From a flyer, not a quote
What that weekly price isn't telling you
Novated lease advertisements all have the same shape: a car, a weekly figure, a total saving, and a footnote. What none of them print is the price of the car — and every other number on the page is worked out from it. Enter what the ad says and this works it back out, along with the residual the weekly figure leaves out and what the same deal costs on your salary instead of the one in the small print.
What does the ad say?
Copy the figures off the advertisement — including the small print, which is where the assumptions are.
From the small print
Optional — about you and the car
Enter the weekly figure to start.
These advertisements all leave out the same thing: what the car costs. Everything on them is derived from that price, so without it the weekly figure can't be compared with another provider's, or with the car on a dealer's website. It can be worked out from the figures they do print.
Why the price is the missing number
A weekly cost can't be compared with anything. Two providers advertising the same car at $210 and $225 a week may be quoting different variants, different terms, different running-cost budgets or different interest rates, and nothing on either page lets you tell. A drive-away price can be compared — with the other provider, and with the manufacturer's own website. That is the whole reason it isn't there.
None of which makes the advertised figure wrong. It is usually close to right for the person in the footnote. The problem is that the footnote describes one salary, one term and one annual distance, and that the residual — the lump still owing when the lease ends — has no place on an advertisement at all.
What to do with the answer
- Look the car up. If the implied price is close to what the car sells for, the ad is costed honestly and the questions are about what it omits. If it is well above, something is being financed that hasn't been named.
- Model it on your own numbers. The calculator takes the implied price and your salary and shows the whole position, including the residual and what the same car costs on a plain car loan.
- Then ask for a real quote. An advertisement is not an offer. Once the car is set up on your lease, the site walks you through getting quotes on it and checking what comes back — including recovering the interest rate a quote won't state, and measuring its fees against the market.
About these figures
The implied price is solved by running the same model the calculator uses against the assumptions in the ad's own fine print, and adjusting the price until it produces the advertised weekly cost. It carries our running-cost estimates and our benchmark interest rate, not the advertiser's, so treat it as close rather than exact — a figure to sanity-check against a dealer's website, which is a thing you can do in a minute and the ad would rather you didn't.
This site names no lease provider and has no relationship with any of them. Every advertisement of this kind has the same structure, and it is the structure being examined here. How this is funded and where the rates come from.