What Credit Score Do You Need to Buy a Car?

Every figure on this page comes from one dataset: Experian's State of the Automotive Finance Market for Q2 2026 — the record of loans actually made in the United States in that quarter, grouped by the borrower's VantageScore 4.0 score. That grounding matters, because averages of real loans behave differently from advertised rates. The average new-car borrower in Q2 2026 carried a score of 751 and financed $43,610; the average used-car borrower scored 688 and financed $27,852. But the averages hide the spread, and the spread is the story: the same market, in the same three months, priced car loans across an 11.70-point range of APRs depending on the score attached to the application.

The tier table: what each score actually paid

Experian sorts borrowers into five tiers. The rates below are what each tier paid on average in Q2 2026 — and the payment columns hold a surprise that the next section explains.

Read the APR columns first: the price of money multiplies down the table — more than three and a half times over on a new car, from 4.41% to 16.11%, and about three and a half times on a used one, from 6.29% to 21.62%. Then look at the payment columns, which barely move — deep-subprime buyers paid $779 a month on new cars, only $38 more than super-prime buyers paying $741. The payments converge because the loans do not: lower tiers borrow less (an average of $36,713 on a new car at deep subprime, against $41,667 at super prime, and $46,079 at near prime — the tier with the highest payment) and pay over similarly long terms, 69.5 months on average for new cars. A monthly payment is a loan amount, a term and a rate blended together; it is a poor instrument for seeing what a score costs. The rate is the instrument. The next section isolates it.

What 100 points costs: the same loan at every tier's rate

Hold everything constant — the same $30,000 borrowed, the same 60-month term, no taxes or fees rolled in — and change only the APR, using each tier's average new-car rate from the table above. Now the score is the only variable, and its price is exact.

Each step down the table is a step of roughly 80 to 120 points of score — the distance between the middle of one tier and the middle of the next — and each step adds between $1,440.91 and $3,447.93 of interest to this one loan. Across the full table, the subprime borrower pays $132.54 more every month and $7,952.45 more in total interest than the super-prime borrower for the identical car on the identical schedule; the deep-subprime borrower pays $10,393.95 more. Put differently, at the bottom of the table the interest alone — $13,877.78 — approaches half the amount borrowed. The car costs the same. The money costs three to four times as much.

One boundary deserves a closer look. A score of 660 is the top of near prime; 661 is the bottom of prime. The tier averages on either side of that single point differ by 3.56 APR points, which on this loan is $51.06 a month and $3,063.61 of interest. That is a difference between two tiers' averages, not a promise about any individual application — lenders draw their own lines, use different score types (the section after next), and price the whole application, not the score alone. But it shows why the prime line at 661 is the most consequential threshold in the table: it is where the average price of a new-car loan falls from near double digits to 6.15%. On used cars the same comparison is harsher still: the identical $30,000 over 60 months at the used-car averages runs from $584.04 a month and $5,042.28 of interest at super prime to $779.87 and $16,792.09 at subprime — a difference of $11,749.81.

Why used-car rates run higher in every tier

The used-car premium is not a subprime phenomenon; it is in every row. Measured tier by tier from the first table, a used car costs 1.88 points more than a new one at super prime, 2.66 at prime, 4.22 at near prime, 5.58 at subprime and 5.51 at deep subprime — a gap of 4.84 points across all borrowers (11.19% against 6.35%). Experian's explanation is about the collateral. A car loan is secured by the car, and as Experian puts it, new cars typically qualify for lower interest rates because they are less likely to break down, which can affect their value; as a car gets older and accumulates miles, expected rates rise. A used car is a less certain asset standing behind the loan, and the rate prices that uncertainty. The second mechanism compounds the first: Experian notes that a lower credit score indicates a greater statistical likelihood of defaulting, which lenders charge more to offset. On a used-car loan to a lower tier, both risks are present at once — a borrower statistically more likely to miss payments, and a car less certain to cover the balance if they do — which is why the used premium widens as the tiers descend, and why the highest average rate in the entire dataset, 21.62%, sits at the corner where the oldest collateral meets the lowest scores.

What else lenders check besides the score

If there is no universal minimum, it is because the score was never the whole application. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau lists what an auto lender weighs when setting a rate: your credit scores and history, your income and debts, the amount of the loan, the loan term, the amount of your down payment in relation to the value of the vehicle, and the type of vehicle, including whether it is new or used. Three of those deserve plain-English definitions, because they are where a weaker score can be partly offset — or a stronger one undermined — by the rest of the file.

• Income and the debt-to-income ratio. A lender generally asks for monthly income and employment information to assess the ability to repay, and looks at how much of that income already goes to other debts. The CFPB defines the debt-to-income ratio as total monthly debt payments divided by pre-tax monthly income. The same score reads differently attached to an income with room in it than to one already committed.
• The down payment and loan-to-value. The CFPB defines the loan-to-value ratio as the loan amount divided by the vehicle's actual cash value, and notes that the higher the percentage borrowed, the riskier the loan is to the lender. A larger down payment lowers that ratio, shrinks the amount borrowed and the interest paid on it, and may lower the rate offered.
• The history behind the score. Experian adds that lenders look past the number to the record: a bankruptcy or repossession on a credit report can make a low rate difficult to obtain even when the score itself is in decent shape, while a clean payment history points the other way.

Because each lender assembles these factors under its own rules, the CFPB's framing is the accurate one: lenders consider the score alongside the rest, they set their own thresholds, and they are not required to offer any borrower the best rate they have. Two applications with the same score can receive different offers from the same lender, and the same application can receive different offers from different lenders — which is a statement about how the pricing works, not a loophole in it.

The score you see may not be the score the lender uses

One more complication, and it explains many "my score was 720, why this rate?" puzzles. There is no single credit score. Experian notes that auto lenders can choose among VantageScore scores, base FICO Scores and industry-specific FICO Auto Scores — and the tier table on this page is built on VantageScore 4.0, which a given lender may not use at all. A FICO Auto Score is a score built for exactly this transaction: it uses the same underlying credit data as a base FICO Score but is tailored to focus on auto loan risk, predicting how likely a borrower is to miss a car payment, so how past auto loans were handled can weigh more heavily in it than in a general score. It also runs on a different scale — 250 to 900, against 300 to 850 for base FICO Scores — and exists in several versions (FICO Auto Score 2, 4, 5, 8, 9 and 10), with the version used varying by lender and by which of the three credit bureaus supplies it. A borrower therefore cannot know in advance the exact number a lender will pull. What transfers across every version is the ordering: the tiers above describe where a borrower stands relative to other borrowers, and that relative standing — prime, near prime, subprime — is what the pricing follows.

Reading these averages honestly

Three limits, stated plainly. First, every rate here is an average of loans actually made in one quarter, Q2 2026 — evidence of what happened, not a menu of what any lender will offer next quarter; an individual offer can sit above or below its tier's average, and rates move with the wider market between quarters. Second, the deep-subprime averages exist because loans were made in that tier — an average amount financed of $36,713 on new cars and $22,071 on used cars — but an average is not an approval standard, and nothing in this data says which applications in that tier were declined. Third, the term is part of the price even though this page held it fixed: the worked example uses 60 months, while the average new-car loan actually ran 69.5 months, and a longer term at the same rate adds interest of its own — the subject of our guide to what a 72-month car loan really costs. The full picture of rates, terms and payments is gathered in our Auto Loans hub. Our methodology is on how we calculate.