Carmax runs on an off-kilter earnings calendar, so today’s numbers were for its fiscal and fourth-quarter 2025, which actually ended on Feb. 28. The numbers: full-year revenue declined 0.7 percent to $26.3 billion, while net income rose 4.5 percent to $500.5 million — although most of that increase was thanks to a $16.8 million drop in the company’s interest expense.

More interesting to us, however, were the many and varied disclosures Carmax made about the used car business. Those disclosures include… 

• Total number of vehicles purchased in the period;

• Number of vehicles purchased from consumers and from dealers;

• Total unit sales, grouped into retail and wholesales segments;

• Gross profit per retail unit and per wholesale unit;

• Profit margin per retail unit for the company’s extended protection plan. 

Our personal favorite, however, is average selling price per used vehicle. We charted that disclosure from the start of 2022 through first-quarter 2025. The result is Figure 1, below.

Average used car price (sold at the retail level, not wholesale) dropped from $29,310 at the start of 2022 to $26,130 by early 2025 — a decline of 10.8 percent. 

Why? Well, think back to early 2022. The global supply chain was still a clogged and kinky mess, and used cars were hard to find. Prices for used vehicles actually rose immediately after the pandemic… and then, in time, supply-chain issues smoothed out and prices declined. That same story is reflected in Figure 1, above. 

We should note that Carmax’s share price has fluctuated wildly in recent weeks: a 52-week high of $89 in mid-February, down to $69.25 in mid-March, then back up to $82.77 at the start of this month. This week Carmax plummeted to $66 per share, but considering the markets overall these days, that’s not an exclusive club.

Our point is simply that if you want to do deep, sophisticated analytics of firm performance — like, say, digging into average used car prices when you’re following an auto retailer — that data exists. Calcbench captures it, quickly and clearly. All you need to do is know what you want to look for.