Here's Where Used Cars Are The Most (And Least) Affordable

Jalopnik readers have told us before about what states they'd never buy a car from. But for the most part your rationale had to do with things like Great Lakes rust corridors, the lack of safety standards in the Midwest, or Florida being Florida. What those replies didn't reflect, though, was the economic reality of just how much used car markets can vary from state to state, and how that affects what people end up paying for their new-to-them vehicles.

Fortunately for us, AutoInsurance.com put in some work on that front, providing a data-driven analysis of car-for-sale posts across all 50 states and D.C., giving us a quantifiable picture of used car prices from place to place. The site collected live listings from a single week in 2025 by searching "used car" on Craigslist. Researchers then cleaned up the resulting data, removing duplicates and filtering for relevant used consumer vehicles, ending up with 37,151 unique listings. They then analyzed the prices, mileage, manufacturers, and other information in those ads to compare used car markets around the country.

The methodology isn't perfect. It captures asking prices and not completed transactions, plus it assumes that Craigslist listings are representative of the broader U.S. used car market, which might not be true. It also doesn't compare identical vehicles from state to state, so differences in mileage and the types of cars being listed can influence the medians. 

In any case, what we're left with is a general sense of the going rate of cars from coast to coast. Individual states ranged from $7,995 in Delaware to $32,761 in Alaska, a hefty spread no matter how you look at it. Digging deeper, here's how the five most and least affordable stack up.

Missouri ranks as the fifth-most affordable state in AutoInsurance.com's analysis, with a median used-car price of $11,989. That is roughly $6,000 below the study's $17,990 national median. This is a good time to point out what this data is actually saying. It doesn't mean that a used car in St. Louis costs less than a similar one elsewhere. It simply means the cars being listed are cheaper. Since the study compares the median prices of the vehicles listed in each state, differences in the inventory can move those numbers around quite a bit.

In Missouri's case, lower prices coincided with higher-mileage used cars, giving us at least one fairly straightforward partial explanation. Missouri shoppers are often looking at vehicles that have spent more time on the road. There's something appropriately Midwestern about that. A six-figure odometer reading is not necessarily a reason to hold a funeral in a state where the primary pastimes are really good barbecue and driving around — Missouri drivers rack up among the most miles in the country, after all, so sometimes the inventory is just a little more seasoned. Plus, Missouri has the most dangerous traffic laws in the U.S., so maybe you don't need the newest possible model as you take your life in your hands.

And now for the other side of the equation. New Mexico is the fifth-least affordable state in the analysis, with a median used-car price of $26,439. That's nearly $8,500 above the national median and way, way higher than those Missouri listings. New Mexico lands squarely in the group of Western and rural states where the study found used cars tended to cost more. Authors of the AutoInsurance.com study point generally to low inventory, long distances to other markets, and buyer preferences as reasons prices can run higher in those areas.

New Mexico's vehicle mix gives that last theory some support. SUVs and pickups together account for nearly two-thirds of the state's registered vehicles, and a market weighted toward larger, generally pricier vehicles can help push the median upward compared with one dominated by older sedans and economy cars. There's also a strong enthusiast streak out there, with places like low-rider mecca Española earning a reputation as one of the best cities for car culture. 

Still, unlike in Missouri, we don't have one clean smoking gun for New Mexico's high median, which you might not expect given that a Pontiac Aztek with Albuquerque-flavored "Breaking Bad" provenance  sold for $7,800 in 2013. Ultimately, a more expensive mix of non-blue-meth-related vehicles in a relatively rural Western market is probably doing at least some of the work.

Swinging back to the affordable side, New York ranks as the fourth-most affordable state in the AutoInsurance.com analysis, with a median used-car price of $11,795. That puts New York more than $6,000 below the national median, surprising because New York is hardly inexpensive generally. Everybody understands that New York City is an affordability nightmare, but New York State actually runs almost 25% higher than the national baseline. So it appears that cheap Craigslist cars are one of the few places where New Yorkers get a break, city dwellers and upstaters alike.

