Americans still want to lease, but the deals aren't what they used to be, and the gap is quietly pushing more buyers into loans that will follow them for seven years.
Leasing made up about 30% of new-vehicle deals before the pandemic, fell to 17% during the inventory crunch, and has only recovered to 23% in the first half of 2026. Automakers have pulled back on subsidized lease offers, and higher rates have made the remaining deals more expensive.
Average lease payments still run cheaper than financing, about $650 versus $800 a month, but many returning customers are seeing renewal quotes $100 to $200 higher than what they were paying. That gap is a real reason 23% of second-quarter purchases used 84-month loans instead.
The customer still has a desire to lease. The big challenge is getting the customer to accept the much higher payment.
— David Ferraez, General Motors Dealer, New Jersey
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The Retention Play Hiding in Your F&I Office
A customer drifting from a 3-year lease into an 84-month loan isn't just accepting a longer term, they're quietly stepping out of the retention cycle that lease renewals create.
If your team isn't proactively walking undecided customers through what leasing still offers, especially now that rates are easing and incentives are starting to come back, you're losing a customer you'll likely never see again in three years, let alone next quarter.
When 84 Months Actually Makes Sense (and When It Doesn't)
A longer loan isn't automatically a bad deal. It makes real sense on a vehicle with strong residual value that a customer plans to keep for the long haul, a 4Runner-style truck someone's driving for 15 years is a legitimate candidate for stretching the term.
What doesn't make sense is defaulting to 84 months just to hit a monthly payment number on a vehicle nobody's planning to keep that long. That's not a financing strategy, it's a deferred problem, and the loyalty cost of it is real even if nobody can point to the exact number yet.
What This Means for Your Store
Build a simple gut-check into your F&I conversation this week: before offering an 84-month term, ask whether the vehicle and the customer's intent actually support holding it that long. If the answer is yes, it's a legitimate option.
If the answer is no, that's the moment to walk the customer back through what a lease renewal would actually cost them today, since a $100 to $200 monthly increase is a much smaller loyalty risk than seven years of financing on a car they'll want to trade in three.
