Release 2026-09-06
How these figures are made
Every number here is a median over live asking prices, floored so that no individual advert can be recovered from it, and dated so you can tell when it stopped being true.
What is measured
Public marketplace listings across 23 national markets, 3,875,842 of them live at the current release. A listing is re-checked individually to confirm it is still there; an advert that disappears from a search result is queued for checking, never assumed sold. The corpus is refreshed nightly and the published artefact is rebuilt once a day.
The disclosure floors
These are applied once, when the artefact is built, and not in the request path — so there is no query that reaches an unfloored number.
| Rule | Value | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| Median floor | 20 | A median over a handful of cars is a car. |
| Quartile floor | 50 | A range says how far the edges reach, and the edges are where identifiable cars live. |
| Exact-count floor | 500 | Below it a count is published as a band of 10, so a count cannot be differenced to one advert. |
| Price rounding | EUR 250 | An exact median is an exact price somebody asked. |
| Mileage rounding | 1,000 km | An odometer reading is close to an identifier. |
Where a group is too small to publish, it is not dropped — it is pooled into a residual, so the published children plus the residual add up to their parent exactly. That is a property you can check on any figure we serve, and it is the reason a suppressed category cannot be recovered by subtraction.
Model years are bands
A single model year is published where the nameplate has at least 500 cars across the whole corpus behind it, and a span like 2006–2012 where it does not. The boundaries are computed per nameplate and are the same in every market, which is what makes two countries comparable at all. A band spanning several years says so on every figure it produces.
The tax and charge parameters
There is no machine-readable European feed for vehicle registration tax. The catalogue behind the market pages is hand-read from national authority documents, and it is built so that being out of date is visible rather than silent:
- Every figure carries a source, and the source is checked mechanically. A parameter records the document it came from, the hash of the bytes we fetched, and a span of text from inside it. That span is re-checked against those bytes every time the catalogue loads. A figure whose quotation cannot be found is not published — it is refused, exactly as a missing one is.
- Every figure carries a review date. Past it, without a later verification, the figure degrades automatically to a bound, and after 90 days to a refusal. Last year's rate is never reused. A country that nobody has re-checked stops answering rather than answering wrongly.
- A weekly job re-fetches every cited document and compares hashes. It can advance a review date when nothing has moved and the figure is still inside its validity window. It cannot change a number — only a person can do that, from a document. Crossing a legislative boundary such as 1 January needs a person even when the page looks identical, because immediately after a budget an unchanged ministry page is weak evidence of freshness rather than strong evidence.
Countries with a parameter file today:
AT, BE, BG, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, HR, IT, LT, LU, LV, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, RS, SE, SI.
A market page for any other country states its refusal instead.
What this data cannot tell you
Stated here rather than discovered in a sales call. None of these is fixable by engineering, and any product claiming otherwise from listings data is overreaching:
- These are asking prices, never transaction prices. We observe that an advert stopped being listed. We do not observe that it sold, or for how much.
- There are no buyers in this data, only sellers. How many dealers list a specification is evidence about supply. It is never demand.
- There is no condition, damage, service history or accident status, in any market. Two cars with the same specification are not the same car.
- There is no trend and no seasonality yet. The corpus is too young for either, and a year-on-year claim from it would be an invention.
- Nothing here is a landed cost. Transport, VAT treatment, plate and administration fees and customs duty are not modelled. A price gap between two markets is not a margin.
- VAT is published as a rate, and a rate is not a charge. A used car bought under the dealer margin scheme carries no deductible destination VAT on the price at all; a private sale carries none; and a car under six months old or at or under 6,000 km is a new means of transport and is taxed in full whoever the parties are. Which applies is a fact about the transaction, not about the country, so this service computes no VAT anywhere.