This is an enormous, varied car market, stretching from dense downstate communities to rural areas hundreds of miles away, and the state recorded more than 872,000 new-vehicle sales in 2024 alone. A market that large has room for everything from late-model luxury vehicles to the sort of older, well-used transportation that often gravitates to online listings. None of that proves why New York's median landed so low, but we will point out that New York wants to make annoying car subscriptions a thing of the past, so maybe one day we'll all be willing to pay a premium for the New York car that doesn't require a credit card to activate the heated seats.

Utah sends us back to the expensive side, but this time there's more to work with than a vague regional trend. Its $28,980 median used-car price makes it the fourth-least affordable state in the study, and Utah also had the fewest Craigslist listings per capita of any state. That's a much more interesting pairing than price alone. Fewer cars being offered gives shoppers less selection to work with, while Utah has also been adding residents at a healthy clip. Census estimates put the state among the nation's fastest-growing in recent years. More potential buyers and a particularly thin pool of listings is no recipe for bargain hunting.

The cars themselves aren't necessarily bargain-bin material, either. Used vehicles in Utah had lower median mileage than those in many other states, another factor working against a low median price. And Utah's garage looks suitably Utah-ish: utility vehicles and pickups account for over three-fifths of the state's registered vehicles, which makes sense in a place where mountains, snow, desert trails, and outdoor recreation are part of everyday life and not just vacation advertising. 

Put it together and the picture is more coherent than it was in New Mexico: Utah has relatively few used cars being advertised, many of them haven't traveled as far, and the broader vehicle population leans heavily toward the sort of utility-focused machinery that tends not to occupy the cheaper end of the market, unless of course you're just looking for a shell to prepare for setting records at Bonneville Speed Week.

Pennsylvania swings us back below five figures, with a $9,995 median used-car price that makes it the study's third-most affordable state. It's a striking number for a state with a huge, mature vehicle market. Pennsylvania had more than 11 million registered vehicles in 2024, and they're buzzing around on roughly 120,000 miles of state and local highway. In other words, this is not some tiny pool of bargain-bin cars skewing the results. There are lots of vehicles here, traveling everything from Philadelphia city commutes to the perpetual-work-in-progress orange barrel nightmare of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, America's most expensive highway to drive on (chew on that, New York!).

Of course, Pennsylvania also offers one reason older cars might get cheap before they actually disappear. Winter road treatment is serious business there: Pennsylvanians are well-acquainted with the unbreakable rules of winter driving, including learning to live with the automotive consequences of nearly 600,000 tons of road salt dumped across the state each winter. Salt is great for keeping people out of ditches but considerably less great for the metal underneath their cars, where repeated exposure can accelerate corrosion. That doesn't explain Pennsylvania's median by itself, but it does mean a cheap used car there can come with a very Pennsylvania-specific reason to spend some quality time inspecting the underside before you celebrate the bargain.

Wyoming comes in as the third-least affordable state in the study, with a $29,490 median used-car price. That's expensive in a state where the vehicle market is shaped by scale in a very literal sense. Wyoming had just 576,851 residents in the 2020 Census, spread across nearly 100,000 square miles. That works out to fewer than six people per square mile, which gives you a sense of how different car shopping there can be from browsing inventory around Philadelphia or New York. When people and available cars are that spread out, the Craigslist refrain of "I know what I have" takes on a different meaning, as "what I have" might be the only used Miata for sale in a 150-mile radius.

Then there's what Wyoming actually drives. Pickups alone account for 40.8% of the state's registered vehicles, and utility vehicles add another 35.1%. Among new vehicles sold in 2024, those two categories made up more than 90% of purchases. That is a market overwhelmingly tilted toward trucks, SUVs, and crossovers rather than cheap compact cars, and the study specifically identifies Wyoming as one of the states where that kind of vehicle mix contributes to higher used-car prices.

 Wyoming's vehicles are also old, averaging 15.1 years compared with 12.2 nationally, which makes that nearly-$30,000 median even more striking. So even though Wyomingites probably put more miles on their cars than you do, age and mileage clearly aren't enough to drag this truck-heavy market into bargain territory.

