Motorway fees: £29.99 to £99.99 to sell your car since May 2026

Affiliate disclosure: this post contains a Motorway referral link. If you use it and sell your car through Motorway, both of us receive a £50 Amazon gift card. It doesn’t change the price you receive for your car, or the service fee you pay.

Short answer: yes, you pay Motorway. Since 6 May 2026 it charges the seller a service fee of £29.99 to £99.99, set by the band your final sale price lands in, VAT included, and free on anything selling under £1,000. Nothing is payable unless the car sells. The one exception is the optional £29.99 Promoted Listing Fee, which is charged before the auction runs and is not refunded if your car attracts no bid you want. I sold my own car through Motorway in 2023 and paid nothing at all, which is what this site’s own Motorway review said until today.

What Motorway charges a seller

The service fee is a flat amount per band, not a percentage. Motorway publishes it in its help centre, read on 2 September 2026:

Four things that table settles.

£99.99 is the ceiling, whatever the car is worth. The top band has no upper bound, so a £20,000 sale and a £50,000 sale pay the same £99.99. On the £50,000 car that is 0.2% of the price. Motorway describes the fee as "typically 0.4-3.0% of your car's value", which is true measured at the band edges up to £20,000 and understates how cheap it gets above them. A percentage commission at even 1% would be £500 on that car.

The worst rate is at the bottom, not the top. £29.99 on a car selling for exactly £1,000 is 3.0%, the highest proportion anyone pays. The same £29.99 on a £4,999 car is 0.6%.

VAT is already in the number. Motorway's terms say all service fees "are inclusive of VAT at the applicable rate", so £29.99 is £29.99 leaving your account, not £29.99 plus 20%.

Motorway's own table overlaps itself at £1,000, listing that figure in both the free row and the £29.99 row. The prose beside it settles the tie: "no fee on cars sold under £1,000", so a car sold at exactly £1,000 pays £29.99.

Still free: the valuation, the profile, listing the car, home collection, and re-listing a car that didn't sell. If your car goes to auction and you turn down every bid, you owe nothing.

The fee is a cliff, and £1 more can cost you £19

Because each band is a flat charge rather than a rate, accepting a bid that crosses a band boundary can leave you with less money than the bid below it. Run the arithmetic at the £5,000 line:

• Sell at £4,999: fee £29.99, you keep £4,969.01
• Sell at £5,000: fee £49.99, you keep £4,950.01

One pound more on the bid, nineteen pounds less in your account. You don't match £4,969.01 again until the sale price reaches £5,019, so every accepted bid from £5,000 to £5,018 pays you worse than £4,999 would have. Motorway writes its bands in whole pounds, and the same trap sits at all four of them:

These are windows of £19 to £30 and Motorway shows you a fee estimate before you list, so this is a thing to check rather than a thing to fear. It bites hardest at the bottom: crossing £1,000 costs £28.99 of a £1,000 sale, which is 2.9% of the whole price and the only boundary where the fee arrives from nothing.

The £29.99 you can pay and not get back

Motorway's headline promise is "there's no upfront cost" and "if your car doesn't sell, you never pay a fee". Both are true of the service fee. Neither is true of the Promoted Listing Fee, a separate optional charge introduced alongside it.

For a flat £29.99, paid before your auction, Motorway adds a "promoted" badge to your car and lets dealers filter for promoted profiles. Its own FAQ is direct about what that buys and what it doesn't: promoting "does not guarantee your car selling", the payment link expires at 4pm on auction day because the auction starts at 4.30pm, and you are not eligible for a refund if your car "went into the auction but received no bids, did not meet the guide price, or if you chose not to accept an offer". A dealer cancelling the sale afterwards is also not refundable.

So the one charge Motorway can take from a seller who never sells a car is the one its fee page describes as having no upfront cost. If you do pay it and the car doesn't sell first time, the badge carries over to the re-list at no extra charge.

On a car in the £1,000 to £4,999 band, promoting doubles what Motorway takes from the sale: £29.99 to be seen, £29.99 to complete, £59.98 in total against a service fee alone of £29.99.

The fee schedule is not on the fee page

Motorway's terms name motorway.co.uk/service-fees as "the Fee Schedule" and say the Fee Schedule "forms part of these Terms". That page, read on 2 September 2026, has a heading that asks "How much is the service fee?" and answers it without a number: "The service fee is calculated based on your final sale price. You see an estimate when you get your free valuation and when you list your car in our auction." The wording is identical to the version the Internet Archive captured on 20 May 2026, so it has never carried a figure.

The figures are real and they are published: they sit in the help centre, on two separate articles, one of which was created on 20 May 2026 and last edited a week later. The band table above is copied from them. But the page the contract points at as the schedule is not the page the schedule is on, and a reader who follows the terms to the fee page comes away knowing only that a fee exists.

That is the practical reason to read this before you list rather than after. Motorway's terms are explicit that the fee it quotes you at the valuation stage "is an estimate only" and that the binding figure is the one set by your final sale price, so the band table is the thing to know going in.

I paid nothing in 2023, and what changed

I sold my own car through Motorway in 2023 and paid no seller fee, because there wasn't one. A few months later I referred a friend who also sold through the platform, and he paid nothing either. Both of those are firsthand and both are now out of date, which is the honest position for anyone writing about Motorway from experience: the fee is younger than most of the reviews describing the platform.

