This Is What A Ford F-150 Cost In 2020 Vs. 2026
The Ford F-150 is the best-selling vehicle in America and practically has been for the last half-century. But like what feels like absolutely everything lately (including car ownership), has ballooned in price over the past handful of years. Has it outrun inflation? Time to do some math.
Turn the clocks back to 2020, and the Ford F-150 had a starting price of $30,440. Fast forward six years and the least expensive 2026 F-150 you can get goes for $40,085 including destination. That gets you into a Regular Cab XL with the eight-foot box, the 2.7-liter EcoBoost V6, rear-wheel drive, and no options.
That's a jump of basically 10 grand or 32%, but — and, yeah, I was a little alarmed at this, too — that's actually right in line with inflation. Feeding $30,440 in 2020 into the inflation calculator, that's about $39,300 in today's dollars, slightly less than what Ford charges for a base F-150 now, but not meaningfully so. This holds for the higher Platinum trim F-150, too, which started at $55,520 back in 2020 but now costs $71,595 to start, an almost eerily close match with the inflation-adjusted numbers.
4.3% inflation is fine, right?
For the economists in the crowd, that's 29% cumulative inflation since the pandemic, or an average compound annual rate of about 4.3% for the past six years. The Federal Reserve, by the way, aims for 2% per year over the long term. You're not imagining it — your money goes less far every year, even less so than it's "supposed to."
So, yes, that $40,000 base F-150 you'd pay for today really is, mathematically at least, the same price as the equivalent truck pre-COVID. The 2026 is a generation newer than that 2020, too, since that was the final year of the 13th-gen F-150 before the 14th-gen debuted for '21. Exterior styling wasn't drastically different, but the truck underneath was. It launched the PowerBoost hybrid option, has more, larger screens inside, and introduced the electric Lightning version, which has since been axed. Granted, that's far from the one you'd get for 40 grand anyway (unless you grab one used, of course), but there you go.