It turns out that New Jersey, against several deeply held regional prejudices, is good for something. Its $9,799 median used-car price makes it the second-most affordable state in the study. There are a couple of useful clues as to why. The study notes that New Jersey's cheaper listings tended to come with higher mileage, so once again some of the discount appears to be hiding on the odometer. The state also has a relatively small share of pickups: they account for just 10% of New Jersey's registered vehicles. Since a market with more pickups and SUVs can skew toward higher used-car prices, New Jersey's relatively small pickup share may help keep its overall median down.

And New Jersey has a ton of population squeezed into not much geography. It remains the most densely populated state in the country, with about 9.5 million people packed into a place seemingly designed around toll booths, left-lane grudges, and roads that change names halfway through your directions. That density means a huge number of buyers, sellers, and cars exist within a relatively compact area, even if getting six miles to any of them somehow takes 40 minutes. New Jersey is also still the rare place where the state won't let you pump your own gasoline, which feels appropriate for a jurisdiction where driving is already enough work. At least the car itself might be cheap.

Arizona jumps us back to the expensive side with a $29,988 median used-car price, making it the second-least affordable state in the study. Unlike Wyoming, though, Arizona is not some tiny, scattered market. The state had more than 8.3 million registered vehicles in fiscal 2025, and its population has been growing quickly enough that Arizona posted one of the largest numeric gains in the country between 2023 and 2024. Census estimates put that increase at more than 109,000 people. And while it might seem like a state that brought you the iced tea that has stayed 99 cents since it launched in the '90s should also serve up some cheap cars, we'll just point out that Arizona Iced Tea was founded on the East Coast by a New Yorker.

Arizona does have one trait that can help preserve older cars and has nothing to do with the origin stories of gas station iced tea: the climate. Vehicles there generally avoid the repeated road-salt exposure that turns Northern underbodies into geological formations, even if the tradeoff is dealing with extreme heat that can punish batteries, tires, cooling systems, and air conditioning. That may help keep some older Arizona inventory appealing to buyers, not to mention some enthusiast pockets like Phoenix, an unlikely hub of car culture.

And this is where the affordable side of the list bottoms out. Delaware posted the lowest median used-car price in the study at just $7,995, less than half of the $17,990 national median and more than $24,000 below what we're about to see in our priciest-state entry. The study gives us one useful explanation: Delaware was among the cheaper states where used vehicles tended to carry higher mileage. That fits the pattern we saw in Missouri and New Jersey, where bargain pricing often came with more miles already on the clock.

Delaware's broader vehicle mix may help, too. Pickups account for just 16.7% of the state's registered vehicles, below the national share, while passenger cars still make up more than a third of registrations. That leaves Delaware with less of the truck-heavy mix that helped push prices upward in places like Wyoming.

There's also one Delaware wrinkle worth mentioning because the state is known for it: Delaware has no general sales tax, although that doesn't mean an out-of-state shopper gets to dodge taxes simply by buying a car there. So the real headline here remains the inventory itself. In this snapshot, no state offered a cheaper median used-car listing than Delaware, which officially gives the First State one more first-place finish to put on the brochure (for a total of two).

Alaska is where the cheap-car fantasy freezes to death. The state posted the highest median used-car price in the entire study at $32,761, more than four times Delaware's figure and nearly $15,000 above the national median. Unlike some of the other expensive states on this list, though, Alaska comes with a pretty straightforward explanation: Getting cars there is difficult and expensive. The study notes that nearly all vehicles sold in Alaska have to be shipped in, with those transportation costs ultimately passed along to buyers. When your supply chain starts with "put the car on a boat," the Craigslist bargain bin was probably never going to be overflowing. Even McDonald's charged Alaskans $9 for a supposedly nationwide $8 Big Mac Extra Value Meal.

That logistical problem doesn't stop once the car arrives. Alaska is enormous, sparsely populated, and much of it is disconnected from the conventional road network. The state says 82% of its communities are not accessible by road, which is why ferries, aircraft, and other forms of transportation play such an outsized role there. In fact, there's an Alaska Marine Highway System of nine ferries set up to carry vehicles between 33 communities, because sometimes "driving it there" simply isn't one of the available options. 

So while Delaware closes out the affordable end of this study with a sub-$8,000 median, Alaska gives us the opposite extreme: a place where geography itself adds friction to getting cars into the market before anyone even starts haggling. If you want to know where used cars are least affordable, this is it.