Vehicle Economics

Buy Extra Lease Miles vs Pay Overage

Should you buy your dealer's prepaid extra-mile package, or just pay the overage fee at lease end?

Why this comes up

Lease Mileage Overage estimates what you would owe at turn-in with no package involved. Dealers often separately offer a prepaid extra-mile package, usually at a lower per-mile rate than the contractual overage fee, but it can lose if you overestimate how many extra miles you will actually drive. This engine compares the one specific package you were offered against just paying overage.

How we calculated this

Overage cost if unbought is your projected miles over the allowance, times the contractual fee. The package's net cost is its price, minus any refund for miles it includes but you don't use, plus any overage still owed beyond what the package covers. Whichever is lower wins.

Worked example, using this page's own defaults: unbought overage costs$1,000, the package nets to $900, so the package wins by $100. The package pays for itself once your projected overage exceeds about 3,600 miles at this overage rate.

What this means

  • A package only wins if your projected overage is genuinely close to or above what it covers, buying a package for miles you won't drive is a pure loss unless it's refundable.
  • Always check whether unused package miles are refunded, that materially changes when the package makes sense.
  • If you're unsure how many extra miles you'll actually drive, run Lease Mileage Overage first to sanity-check your projection.

Limitations

Package price, package miles, refund terms, and the contractual overage fee must come from your actual lease offer, this engine does not invent or estimate them. See Methodology.

Methodology

This engine combines Vehicle Economics' lease payment and buyout model (cap cost, residual, and money factor split into a depreciation charge and a rent charge) and break-even search model (a closed-form solve where one exists, otherwise a bounded search over a stated plausible range). See Methodology for the full detail.

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