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.”
Patrick Janes, vAuto AVP of Inventory Solutions
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Zooming in: U.S. brands were down less than 3%, while vehicles from Asia had the sharpest decline in CPO sales. Non-luxury CPO sales dropped almost 4% while luxury brand CPO sales gained almost 1%.
CPO sales are predicted to finish the year at 2.6 million and experience a resurgence next year as more than 3.1 million off-lease vehicles enter the market.
Also worth noting: Aside from the CPO sales dropping, dealers are taking new approaches to fill their pre-owned inventory.
The days of supply for the used market, according to vAuto data, has dropped by 15 days from 52.2 in December. vAuto’s dealers’ used sales are up 11% through the first quarter. To supplement their used car supply, Janes noted dealers are retaining a greater amount of the vehicles they take in on trade.
“We have 14,000 rooftops and see millions of cars retailed through vAuto every year…Last year, about 85% of cars [entered in the system] were kept in retail,” Janes said. “This year, I’ve seen that trend up. It’s at 87%. I know that’s only a couple percentage points, but that’s thousands of cars.”
Janes also noted the trend continued with older vehicles with more miles. Dealers are keeping a greater percentage of vehicles with more than 100,000 miles to provide affordable options in the price point of more customers.
“I wanted to see if franchise dealers are starting to keep that type of vehicle more readily available. I was shocked to see that, if you look at last year, cars over 100,000, the dealer was keeping 70% of those cars,” Janes said. “The first quarter, that’s jumped to 75%.
“That’s a big jump. [Dealers] are starting to hold onto those vehicles and spend the money to recondition and retail those cars.”
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