Is your car worth repairing?

You have a damaged car and a repair quote in your hand. There are four things you can actually do with it, and only one of them leaves you best off. Put in what the car was worth undamaged and what the repair costs, and the calculator above works out the net position on each, plus the most you should ever spend on the repair.

The four options, and how each one is worked out

• Repair it and keep it. You pay the repair bill and end up owning a car with no marker against it. Worth doing whenever the repair costs less than the value it puts back.
• Claim on your insurance. If the insurer repairs it, the damage gets recorded, and a recorded car is worth less afterwards: around 75 to 85 percent of a clean equivalent for non-structural damage, around 60 to 75 percent where structural damage was involved. You pay your excess on top. The insurer may also decide not to repair at all and settle it as a total loss instead.
• Sell it as it stands. A salvage buyer will do the same repair you were quoted for, then sell the rebuilt car at the recorded value, and they need a margin on everything they put in. So what they can offer is the rebuilt value less their return, less the repair cost.
• Scrap it. Typically £150 to £400, set by the car's kerb weight and the metal price that week, plus anything the catalytic converter is worth. This is the floor under every other option.

The number that actually matters

Not what the repair costs, but the most it is worth paying. Spend beyond the point where selling the car as it stands would have left you better off and the repair is costing you money, however reasonable the quote looked. The calculator puts that ceiling in pounds at the top of the result.

Before you decide

A car that already carries a write-off marker, or whose mileage history does not add up, is worth less than any of these figures assume. Run it through the free vehicle history check first, and see how much a marker knocks off a car's value and what you are obliged to declare. Buying a damaged car rather than selling one? Use the write-off value calculator or the salvage profit analyzer.