How much does a car lose in value in Ireland?
Everybody knows a car loses money. Almost nobody can tell you how much, or when, and the guesses are usually borrowed from British articles that do not describe this market at all.
Ireland is its own case. We tax cars into the country rather than out of it, we buy far fewer of them than Britain does, and we change the plate twice a year. All three of those show up in what your car is worth on the day you decide to move it on.
The short version
A new car in Ireland typically loses somewhere around half its value over three years, and most of that happens early — a chunk of it the week it stops being new.
After that the curve flattens. The same car goes on losing money between year four and year seven, but in far smaller steps, and by the time it is ten or twelve years old the year on the plate matters much less than the state of the car.
That shape is why the most expensive year of ownership is nearly always the first one, and why a three-year-old car is the one most people should be buying.
Why the Irish curve is flatter than the British one
Two things hold Irish used values up.
Vehicle Registration Tax. A new car here carries VRT on top of the price of the car, charged on its value and its emissions, with a NOx component on top of that. So the replacement cost of almost everything is higher than it is across the water. When a new car is dear, the good second-hand one underneath it is worth more, because that is what people buy instead.
We are a small market with thin supply. There are only so many three-year-old diesel estates in the country in any given month. Britain has an order of magnitude more of everything, and plentiful supply is what drives a price down.
The used imports that used to smooth that out largely stopped after Brexit: bringing a car in from Britain now means customs duty and VAT as well as VRT, and the arithmetic only works on a narrow band of cars. Less imported supply means firmer prices for the cars already here.
What actually drives the number
In rough order of how much they move the figure:
- Age and the plate on it. Not just the year — which half of the year. A 231 and a 232 are the same age in months and not the same car in the ad. That is worth its own page: what the 231 and 232 plates do to a car's value.
- Mileage against the clock everyone expects. Roughly 17,000 km a year is the yardstick most of the trade uses. Well under it helps; well over it costs, and costs more on a premium car than on a small hatch.
- NCT. A full test is worth real money, and a car sold with weeks left on it is worth less than the same car with a fresh one. See what NCT and mileage do to what a dealer will pay.
- Motor tax band. This is the quiet one. A car first registered before July 2008 is taxed on engine size, which can mean €700 or more a year on a two-litre — while an identical-looking car registered a few months later is taxed on emissions and costs a fraction of that. It is a cliff edge in the middle of a model's life, and it is priced in.
- Fuel and drivetrain, this year. Demand for diesel, petrol, hybrid and electric moves faster than any of the above, and it does not move the same way in Dublin as it does in Leitrim.
- Condition, history and how well it presents. Service records, one owner, no smoke inside, a clean boot. Cheap to protect, expensive to fix at the end.
Which cars hold on best here
There is no single answer, but the pattern is consistent enough to be useful:
| Holds value better | Falls away faster |
|---|---|
| Cars that are cheap to tax and cheap to insure | Big-engined pre-2008-band cars |
| Common models with parts on the shelf | Rare trims and grey imports |
| Manual small diesels and mid-size hybrids in rural counties | Anything with a queue of the same thing for sale |
| Sensible colours with a full history | Modified, unbranded alloys, no records |
| Cars sold in January or July, into a busy market | Cars sold in late November into a dead one |
What you can do about it
Not much, once you have bought the car — which is exactly why the decisions worth making are the ones at the start.
- Buy the depreciation somebody else has already paid. A three-year-old car has taken the worst of it. You get most of the life for a good deal less of the loss.
- Keep the paperwork. A folder with every service and every NCT in it is the cheapest value protection there is, and the first thing anyone buying the car asks for.
- Do not sit on it out of hope. A car that is two months from an NCT and about to roll past a round mileage number is losing money faster standing still than it would have if you had sold it in the spring.
- Time it if you can. January and July are when the trade is buying. November and December are when they are not.
Find out what yours is actually worth
Everything above is the shape of the curve. Where your car sits on it depends on its own mileage, its own NCT and its own history, which is the part no average can tell you.
The free way to find out is to have dealers look at it and say what they would give you: get a free car valuation and offers come back, usually inside 24 to 72 hours. There is no charge and no obligation to sell to anybody.
If you are weighing that against advertising it yourself, the honest comparison is on trade-in versus private sale.