What age and mileage does your budget actually buy?
In live UK dealer stock, under £5,000 buys a car with a median age of 14 years and 92,000 miles on the odometer, while over £30,000 buys one at 6 years and 31,750 miles. Mileage falls faster than age as the budget rises: the cheapest band is roughly 8 years older than the dearest, and every figure here is a median asking price from cars currently for sale, not a transaction price.
What each budget reaches
Every row is a median taken from cars advertised for sale on Autoza right now. Medians rather than averages, because a handful of six-figure cars drag an average somewhere no buyer would recognise. A band appears only when live stock holds at least 30 priced cars in it — below that a median describes one or two sellers’ pricing rather than a market, so it is withheld rather than estimated.
| Budget | Median age | Median mileage | Median asking price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under £5,000 | 14 years | 92,000 miles | £3,499 |
| £5,000 – £10,000 | 10 years | 67,101 miles | £7,495 |
| £10,000 – £20,000 | 8 years | 57,805 miles | £13,995 |
| £20,000 – £30,000 | 8 years | 55,550 miles | £23,989 |
| Over £30,000 | 6 years | 31,750 miles | £43,995 |
The pattern that matters is the one the table makes obvious: mileage falls faster than age as the budget rises, because the median age falls 57% between the cheapest and dearest bands while the median odometer reading falls 65%. Moving up a band takes a bigger proportional slice off the odometer than off the registration age. If what you want is remaining service life, that is good news. If what you want is remaining manufacturer warranty, age is the number to watch — cover runs from first registration — and it moves more slowly.
Automatics cost roughly two years
Buyers ask about automatics specifically, so the same figures restricted to automatic gearboxes are below. At the budget end the same money buys an automatic that is meaningfully older than the market as a whole — the convenience is paid for in registration years rather than in headline price. The gap narrows as the budget rises, because automatics make up a far larger share of newer stock.
| Budget | Median age | Median mileage | Median asking price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under £5,000 | 17 years | 96,003 miles | £3,994 |
| £5,000 – £10,000 | 11 years | 75,109 miles | £8,297 |
| £10,000 – £20,000 | 8 years | 60,000 miles | £14,548 |
| £20,000 – £30,000 | 7 years | 55,000 miles | £23,750 |
| Over £30,000 | 6 years | 31,750 miles | £43,497 |
What these figures are not
These are asking prices. We see what sellers advertise, never what buyers finally pay, so every figure here sits above the equivalent transaction price and the gap is not constant across bands. A valuation answers a different question — what one specific car is worth — and a trade guide doing it against recorded transactions will not agree with a page like this one built from advertised stock. Use this page to judge what a budget reaches; use a valuation for a car you already own.
The cars on sale at any moment are also not a random sample of the cars that exist. Models that sell slowly are over-represented on any forecourt, here included. That is a real limit on what a snapshot of live stock can tell you, and it applies to every marketplace that publishes one.