The State of Lease Prices: September 2026

The headline numbers

The median advertised lease in September 2026 is $469 a month. The range is enormous: the cheapest lease any manufacturer is advertising is the Buick Encore GX at $179, and the most expensive is the Land Rover Range Rover at $1,809 — a spread of more than 10×.

68 models lease for under $300 a month; 31 ask more than $1,000. 65.8% of offers are 36-month terms, which is why almost every comparison you see quoted is a 36-month figure.

Sedans lease higher than SUVs

The intuitive ordering is wrong. Sedans carry a higher median payment than SUVs, because the sedan segment has hollowed out at the bottom — what remains is disproportionately luxury, while SUVs still span everything from a $179 subcompact upward.

What actually moved between August and September 2026

Lease programs are re-published every month, which creates an impression of constant movement. Comparing the same model, in the same market, on the same term, most payments simply did not move: 119 of 289 models (41%) were unchanged, 95 fell and 75 rose. The median change was $0.

The averages hide where it happened. The three brands that moved most were Alfa Romeo +$74, Mitsubishi +$67 and Mercedes-Benz -$46 a month across their comparable models, against a median of $0 for everything else. When a headline says lease prices moved this month, it is usually a handful of manufacturers, not a market.

Scoped to the 32 brands we tracked on both dates, and to offers that pair exactly on model, market and term — 1520 such pairs, folded to 289 models so that a brand pricing one car in twenty metros counts once rather than twenty times, and so that the several configurations behind a single model page count once too. It is not a market-wide index — see the method note below.

Cheapest and most expensive brands

Method, and how to cite this

Every figure comes from offers published by the manufacturers themselves — the same data behind the model pages on this site — captured in September 2026 across 35 brands, 326 models and 3,751 individual offers. No dealer listings and no estimates.

Two choices are worth stating, because both change the answer. Headline medians are per model, not per offer: brands differ enormously in how many metros they advertise separately, and a per-offer median would measure that rather than what a lease costs. (The per-offer median is $429.) And the month-over-month comparison is matched — the same model, market and term in both months — never a comparison of one month’s median against another’s, which would mostly reflect changes in which brands we had captured.

These numbers are free to use with attribution to LeaseCheetah and a link to this page. Data last refreshed 2026-09-19. If you need a cut we haven’t published — a specific segment, a longer time series as it accumulates — ask us.