Car Price Hikes in India 2026: Every Change, Variant-Wise

We record the ex-showroom price of every variant we track and keep the old figure. Since 17 September that is 27 snapshots over 42 days, and in that time 132 variant prices moved across 17 cars — 129 rises and 3 cuts. The rises run from ₹2,000 to ₹45,000, and for most of them we found no announcement from the manufacturer.

Most prices do not move: 888 of the 1020 variants we have held long enough to see a change are unchanged in every snapshot we have of them. The other 102 of the 1122 we track arrived too recently to have a price to compare against. That 1122 includes 14 variants of cars since replaced by a successor, which our other pages leave out, so they count 1108. What moves, moves in clusters — a manufacturer lifts part of one range on one day, and the aggregators are still carrying the old figures for days afterwards.

The part nobody reports is what that does to the variant you were actually considering. Not one of the 18 was applied across a whole range. Every one landed on some variants and not others, or by different amounts — so in each case the gap between two trims changed, and the price of moving up a variant changed with it. On 32 of the 76 upgrades whose cost moved, the upgrade got cheaper — by up to ₹25,000 — because the trim below it went up and the trim above it did not.

By month

“Recorded” is the date we saw the new figure, not the date the manufacturer changed it. Cars are re-checked a couple a day in rotation, so a rise is recorded whenever that car's turn came round — it may have happened a few days earlier. “Variants” counts against what we held of that car at that snapshot.

Under each month, “what it did to the trim above” is the table that is not a price tracker: the cost of moving from one variant to the next one up, on the same fuel and gearbox. When a rise skips a variant, that gap changes by the whole amount — the widest so far is the Kia Seltos, where moving from HTE to HTE(O) went from ₹1,42,000 to ₹1,17,000 in a single snapshot. Across every month, 44 upgrades got dearer and 32 got cheaper. A cheaper upgrade is not a price cut: the variant below rose and the one above did not.

Facelifts, not counted as price changes

When a manufacturer launches a facelift, the price changes because the car did. A new engine or new equipment at a new price is not a rise on the same car, so these 2 entries are left out of every count, table and gap comparison above.

• Toyota Glanza: facelift launched 14 October; new prices recorded 15 October on 9 of 13 variants.
• Honda Elevate: facelift launched 6 October; new prices recorded 6 October on 7 of 7 variants.

How this is collected, and what it does not say

Prices come from the manufacturer's own price pages and brochures, and the snapshot is appended whenever a car is re-checked. Cars rotate a couple a day, so this is a record of what we found and when we found it, not a daily census — a rise recorded on one date may have happened a few days before. Every figure is ex-showroom, New Delhi.

The record starts on 17 September, so it is 42 days long and nothing here should be read as a trend. It contains no discounts, no dealer handling charges and no on-road figures — what a car costs to register varies by state, and that is computed separately on the RTO charges page. Where a manufacturer and a portal disagree on a price, we take the manufacturer. When we refine a figure we already held, such as replacing a rounded price with the manufacturer's exact one, that is not counted as a price change.

If you want the underlying data for something you are writing, it is yours — the whole record, every variant and every snapshot. Ask at hello@carmaths.in.