Out-the-Door Price — Maine

The sticker isn’t the price. Enter your numbers and get an itemized breakdown — tax, title, and fees included — so you can give it a proper side-eye before you ever sit down.

How to use it: enter the agreed price, pick your state, add your trade and financing — the out-the-door total builds line by line in The Math.

Example numbers so you can see how it works — swap in yours.

1 · The vehicle

Agreed vehicle price
State of registration

2 · Tax & fees

Local tax add-oncity/county
Dealer doc feenegotiable-ish
Title & registrationestimate

State base rate applied: 5.5% · trade-in reduces taxable amount

3 · Trade & financing

Trade-in value
Trade payoffwhat you still owe
Cash down
APR
Term

Estimates only. Tax rates, trade-in credit rules, and fee caps are approximations and change by locality and year — verify with your state DMV and dealer paperwork.

How Maine taxes a car deal

State tax rate
5.5%
Local add-ons
None typical
Trade-in credit
Yes — taxed on the difference
Doc fee
Uncapped

Maine taxes vehicles at a flat 5.5% statewide — no municipal add-ons — with the trade-in credit applied in full on dealer purchases. A $32,000 purchase with an $8,000 trade is taxed on $24,000: $1,320, and the math rarely gets more complicated than that at purchase time.

Doc fees are uncapped, typically $400–600 in the current market — the one line on a Maine buyer's order with real spread between dealers, and therefore the one worth comparing when quotes are otherwise close.

The Maine-specific cost lives after the purchase: the annual municipal excise tax, charged by your town at registration on a mil-rate schedule that starts around $24 per $1,000 of the manufacturer's list price in year one and steps down for six years. On a $35,000 MSRP vehicle that's roughly $840 the first year — often more than the doc fee everyone haggles over — and it follows the original list price, not what you paid. It's the single most underestimated number in Maine car ownership; put it in the budget before the dealership visit, not after the town bill arrives.

Every figure above was last verified against official Maine sources in July 2026. Tax rules do change — the final word is always your paperwork and the DMV.