What does £200, £300 or £400 a month buy in a used car?

Most used cars are now advertised with a monthly figure next to the price, so it's natural to shop by what you can pay each month. The harder part is knowing what that figure gets you: how old the car is, how far it's been driven and what kind of car it is. That's why we turned £200, £300 and £400 a month into the cars they buy across 41,284 used-car ads, and worked out what the loan costs on top.

What does £200, £300 and £400 each monthly payment buy?

Each monthly payment buys a younger car the higher it goes, and £400 a month gets you a car about 5 years newer than £200 does. We can say that because every ad in our data shows the same finance quote, so each payment matches exactly one car price.

Your own rate will depend on your credit record, though, so treat the prices below as what the advertised quote buys rather than what you'll be offered.

Cars at a payment are those within £25 a month of it, about £1,140 either side of the price. Typical means the middle value, so half the cars are above it and half below.

The first £100 does far more than the second. Moving from £200 to £300 a month takes about 4 years off the typical car, from 8 years old to 4. But the next £100 takes off only about 1 more year. That first step widens your choice, too, because about three times as many cars for sale cost £300 a month or less as cost £200.

You can see the gap within a single model. Take the Nissan Qashqai, where the typical one at £200 a month is 8 years old with 65,000 miles. Spend £400 a month instead and it's 3 years old with 19,000 miles.

The Qashqai isn't the only model that shows it. These are typical examples at each payment, with the typical age and mileage of that model:

• £200 a month: a Vauxhall Corsa (6 years, 39,000 miles), Ford Fiesta (7 years, 46,000), Nissan Qashqai (8 years, 65,000), Ford Focus (7 years, 65,000) or Fiat 500 (4 years, 31,000).
• £300 a month: a Vauxhall Corsa (3 years, 15,000 miles), Nissan Juke (3 years, 21,000), VW Polo (5 years, 34,000), Vauxhall Mokka (3 years, 22,000) or MG ZS (3 years, 19,000).
• £400 a month: a Ford Puma (3 years, 14,000 miles), Nissan Qashqai (3 years, 19,000), VW Golf (4 years, 27,000), Hyundai Tucson (4 years, 28,000) or a Vauxhall Mokka (1 year, 9,000).

What kind of car does each budget buy?

Your monthly budget changes the size of car you get, with small cars the biggest group at £200 a month and small or compact SUVs taking over from £300. At £200, city cars and superminis make up 39% of what's for sale, though small or compact SUVs aren't far behind.

From £300 a month, those SUVs pull ahead and make up almost half of what's on offer. Spend £400 and large cars (large SUVs and family or executive cars) start to appear, too, three times as often as at £200. Only family hatchbacks hold steady, at about one car in six whatever you pay.

What else changes as the monthly payment goes up?

A higher monthly payment makes the car more likely to be an automatic, a hybrid, a premium brand and a one-owner car, and less likely to be a diesel. Of these, the gearbox swings the most, from 18% automatics at £200 a month to 69% at £400.

This means that below £300 a month, most cars are manuals. If you only drive an automatic, that pushes your budget towards £400. Hybrids follow the same pattern, and they only become common at £400, too.

Diesel runs the other way. At £200 a month, 26% of the cars are diesels, more than across all cars for sale, and the share drops once you reach £300.

Premium brands mostly arrive at £400 a month. At that payment you get the market's usual share of Audi, BMW and Mercedes, but below it there are far fewer.

Owner history improves just as sharply with the budget. At £200 a month, most cars whose ads state it have had two owners or more. By £400 that flips, and more than half are one-owner cars.

Kit and body style

The kit an ad mentions improves with the budget, though not evenly. Adaptive cruise control, for example, appears in 3% of ads at £200 a month and 22% at £400, and LED headlights rise from 7% to 24%. Apple CarPlay or Android Auto is the exception, peaking at £300 a month, where 49% of ads mention it.

Body style shifts, too. At the bottom end, three in four cars at £200 a month are hatchbacks, and 3-door cars are more common there than at any other payment (8%, against 3% across all cars). Move up to £400 a month and the mix opens out, with more estates (16%) and saloons or coupés (8%).

What does each payment buy in an electric car?

An electric car at £200 a month is typically 5 years old with 29,000 miles, which makes it about 3 years younger than the typical car overall at that payment. The same holds at £300, where the typical electric car is 3 years old against 4 years for cars overall. That's because electric cars lose value faster in their first years, so they reach these prices sooner.

The catch is choice. Electric cars start at about £200 a month, but only 4% of the 1,576 electric cars for sale cost that or less. Even at £400 a month you can afford only half of them, since the other half cost more than £18,100.

Battery size is in kWh (kilowatt-hours), and a bigger battery usually means a longer range between charges.

What you get at each payment

• £200 a month: a Nissan Leaf, Vauxhall Corsa Electric, Renault Zoe, MG ZS EV or Fiat 500e. Only 5% have a battery of 60 kWh or more.
• £300 a month: a Vauxhall Mokka Electric, MG4, VW ID.3 or Peugeot e-2008. Half are crossovers or SUVs.
• £400 a month: a Honda e:Ny1, Polestar 2, Hyundai Kona Electric or Jaguar I-Pace. 72% have a battery of 60 kWh or more, and a third are premium brands.

Going cheaper than £200 a month is possible but rare. The cheapest electric car in our data is £4,290, a 2017 Nissan Leaf with a 30 kWh battery and 68,500 miles. But it's an outlier, since only 26 electric cars cost under £8,000.

Electric cars also have better owner histories than cars overall at every payment. Where the ad states it, 36% of electric cars at £200 a month have had one owner from new, rising to 64% at £300 and 71% at £400. Still, for all that, they're a small slice of what's on offer, at 4% of cars at £200 a month and 6% at £300 and £400.

Which monthly budget should you aim for?

For most buyers, £300 a month is where an extra £100 does the most, because it takes the typical used car from 8 years old to 4. Going on to £400, by contrast, takes off only about another year. So unless you need something only £400 brings, £300 gets you the biggest step up for the money.

That said, your needs decide it. Want an automatic, a hybrid or a premium brand? £400 a month is where they become common. Happy with a small manual car for getting from A to B? £200 a month works, as long as you're comfortable with an older car that has probably had more than one owner. Thinking of going electric? £300 a month buys a 3-year-old with a mid-sized battery, and £400 gets you a bigger one.

Whatever you pick, a few habits stretch the budget further:

1. Turn the monthly figure into a price. On the standard quote, every £100 a month over 5 years buys about £4,570 of car.
2. Ask for your own rate. The 11.9% in the ads is a standard example, and a better rate or a deposit makes the same payment go further.
3. Look at the total, not just the month. Over 5 years, interest on the standard quote adds about a third to the price of the car.