Used luxury cars under €20,000: what the annual invoice says

The purchase price is not the deciding line

A seven- or eight-year-old German premium car can be negotiated, haggled over, compared from one listing site to the next. The road tax cannot. It lands every year, on a published scale, and it knows nothing about your budget or the mileage on the odometer.

That is the first figure to put on the table when looking at a used Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi or Jaguar in Belgium.

What the Walloon road tax costs, per fiscal horsepower

The Walloon scale for the period from 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027 reads directly:

Beyond 9 fiscal HP, the amounts keep climbing. A large-displacement petrol engine from the 2010s sits well above that last line, and that is where the arithmetic of a small-budget purchase tips over.

A vehicle at least thirty years old on 1 January of the tax year gets the oldtimer flat rate of €46.70 a year, the lowest amount on the Walloon scale. Between the two extremes there is nothing: no tolerance, no taper.

Four brands, four workshop logics

Mercedes-Benz — The Classe E is the Autovista 2025 winner in the large saloon category, which makes it the best observed value retention among the models we track. On new cars, the manufacturer warranty is 2 years, extendable to 8: a recent used car may therefore still be covered if the previous owner took out the extension.

BMW — The Service Inclusive package applied to the brand's electric cars contains no engine oil, no spark plugs and no fuel filter. On a used combustion car, those three lines come back at every service instead.

Audi — The A6 Sportback e-tron is the Autovista 2025 winner among electric cars excluding SUVs, with a 5-year or 120,000 km warranty and a battery covered for 8 years or 160,000 km. It is the only one of the four brands to show cover that long from the factory.

Jaguar — No public European residual value was found for the brand in the 2025 Autovista awards. With no sourceable data, nothing is claimed here about its value retention.

And if the car goes through a company

A combustion premium car bought by a company in 2026 is 0% deductible, used cars included. It is the signature date of the purchase order that determines the regime, not the age of the vehicle. The full timetable is in our article on the end of deductibility in 2026.

To compare what the new models of those same brands cost to keep, the luxury car ranking gives dated list-price ranges and recorded annual taxes.

Sources

• SPW Finances, road tax scales, period 01/07/2026 – 30/06/2027, consulted 2 August 2026.
• Moniteur Automobile, prices and annual taxes per model, recorded 1 August 2026, re-checked 2 August 2026.
• Autovista 2025 residual value awards, “large saloons” and “electric excluding SUVs” categories.