If you’re interested in the total costs to purchase a car an auction site like Copart, this is the article for you. We’re going to go line by line into how costs are calculated and what your potential total cost of acquisition might be.

Background

Copart is an auto auction company that takes totaled cars from insurance companies and sells them on their behalf. Think eBay for insurance companies. Copart makes money two ways: by charging the insurance companies a percentage of the sale price and charging bidders the Copart fee. If you think about it, that’s a pretty sweet deal for Copart! They make money on the supply side and the demand side. In this article, we’ll focus on the fees.

Line by line breakdown of the fees

The fees Copart charges is quite simple and laid out plainly on their website. It’s not laid out in the best way and makes it difficult to find, but all the information is there. There will typically be 5 line items on your final bill. There is 1 optional line item (delivery fee- more on that below). Copart sums all these fees as “Member Fees.” Let’s dive in.

Sale price

This is the winning bid on listing. If you won, this would be your bid amount.

Buyer fee

*September 2020 Update*

There are two types of buyer fees: dealer and non-dealer. If you do not have a dealers license provided by the state, you are not a dealer.

Copart has changed their fee structure. They are now separating high-volume members versus low-volume members where high-volume is defined as 12+ purchases in the last 365 days. The pricing table below has not changed. What this means is now in order to qualify for the lower Fee A and Fee B, you don’t just need a dealers license but need to have made at least 12 purchases within the last year.

This fee is calculated based on a percentage of the sale price and can be found using the table provided by Copart. I pasted a small sample below:

To use this chart, look at where your Sale Price fall and use fee C if you are using any of the following payment types to take care of the invoice:

• Money Order
• Wire Transfer
• ePay
• Cash
• Available Funds
• Cashier’s Check
• Company Check
• Third Party Financing

If you use a credit or debit card, you fall into column fee D.

If you are slowly realizing you may have been underestimating the total purchase price, you are not alone. That’s just how it is. Don’t be discouraged though as good deals can still be found.

NOTE: It is possible to hire a “dealer” to use fee A and fee B to save on the charges. A dealer will typically charge $150 for his or her service. Sometimes it is actually cheaper to pay a dealer so that you can use a different fee schedule. This only seems to make sense on cars in the higher price range.

Virtual Bid Fee

This is a bogus fee Copart charges for simply making the bid online. The alternative is physically visiting a Copart location and writing your bid on a piece of paper for them to mark for you. This does not make sense most of the time as there will be other bidders when the auction goes live. This could be a good strategy if you live near Copart and you are have a great sense of what the cars winning bid will look like.

Gate

This is another fee they jab on you for simply bringing the car out to you when you go pick it up.

Sales Tax

Self-explanatory. Sales tax is only applied to the sale price and the delivery (if you choose to use this).

Delivery

This is the price to deliver the car to your doorstep. This is an optional fee as you can drive or tow the car away yourself. If you ever do end up visiting the Copart locations, get to know some of the drivers and see if you can grab a business card. Often times, these drivers will take a reduced rate for making arrangements directly with you since Copart would only pays out a fraction of what they charge bidders.

My Experience

Those are the fees you will find on a Copart bill if you end up purchasing a car. I have purchased 2 cars from Copart, 1 with delivery and 1 without. I will tell you even though I calculated the total costs, I was still surprised to see the bill! The good news? It’s way cheaper than any used car on the market (you have to put time into fixing it though).

I hope this was informative in your calculation on final costs to assess whether or not purchasing an auction car makes sense for your wallet.

Check out our video series where we purchase $350 Honda Civic from Copart and we document every step of the journey.

If you want to learn how to screen out bad cars on Copart, check out our other article here.