Spring 2026 used car supply dwindling…
With the number of off-lease vehicles finding their way back to dealer lots dwindling, certified pre-owned sales continue to lag. CPO sales dropped 11.2% year-over-year in March, according to data from Cox Automotive.
What we know: CPO sales slumped, even as overall used sales finished only slightly down, 2.9%, from March 2025, when sales surged ahead of expected tariffs being implemented.
Cox Automotive’s breakdown showed:
March CPO sales finished at 221,840.
CPO sales accounted for 13.7% of the estimated used sales market, totaling 1.62 million units.
And through 2026 Q1, CPO sales are down 18,801 units with a total of 636,717.
What they are saying: As overall used car demand has increased, with the days of supply shrinking to 37.4 days in March, the falling CPO sales numbers are attributed directly to supply, according to vAuto AVP of Inventory Solutions Patrick Janes.
For context, he spent 10 years as a dealership general manager, worked more than a decade for Nissan, and served as the performance manager at vAuto for 11 years.
“If you just look at off-lease cars, which are the wheelhouse of the CPO world, the three-year-old vehicle, we ended 2025 with about 2.3 million. You jump to ‘26, and the forecast is we come back a little to about 2.4 million…There’s a really low dealer day supply when you factor in that there’s not a lot of these cars coming off lease for dealers to buy and supplement their inventory for CPO.”