The change is datable from Motorway's own documents. Its terms as captured on 15 April 2026 were last updated in January 2026, described Motorway as "a free online used car marketplace", and used the phrase "service fee" zero times. The terms live today were last updated in April 2026 and open by telling you that "when you sell your car through Motorway, we will charge a service fee based on the final sale price of your vehicle". Car Dealer Magazine reported the launch date as 6 May 2026 and quoted CEO Tom Leathes framing it as a move toward "a more balanced, two-sided marketplace", after dealers asked why only one side of the platform was being charged.

Dealers still pay too. Motorway's help centre says it "charges dealers a fee when they buy a car through the platform" and charges sellers a service fee, so the seller fee is an addition to the old model rather than a replacement for it.

Set against the numbers that actually decide whether Motorway is worth using, £29.99 to £99.99 is small. The gap between a Motorway sale and a well-executed private sale is percentage points of the car's value, which on a £10,000 car is hundreds of pounds against a fee of £79.99. My verdict on that trade, and the 8% I measured on my own sale, is the other half of this question and it has not moved.

Where the £50 referral reward lands against the fee

Motorway's refer-a-friend scheme pays £50 in Amazon gift cards to each side when a referred seller completes a sale, within seven days of completion. That is a gift card rather than money off your invoice, so it doesn't reduce the fee, but the comparison is worth having:

• On a car selling under £10,000, the £50 card is worth more than the £29.99 or £49.99 fee
• On a car selling over £10,000, the £79.99 or £99.99 fee is more than the card

How the Motorway referral works covers the qualifying steps. There is no code to type, and the link has to carry the referral from the start of the valuation.

Motorway fees FAQs

Do you pay Motorway to sell your car?

Yes, since 6 May 2026. Motorway charges the seller a service fee of £29.99 to £99.99, set by the band your final sale price falls in and inclusive of VAT. Cars selling under £1,000 pay nothing. The fee is only payable once the sale completes and the car is collected and paid for, so listing a car and rejecting every bid costs nothing. Before May 2026 Motorway was free for sellers and took its money only from the buying dealer.

How much is Motorway's service fee?

Free under £1,000, £29.99 from £1,000 to £4,999, £49.99 from £5,000 to £9,999, £79.99 from £10,000 to £19,999, and £99.99 at £20,000 and above, read from Motorway's help centre on 2 September 2026. It is a flat amount per band rather than a percentage, so £99.99 is the most anyone pays however expensive the car. All figures include VAT.

When did Motorway start charging sellers a fee?

6 May 2026, as reported by Car Dealer Magazine. Motorway's terms as archived on 15 April 2026 still described it as "a free online used car marketplace" and contained no mention of a service fee; the version live today is dated April 2026 and states the charge in its opening section. The /service-fees page first appears in the Internet Archive on 20 May 2026.

Do you pay Motorway if your car doesn’t sell?

Not the service fee. Motorway's terms say it "is only payable once your car is sold", and a car that receives no bids, misses its guide price, or gets an offer you turn down owes nothing. Re-listing in a later auction is free too. The optional £29.99 Promoted Listing Fee is the exception: it is charged before the auction and Motorway's own FAQ says it is not refunded if your car goes to auction and doesn't sell.

What is Motorway’s Promoted Listing Fee?

A flat, optional £29.99 that adds a "promoted" badge to your car in the daily auction and lets dealers filter for promoted profiles. Motorway says it may attract higher engagement but does not guarantee a sale, the payment link expires at 4pm on auction day, and the badge stays on the car through any re-list without a second charge. It is not refundable if the car fails to sell.

Does Motorway add VAT on top of its service fee?

No. Motorway's terms state that all service fees "are inclusive of VAT at the applicable rate", so the £29.99, £49.99, £79.99 and £99.99 figures are the amounts charged. Where the dealer pays through Motorway Pay, the fee is deducted from your sale proceeds automatically; otherwise Motorway invoices you within 14 days of the sale and payment is due within 14 days of that invoice.

You might also like

• Is Motorway worth it? A review from someone who sold a car
• Get a Motorway referral code: a £50 Amazon gift card for both of you

Sources

• Motorway service fee bands, read 2 September 2026: How much is the Service Fee in comparison to my car price? (opens in new tab) and What are the fees to sell my vehicle through Motorway? (opens in new tab). Both carry the same table and the "typically 0.4-3.0%" figure.
• Both sides are charged: How does Motorway make money? (opens in new tab).
• Promoted Listing Fee, its £29.99 price, the 4pm deadline and the refund exclusions: Promoting my vehicle profile - FAQs (opens in new tab).
• Service Fee obligation, the Fee Schedule reference, VAT inclusivity and the 14-day invoice terms: motorway.co.uk/terms (opens in new tab), last updated April 2026, read 2 September 2026.
• The fee page that names no fee: motorway.co.uk/service-fees (opens in new tab), read 2 September 2026 and unchanged from the Internet Archive's capture of 20 May 2026.
• The terms before the change: the Internet Archive's capture of motorway.co.uk/terms on 15 April 2026, showing a January 2026 revision, "a free online used car marketplace", and no service fee.
• Launch date and Motorway's stated reason: Car Dealer Magazine, 8 May 2026 (opens in new tab).
• My own Motorway sale in 2023 and my friend's referred sale a few months later, both completed with no seller fee charged.