How the score works
Every offer, graded the same way.
Each lease on Leasepond carries a score out of 100. It grades the deal, not the car and not the company offering it — a great car on a bad lease scores badly, which is the whole point. The formula is on this page in full, including the parts that work against a low advertised payment.
Nobody can buy a score
There is no paid placement and no promoted rank. No provider has ever been able to raise a score by paying us, because there is no mechanism to do it.
The math is provider-blind
The formula never sees who is offering the lease. Feed it the same numbers from a household-name dealer and an unknown broker and it returns the same score.
Recomputed, never stored
Scores are calculated fresh from each offer's current numbers every time a page loads. Nobody can hand-type a score, and none of us can nudge one.
What the score is made of
Five components, each scored from 0 to 100 and then weighted. You can see this exact breakdown on every deal page, with the reasoning written out for that specific offer.
Is this payment cheap for this much car?
The effective monthly cost — every nonrefundable dollar spread across the term — measured against the car's MSRP, and judged against what a strong lease costs for a car at that price. A flat 1% rule would flatter expensive cars and punish economy ones, so the benchmark moves with the price class.
What interest rate is buried in the payment?
The money factor, converted to plain APR. Manufacturer-subsidized lease programs run near 1–3%. A marked-up rate is the classic way a cheap-looking lease earns hidden profit, so we score the rate itself — not merely whether it was mentioned.
How much nonrefundable money are you asked to risk on day one?
Due at signing, minus the first payment it may contain and minus refundable deposits — paying month one early is not extra risk. Offers that fold upfront taxes and fees into the drive-off are never graded below ones that leave those costs out.
How much driving does the payment actually buy?
A low payment attached to a 5,000-mile allowance is not a low payment. 12,000 miles a year is the traditional standard.
How much of the lease math did the source actually show?
Hidden numbers are where bad leases hide, so disclosure is scored directly. Every one of the six key inputs either appears in the offer or counts against it.
The six numbers we look for
These are the inputs that decide whether a lease is good or bad. A source either publishes them or it does not, and the disclosure component is simply how many of the six it published.
Rule one
A missing number never scores better than a disclosed one.
The obvious way to build this scoring system is to treat anything undisclosed as neutral — neither good nor bad. That turns out to reward hiding things: a lease with an unflattering number does better by staying quiet about it than by publishing it.
So undisclosed inputs are scored below average instead of neutrally. Silence is treated as the below-average news it usually is, and it costs a disclosure point as well. The example on the right is a real one, scored by the same code that scores the marketplace: an unremarkable lease scores worse when it conceals its MSRP, not better.
Computed live by the scoring function itself, so these numbers cannot drift out of date.
Rule two
Thin evidence gets a ceiling.
Some offers look wonderful precisely because so little about them has been pinned down. In two situations a score is capped no matter how attractive the advertised payment is — and when a cap applies, the deal page says so and explains why. A hidden penalty would be its own kind of small print.
The advertised payment assumes a rebate you have to qualify for personally.
Priced as if you already qualify, the payment flatters the deal. Until the provider confirms your price, the grade stops below the top bands.
The source withholds three or more of the six key numbers.
A cheap headline proves nothing when most of the lease math is missing. The grade stays capped until those numbers are confirmed.
Both rules are about the offer’s own numbers — never about who is offering it. A capped grade is not an accusation, and a provider lifts one the same way anybody would: by telling us the numbers, which we then publish.
What the words mean
Scores are grouped into five plain-English bands. Most real offers land in the middle — that is the honest distribution of the market, not a scale tuned to make everything look like a bargain.
What can never move a score
The list of things we refuse to let count.
Money
No provider can pay for a higher score, a better rank, or a place on the front page. We do not sell placement.
Who the provider is
Brand recognition, size, and how long we have worked with someone are all invisible to the formula.
Your personal details
The score is identical for everyone. It is a property of the offer, not a profile of you, and we never sell or share your data.
Anyone's opinion — including ours
There is no editorial override and no manual adjustment. If we think a score is wrong, the only honest fix is to correct the formula for every offer at once.
Guesses about missing numbers
We never invent a fee, an APR, or a residual to fill a gap. Unknown stays labeled unknown, and it counts against the score rather than quietly becoming a zero.
How new the offer is
A freshly posted lease gets no boost. We show when each offer was last checked and let the numbers speak.
See it on a real lease.
Every deal page shows this breakdown for that specific offer — each component, what it scored, and the sentence explaining why.
Think the formula gets something wrong? That is a fair thing to argue about, and we would rather hear it — the whole method is published here so it can be checked. Read our privacy promise for what we do and do not do with your information.