internet says, and more than zero. Almost every seasonality article is written for markets that have a winter. The "spring is better" logic is half weather, people stop shopping when the roads are bad, and half tax refunds landing February through April. The Valley only has the second half, and cars sell here in January because January here is fine.

Where the season genuinely bites, and I'll be straight about it: convertibles and sports cars. The best measurement here is academic instead of commercial. Busse, Pope, Pope, and Silva-Risso matched more than 40 million vehicle transactions against local weather records for the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015 and found that a 20 degree rise above the seasonal average came with an 8.5 percentage point increase in the convertible share of sales (QJE, 2015). The effect is real and measured, and it is a lot smaller than the 20 to 30 percent swings thrown around on this topic. It's narrower here than anywhere else, because the effect needs a 20 degree seasonal swing and the Valley doesn't supply one. Our top-down season never really closes. If you have a Miata or a Mustang convertible, spring and early summer buyers still engage in a way November buyers don't, and that's worth waiting a few months for as long as none of your car's own clocks are about to run out.

My opinion, and it lands opposite most of the seasonal advice out there: waiting for spring costs the average Valley seller more than it earns them. The seasonal upside on an ordinary commuter car is a few percent at best. The cost of the wait is a registration cycle, four or five months of depreciation, five months of miles, and a real chance that the noise it's been making turns into a repair quote. I've watched that trade go badly far more often than I've watched it go well.

Where the market sits as of August 2026

One caveat: this section has a shelf life, so check the date at the top.

Wholesale values had a strong spring. Manheim's index, which tracks what dealers pay each other at auction, peaked at 215.3 in March, up 6.2% from a year earlier and the highest reading since summer 2023 (Cox Automotive, Q1 2026). It has been giving that back since. July came in at 210, down 1.4% from June, against a typical July move of positive 0.4%. Cox Automotive's Jonathan Gregory: "spring bounce peaked in March... genuine seasonal depreciation is doing more of the work now that we're fully into summer" (Cox Automotive, July 2026).

Then there's the supply that hasn't landed yet. Edmunds counts roughly 25.7% more leases ending in 2026 than the year before, about 500,000 additional cars coming back, with another 400,000 on top of that in 2027. Cox expects wholesale inventory to top 12 million units in 2027, the first time since 2019 (Cox Automotive, Q2 2026). Every one of those cars is competition for yours.

I'm not forecasting prices and I'd be suspicious of anyone who does. The calendar argument for waiting is small in an ordinary year, and the supply building into next year runs the same direction as everything else here.

The worst timing mistake has nothing to do with the season

The mistake is the car nobody is driving. I bought a 2010 Prius in Calabasas that had been parked about two years. Check-engine light on, dead battery, hybrid codes stored. My read: he wasn't avoiding the sale, he was avoiding the project of it, pricing it, deciding whether to fix it first, photographing it, writing the listing, screening the messages, sitting through the no-shows. The sale itself took under ten minutes in his driveway.

Same pattern with an electrician in the Valley and a 2017 Ram ProMaster: clean van, 53,000 miles, two hand-lettered FOR SALE signs still taped in the windows the day I bought it.

That's the real reason people mistime this. Selling a car feels like a project, so it gets deferred to a month that seems more convenient, and the convenient months keep arriving and leaving. When the whole thing is one phone call and twenty minutes in your driveway, "the best time" stops being a research question. How long each selling path actually takes is in how long it takes to sell a car, and if a dealership trade is on the table, the math is in should I trade in my car.

How I'd time it

If it were my car, in this order:

1. Read the odometer. Comfortably under 100,000 means you have room to choose. Within a few thousand means sell now.
2. Find your registration renewal notice. Inside 60 days, that's your deadline, and it's the cheapest one to beat.
3. Check the date on your last smog certificate. Inside 90 days is free money.
4. Only then look at the month.

If all four say there's no rush and you're holding a convertible in November, wait for March. In every other case the season isn't paying you enough to justify the wait.

When you're ready, call or text me at (818) 325-7535. I come to you anywhere in the San Fernando Valley, Ventura County, and West L.A., I inspect the car in your driveway, and the number I give you is guaranteed to match or beat any CarMax offer. Take it and you're paid the same day with the DMV paperwork handled. Turn it down and you've spent twenty minutes and you have a real number to measure everything else against. The price I quote is the price you get. Where that number comes from is in what is my car worth.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best month to sell a car?

June, followed closely by May and July. On iSeeCars' analysis of 40 million-plus used-car sales through October 2025, June is the month when buyers are least likely to find a discount, at 22.8% below the average odds. That makes it the month when a seller faces the least price pressure.

What is the slowest month for selling a car?

January. iSeeCars found buyers were 55.6% more likely to find a good deal in January than on an average day, with February second at 36.2%. Used-car prices track the average temperature and bottom out between December 31 and February 28.

At what mileage is it most profitable to sell a used car?

Before 100,000 miles. Most large retail buyers won't put a car with six figures on the odometer on their lot, so it goes to wholesale auction and the offer follows auction money instead of retail money. If you're within a few thousand miles of that line, sell now rather than waiting for a better season.

How long should I keep a car before selling it?

It depends on what you're optimizing. If you want the lowest total cost of ownership, keeping a paid-off car well past 100,000 miles is usually the cheapest thing you can do. If you want the most money back out of the car, sell it before the odometer crosses 100,000 and before any warranty coverage that transfers to a buyer expires. Those two goals point in opposite directions, and most advice pretends they don't.

Should I sell my car now or wait?

Sell now if your odometer is within about 7,000 miles of 100,000, if your registration renews within 60 days, if you're holding a repair quote worth more than a third of the car's value, if the car is sitting unused, or if you have a smog certificate less than 90 days old. Wait if you're selling a convertible or sports car in the off season and none of the above applies.

Will used car prices drop in 2026?

Used values have held up better than most forecasts expected, and the current picture is in my breakdown of used car prices in 2026. For a seller, forecasting the market is a losing game compared with managing your own car's mileage, registration, and smog timing, because those are the numbers you control.

What is the $3,000 rule for cars?

There isn't one for selling. The phrase usually traces back to the 20/3/8 car-buying guideline, where the 3 is a three-year loan term, not a dollar figure. Chase describes the rule as "a 20% down payment," "a three-year financing term," and "car expenses that equal 8% or less of your monthly income" (Chase). It's a rule for buying your next car, and it has nothing to do with timing the sale of your current one.

What should you never tell a dealer when you're selling a car?

Don't lead with the fact that you're in a hurry, and don't name a price you'd accept before you've heard an offer. What you should absolutely disclose is everything about the car itself: accidents, warning lights, the real mileage, work that's been deferred. A buyer who finds those at the inspection changes the number. A buyer who was told upfront just prices it in, and the offer holds.