Enter your negotiated price and lease terms — residual percentage, term, money factor, cap reduction, and sales tax — to estimate your monthly lease payment before you sign.
How to Use the Auto Lease Calculator
Enter the negotiated price you agreed on with the dealer — not the sticker price — along with any cap cost reduction (a down payment or trade-in credit applied up front), the residual percentage, lease term in months, money factor, and your local sales tax rate. The payment recalculates as soon as any field changes.
A lease payment isn't one number pulled from a table; it's two separate fees added together. The depreciation fee covers how much value the car is expected to lose while you're driving it. The finance fee is effectively the interest charge on the money tied up in the vehicle for the length of the lease.
Adjusted Cap Cost = Negotiated Price − Cap Cost Reduction
Residual Value = Negotiated Price × Residual %
Depreciation Fee = (Adjusted Cap Cost − Residual Value) ÷ Term
Finance Fee = (Adjusted Cap Cost + Residual Value) × Money Factor
Monthly Payment = (Depreciation Fee + Finance Fee) × (1 + Sales Tax %)Money factor looks unfamiliar if you're used to shopping loans by APR — it's expressed as a small decimal instead of a percentage. Multiply it by 2400 and you get roughly the equivalent APR, which is why the input carries that conversion as a note: a 0.00125 money factor works out to about 3%.
Residual value matters more than most shoppers expect. It's the leasing company's prediction of what the car will be worth at lease-end, and a higher residual percentage means less depreciation to pay for during the lease — part of why some models lease far cheaper than their purchase price would suggest, and others don't.
A bigger cap cost reduction lowers the depreciation fee just like a down payment lowers a loan payment, but unlike a loan there's no equity building up behind it — if the car is totaled early in the lease, that upfront cash is generally gone. Some lease specialists argue for the smallest reasonable down payment on that basis, not the largest, which is the opposite of typical buying advice.
Sales tax on leases is genuinely inconsistent from place to place. Some U.S. states tax only the monthly payment, the way this calculator does; others tax the full vehicle price up front as if it were a purchase, and a few handle it differently still. The depreciation and finance math is the same everywhere — tax treatment is not, so check how your state or country handles it before treating this number as final.