How many kilometres should a used car have? Median mileage by age in 7 European markets

The short answer

A 10-year-old car in Germany typically shows around 117,000 km. The same car, same age, in Lithuania typically shows around 211,000 km. Both are completely normal for their markets — and that is the whole problem with the question "is this mileage too high?"

Mileage is not an absolute measure of wear, and — this is the part most guides get wrong — it is not a measure of how far that country drives either. An odometer records distance wherever it was travelled. In a market supplied largely by imports, much of the reading was accumulated in the exporting country before the car ever arrived. Until you know which market a car actually spent its life in, its odometer tells you very little.

Our analysis of used-car listings across seven European markets produced the following medians.

Median odometer reading by age

Every figure is a median: half the cars of that age in that market read below it, half above.

What the table actually says

Germany is the lowest at every age. Not at most ages — at every single one, from year three through year fourteen. This is the structural reason the German used-car export corridor exists: for a given age and specification, a German car has simply covered less distance.

Lithuania is the highest, and the gap widens with age. At three years old, Lithuania and Germany are close together. By year ten Lithuania is 79% higher. That divergence is the signature of a market supplied by imports — cars arrive with distance already on them, then keep adding.

The middle of the table is tighter than people assume. Czechia, Poland and Denmark sit within about 10,000 km of each other at year ten, despite quite different economies.

Odometer-age rate is not a driving rate

Divide the median odometer by the age and you get what we call the odometer-age rate. At year ten it runs about 11,800 km/yr in Germany, 12,300 in Sweden, 16,200 in Czechia, 16,500 in Poland, 17,200 in Denmark, 19,200 in Romania and 21,100 in Lithuania.

It is tempting to read those as national driving habits. They are not, and treating them that way is the single most common error in this subject. Independently published European transport statistics put actual annual distance driven in several of these markets far below their odometer-age rate — in Lithuania's case by a factor of roughly three.

Both figures are correct, and the gap between them is not an error. It is imported distance. A car that spent five years in Germany before being registered in Lithuania carries its German kilometres with it; the Lithuanian odometer-age rate is therefore an average of two countries' driving, not one.

This is why the table is useful rather than merely interesting. Where a market's odometer-age rate sits close to how much its drivers actually drive, most cars there lived there. Where the rate runs far above it, the fleet is substantially imported — and an imported fleet is exactly the population where a rolled-back odometer is easiest to hide, because the paper trail pauses at the border.

Mileage growth decelerates. In every market, the first five years add far more kilometres than the last five. A car that has already survived a decade tends to be driven less: shorter trips, second-car duty, or an owner reluctant to add distance to an ageing vehicle. This matters when you extrapolate — assuming a flat annual rate across fifteen years will substantially overestimate.

Why this is the key to spotting a rolled-back odometer

Odometer fraud is rarely crude. Almost nobody sets a 15-year-old car to 40,000 km, because that invites exactly the question the seller wants to avoid. The adjusted figure is chosen to look ordinary.

The flaw in that plan is that "ordinary" is national. A car exported from Germany carries a German-shaped odometer; a car that spent its life in Romania carries a Romanian-shaped one. When a vehicle crosses a border its paper trail pauses — and in that pause the number can be changed to whatever looks normal in the destination market.

This produces two detectable situations.

A number that is too low for its origin. A ten-year-old car that genuinely lived in Romania should sit near 192,000 km. Offered at 120,000 km, that figure is perfectly plausible for a German car and entirely implausible for a Romanian one. The reading is normal — for the wrong country.

A number that is too high for its origin. Less intuitive and less common, but it happens when paperwork is assembled carelessly. A German-origin car showing Lithuanian-typical mileage suggests either a genuinely unusual history or a record that does not belong to this vehicle.

Neither case is visible if you only ask "does this seem like a lot?" Both become visible the moment you place the car against the norms of the country it came from.

How to use these numbers when buying

Establish origin before you judge the odometer. The question is not "is 150,000 km high?" It is "is 150,000 km high for a car that spent nine years in Poland?" On the table above that is close to typical. For a car that spent nine years in Germany, it is well above normal.

Expect deceleration. If a car is fifteen years old, do not multiply a first-year rate by fifteen. Later years add less.

Treat a suspiciously round figure with care. Genuine odometers land on arbitrary numbers.

Look for the shape of the history, not one number. A single reading can be set to anything. A sequence of readings across years is far harder to fake consistently, which is why a mileage timeline assembled from more than one country is what actually exposes manipulation.

Remember that low mileage is not automatically good. A car that covered 40,000 km in twelve years has spent most of its life stationary, which brings its own problems: perished seals, corrosion, degraded fluids. Very low mileage for its market deserves as much scrutiny as very high.

The limits of this data

These are seller-declared odometer readings from live listings, not registry-verified figures and not completed sales. Seller-declared mileage is exactly the number fraud targets, so the medians here describe what the market presents, which is subtly different from what the cars have actually done. If anything, that biases the figures slightly downward.

They are also national medians across all makes, body types and fuel types. A diesel estate and a city hatchback do not accumulate distance at the same rate, and a national median smooths that away. Use the table as a reference frame, not as a verdict on a specific car.