IAAI fees and state taxes are two separate bills. IAA bills the auction side: a tiered buyer fee that grows with the winning bid, an internet bid fee, a service fee and an environmental fee. Your state bills the registration side: sales or use tax, plus title and registration. If your max bid only subtracts one of them, you overpay on every car.
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Fee breakdown
The number missing from this calculator
IAAI is dominated by insurance auction lots — most are salvage or rebuilt titles. Fees are only half the equation. The other half is how much that branded title actually sells for in your local market. CarFlipIQ tracks real Facebook Marketplace prices for salvage and rebuilt vehicles by ZIP, so you know the resale ceiling before you place a bid.
Estimates only. IAAI updates its fee schedule periodically and certain branches / vehicle types apply surcharges. Always verify final fees against the IAAI buyer fee schedule before bidding.
Calculator assumptions: Standard (non-Public) buyer bidding online, default $105 service, $15 environmental and $20 title fees, no storage. Estimates only. Also available as the standalone IAAI fee calculator.
Most "what does an IAAI car cost" posts, including our own IAAI fee breakdown, stop at the auction fees. The tax side is covered in a different post, because it works differently. This one lays out how the two fit together for an IAAI purchase specifically.
LocalIQ™ market snapshot
What top flip candidates are asking right now
| Model | Listings | Median asking price |
|---|---|---|
| GMC Sierra 1500 | 632 | $29,972 |
| Honda Civic | 5,396 | $15,000 |
| Honda Accord | 4,176 | $15,999 |
| Ford F-150 | 3,134 | $24,000 |
| Toyota Corolla | 3,040 | $14,500 |
| Nissan Sentra | 3,004 | $9,880 |
| Toyota Camry | 2,510 | $17,082 |
| Hyundai Elantra | 2,396 | $9,499 |
LocalIQ™ asking-price median · 24,288 listings · updated every 6 hours. National, last 8 model years; asking price is your resale ceiling.
What fees does IAA charge on top of the hammer price?
Our IAAI fee calculator models the Standard schedule with these line items:
| Line item | How it scales |
|---|---|
| Buyer fee | Tiered by winning bid; a percentage once the bid passes $10,000 |
| Internet bid fee | Tiered by winning bid |
| Service fee | Flat per vehicle |
| Environmental fee | Flat per vehicle |
| Title / documentation charge | Flat per vehicle |
| Storage, late payment | Only if you are slow |
We do not print dollar amounts for these in this post. IAA changes its schedules, and the calculator is where we keep ours current. What you can rely on is the shape: the buyer fee and internet fee step up with the bid, and the flat charges do not. That means flat charges hurt most on cheap cars. On a $1,500 car they are a much larger share of the bill than on a $9,000 car.
Which IAAI fee schedule applies to you?
Your account type matters. IAA's registration page (checked 2026-10) says a Licensed Business Buyer account requires a business license and a membership fee, and that a Public Buyer account is for people without a business license. The page lists no membership fee amount and no fee schedule.
Our calculator models the Standard schedule. If you buy as a public buyer, or at high volume, your numbers can differ, and the cost calculator inside your IAA account is the authority for your own schedule. More on account types in can you buy from IAAI without a dealer license.
Source: IAA registration page.
What taxes apply to an IAAI car?
Sales or use tax is a state matter, and it depends on who you are and where the car gets titled.
- Licensed dealer buying for resale: many states let a dealer buy inventory without paying sales tax, with tax collected when the car is sold to a retail customer. The rules and paperwork differ by state.
- Retail or public buyer: you generally owe tax in the state where you register the car, not where the auction yard sits.
- Out-of-state purchase: tax typically follows the registration state, but the details are the state's call.
We are not giving tax advice here. Your state revenue agency or a tax professional has the answer for your status. What we can give you is the lookup: the vehicle sales tax calculator has state rates, and the car title fee calculator covers title charges.
How do fees and taxes combine into one number?
Build the total in three layers.
- Hammer price. What you bid.
- IAA side. Calculator output for the winning bid, plus anything you create by being slow (storage, late fee).
- State side. Sales or use tax on the taxable amount, plus title and registration where you retitle.
An illustration with a made-up rate: if your state charged 6% on a $5,000 taxable amount, the tax would be $300. That $300 is not in any IAAI fee total, because IAA never charged it. It still comes out of your margin. The state-by-state view lives in the auction car total cost guide, with a page for each state (for example North Carolina).
One caution: states differ on whether tax applies to the purchase price alone or includes some fees. Check your state's rule instead of assuming.
Which charges can you avoid, and which can you not?
You cannot avoid the buyer fee, the internet fee, the service fee or the environmental fee on a purchase. You can avoid the penalty charges.
On the branch pages we fetched (IAA Riverside, CA and IAA Hartford, CT, checked 2026-10), payment is due by 5:00 PM branch local time on a due date counted from the award day, and the late fee is "$50.00 or 2% (whichever is greater)". Storage is $50 a day after the free days, and the free days differ: award day plus 4 days at Riverside, award day plus 2 days at Hartford. Details are in our posts on IAAI storage and pickup and IAAI payment methods and deadlines.
Sources: IAA Riverside branch page, IAA Hartford branch page.
Do fees and taxes change what you should bid?
Yes, and the direction is always down. The clean way to set a max bid is to work backward from your expected resale price and subtract everything: repairs, transport, the IAA fee stack, state tax, title, registration and your target margin. The max bid calculator does the subtraction. Our post on how taxes and fees change your max bid shows what happens when your state's tax rate differs from a competitor's.
To sanity-check your resale price, the Q3 2026 state price study lists asking prices and days to sell by state. Those are asking prices, and days to sell is the average gap between a listing's last and first crawl for sold listings seen on two or more crawls. They are not transaction prices.
Before you bid: a short checklist
- Price the lot in the IAAI calculator with the winning bid you actually expect.
- Look up your state's sales or use tax treatment for your buyer status.
- Add title and registration.
- Confirm the pickup deadline and free storage days at the specific branch.
- Subtract all of it from resale, then bid.
The IAAI fee calculator gives the auction side in seconds, and the total cost guide for your state gives the other half. Put both numbers in the max bid calculator before the lot opens, so the walk-away price is set before the bidding starts.
