Are you wondering when is the best time to buy a car? The answer is simple. Just follow the thermometer-based car-shopping rule of thumb—when temperatures are low, so are car prices.
Car shoppers are more likely to find good deals in the cold-weather months of December, January and February than at any other time of year, according to a recent study by automotive research website iSeeCars.com.* November and March may come close. Potential exception: If you live in a part of the country that gets significant snow, the cold months are likely not the best time to find a good deal on an all-wheel-drive SUV or truck. Vehicles viewed as excelling in snow can experience strong demand when the weather is at its worst.
On the other hand, the worst time to buy a car is in the warm months of May, June and July. August and April are only slightly better bets.
A combination of factors make winter the best time of year to buy a car, including…
But that means fewer potential buyers visit dealerships when it’s cold out, making dealerships and salespeople more willing to be flexible with potential buyers who do present themselves.
December is a busy month for many people, and car shopping often gets pushed down on to-do lists because of holiday gatherings and gift-buying. And, despite all the December advertisements featuring vehicles with giant bows on top, cars are not often purchased as holiday gifts. Best days in the entire year for finding car deals: New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. Car buying is the last thing on people’s minds as they recover from New Year’s Eve parties and prepare for the new year. That adds up to fewer potential buyers on dealership lots, and dealerships are more likely to make deals when buyers are scarce. And while buyers’ schedules open up in January and February, bank balances can be an issue in these post-holiday months. Some shoppers spend so much on the holidays that they can’t ante up to buy a car in the months that follow.
Car dealerships and salespeople often have strong financial incentives to meet sales targets, and the deadline often is the end of a calendar month, quarter or year. The final days of December represent the end of all three of these time frames. Helpful: Buyers have no way of knowing which salespeople and dealerships are desperate to meet sales targets as year-end nears, so one strategy is to contact many dealerships in late December. Express a willingness to move quickly to complete a sale if the right deal appears. You might receive attractive offers before the 31st.
Year-end sales targets help explain December’s car deals, but a completely different factor might be at play in January and February—and that’s the way people think about automotive age. When the calendar flipped from December 2024 to January 2025, every 2023-model-year used car on dealer lots stopped seeming like a one-year-old vehicle and started seeming like a two-year-old vehicle to potential buyers. True, the difference is largely psychological—a car is only one day older on January 1 than on December 31—but dealerships are well aware that psychological factors can play a crucial role with sales. The new year could be a time when dealerships realize that they’re going to have to be more flexible to sell cars that have been sitting on their lots. Helpful: This new-year-means-older-car psychological pricing effect is more likely to impact relatively recent cars than older ones. A seven-year-old used car doesn’t seem that much older than a six-year-old one…but a two-year-old car seems substantially older than a one-year-old vehicle, and a brand new 2024-model-year car that’s still sitting on the lot in 2025 seems significantly less new than it did when the calendar still said 2024.
Many buyers can’t put off car purchases until the colder months. Sometimes they need to buy a car quickly because their old car broke down or they have a new job that’s not near public transit.
There are a few time-your-car-shopping strategies that can somewhat improve your odds of getting a good deal during any season, including summer…
Whatever month you are shopping, you’re more likely to get a good deal during the final few days of that month than earlier in the month. Dealerships and salespeople face sales targets every month, not only in December, and if you contact lots of dealerships, you might stumble upon one that needs to make a sale to meet its targets.
Auto dealerships attract many more potential buyers on weekends than during the workweek—and, as noted above, the fewer shoppers on a dealership lot, the more flexible that dealership is likely to become. If you work Monday to Friday and prefer to car shop on the weekends, contact dealerships relatively late on Sundays—by that point the dealership knows that another customer with a better offer probably isn’t going to appear anytime soon. This weekly trend, however, is far weaker than the annual trends cited above.
Keep in mind: There are 12 states in which dealerships are not legally permitted to be open on Sundays— Colorado, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Maine, Mississippi, Louisiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
If a certain model or style of vehicle isn’t selling, dealerships might be willing to offer good deals regardless of the time of year or month or day of the week. Examples: New cars that sold poorly in 2024 and that were available as discounted leftovers in 2025 included Dodge Hornet crossover…Hyundai Ionic 6 EV sedan…Chevy Silverado EV pickup…Jeep Grand Wagoneer full-size SUV…and Nissan Armada full size SUV—buyers avoided the 2024 Armada because they knew a remodeled 2025 would arrive soon.
There are a few points worth noting for anyone planning to put car-buying cyclical trends to use…
No amount of smart timing is going to make today’s pricey vehicles truly inexpensive. The average new car costs close to $50,000 these days…the average used car, more than $25,000. Timing a purchase properly could reasonably be expected to save a car buyer 5% or so. That’s still a very meaningful amount of money—a 5% reduction on a $40,000 car is a $2,000 savings.
Savvy shopping will always trump good timing. When a naïve shopper shows up on a dealership lot, it doesn’t matter if he/she is there on the most buyer-friendly day of the year—the salesperson is going to spot weakness and not give that shopper a good deal. Key steps to being a savvy car shopper: Research the current market value of the vehicle you’re interested in before making contact with dealerships…negotiate the price with dealerships via e-mail or phone before ever setting foot on the lot…and have a financing offer from a credit union or bank in place before visiting the dealership to finalize the purchase—that way you don’t have to accept the dealership’s loan terms unless they beat the offer you have in hand.
*The iSeeCars study examined the odds of finding significantly below-market-value deals on used cars. Very similar trends almost certainly affect the new-car market as well, but pricing trends are more difficult to accurately track with new vehicles due to the complexities of auto manufacturer incentive programs.
