October is spooky season and what may give some consumers a jump-scare is the average price tag they’ll see on a used vehicle.

Fortunately for them, the car-buying version of comic relief is sweet trade-in equity.

A little more than a week out from Halloween, used-vehicle prices are averaging $29,446 this month, a $473 rise from October 2024, according to J.D. Power.

“This reflects the combination of reduced supply of recent model-year used vehicles due to lower new-vehicle production during the pandemic, fewer lease maturities and manufacturers moderating discounts,” said Thomas King, president of J.D. Power’s data and analytics division, in the company’s monthly U.S. Automotive Forecast released Thursday.

The off-lease supply element may not get much better in the near-term: J.D. Power anticipates the number of leases ending in the final two months of the year will be down 15% year-over-year and 48% softer than the same period of 2023.

But the bright side to higher used-car prices is that trade-in equity has climbed to $8,378, which beats year-ago figures by $386, the company said.

Still, new-car buyers are bringing in trades with higher loan balances, with 26.6% likely to have negative equity on the trade-in, according to J.D. Power. A year ago, 24.4% had negative equity on their trade-in.

On the wholesale side of the used-car market, prices in the first half of the month were up 0.4% from full-month October 2024 levels, but down from September, when adjusting for mix, mileage and seasonality.

That’s according to the mid-month reading of Cox Automotive’s Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index, which was at 203.6 as of Oct. 15.

Analyst said a higher-than-usual seasonal adjustment had an “amplified” impact on used values this month.

“The non-adjusted price change in the first half of October fell 3.4% compared to September, and the unadjusted price is higher by 0.6% year over year,” Cox Automotive said in its analysis last week.

“The average move for the full month of October is a decline of 1.5 percentage points for non-adjusted values, indicating the pricing declines observed so far in October are higher than normally seen for the full month.”

Cox Automotive deputy chief economist Jeremy Robb said wholesale vehicle prices began softening late last month and continued slowing this month. Price depreciation is normalizing, he said.

“Declining retail sales in late September typically signal that we could see softer wholesale demand, a pattern holding at Manheim,” Robb said in the analysis.

“While October typically shows the year’s strongest depreciation, current weekly declines are running higher than normal for this month, giving back some of the unusual price strength we maintained through most of 2025. The seasonal adjustment was smaller than typical for October, which amplified the month-over-month index decline.”