Used Nissan Leaf: Sixteen Model Years of EPA Ratings

Search advice about buying a used Leaf and you will meet the same paragraph everywhere: the battery degrades, check the bars, avoid the early ones. It is probably good advice. It is also, in almost every version, unsourced — a number of per cent per year that traces back to another article that traces back to a forum.

This page takes a different route. The Leaf has been on sale in the United States longer than any other mass-market electric car, which means the federal fuel-economy database holds something for this nameplate that it holds for no other: an unbroken series of ratings under one model name, from the first cars to the current ones. Sixteen model years is long enough to stop treating each rating as a fact about a car and start reading the series as a shape.

What that shape shows turns out to be more useful to a used buyer than any degradation percentage would have been, and it is checkable. Everything below comes from three archived pulls made on 2026-09-07: every EPA record for the nameplate, every owner complaint NHTSA holds against it, and every recall campaign. Where the federal record does not answer a question a buyer actually has, that is said plainly rather than filled in.

This site sells nothing and holds no inventory. There are no listings here and no vehicles for sale.

One nameplate, sixteen model years, thirty ratings

EPA rates an electric car on three numbers that matter here, and it rates them independently of one another. The first is combined range: the miles the car covers in mixed driving before it must be recharged, weighted 55 per cent city and 45 per cent highway. The second is consumption, published as kilowatt-hours per 100 miles — EPA calls this an estimated rate rather than a promise, and its own label guidance is explicit that a particular car may not in fact reach 100 miles on one charge. The third is charge time: hours to fill an empty battery from a 240-volt supply.

Two of those describe different things, and conflating them is where most range writing goes wrong. Consumption is a property of the car — its weight, its gearing, its aerodynamics, its tyres, its motor. Range is that property multiplied by however much energy the car is carrying. A car can gain range by getting more efficient or by carrying more energy, and the published figure does not tell you which happened.

On a single-model series sixteen years long, it does. Here is the whole run in two numbers. In 2011 the Leaf was rated at 73 miles and 34 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles. In 2026, the leanest of the three rated configurations is 303 miles and 27.82. Range is up by a factor of 4.15 — a gain of 230 miles, or 315 per cent. Consumption is down by 6.18 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles, which is 18.2 per cent.

Those two percentages are not comparable as they stand, so do the arithmetic properly. Multiply the 2011 rating’s range by its consumption and you get the energy that rated range costs: 24.8 kilowatt-hours. Hold that energy fixed, apply the best consumption figure the nameplate has ever recorded, and the car covers 89 miles. That is what fifteen years of efficiency work is worth on this car: 16 miles.

The other 214 miles of the 230 are stored energy. Efficiency bought 7 per cent of the improvement and a larger battery bought 93 per cent.

It is worth being clear about what that arithmetic is and is not. It is a division of two published numbers, and both numbers are certification results for new vehicles. It is not a measurement of any pack, and the split is a description of the model line rather than of a car you might buy. What it establishes is a fact about the series — that on this nameplate, range and efficiency came apart, and the range number moved almost entirely on the battery.

Why a flat efficiency line turns range into a battery gauge

Now put that finding next to a used car. You are looking at a Leaf on a forecourt. The question you want answered is how much of its battery is left. The question you can actually answer, on the day, with the car in front of you, is how far it says it will go.

On a nameplate where efficiency improved sharply over the years, those two questions would be badly connected: a newer car might show more range because it uses less energy, an older one less because it uses more, and the range reading would be a blend of two effects. On the Leaf it is not a blend. The consumption ratings for the entry car sit between 29 and 30.43 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles for every model year from 2013 to 2025 inclusive. The 2025 base car, at 30.43, is rated to use more energy per mile than the 2013 car at 29.

So on this nameplate, and unusually, a range figure is close to a direct read of stored energy. If a car shows 20 per cent less range than its rating, roughly 20 per cent of its energy is gone, because there is no efficiency change worth speaking of to absorb the difference. That is not a licence to compute a degradation percentage from a dashboard number — a range estimate on a dashboard is a prediction shaped by recent driving, temperature and climate-control load, not a capacity reading — but it does mean the comparison is honest in a way it would not be on a nameplate whose efficiency had moved.

The flat line also settles a question people ask the wrong way round. A 2015 Leaf is not short of range because it is an old design that wastes energy. It is short of range because it was sold with a small battery, and then some of that battery went away. The first half of that sentence is the larger term. On the ratings, the 2011 and 2012 cars were certified at 73 miles while the 2018 car was certified at 151, and that gap existed before either had turned a wheel.

Every rating the Leaf has carried

The table below is the whole series. Each row is one configuration EPA rated separately, in the words EPA files it under. The energy column is range multiplied by consumption, which is the energy the rated range costs; read the caption before reading the column.

Three things in that table are worth stopping on before going further.

The first is 2013. The entry car’s rating moves from 73 miles at 34 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles to 75 miles at 29, and the implied energy falls 12.1 per cent, from 24.8 to 21.8. The following year it climbs 15.6 per cent, to 25.2, on a car whose consumption rating went slightly the wrong way. Whatever happened between those model years, the two published numbers do not reconcile against an unchanged battery, and the safe reading is that a step of that kind is a rating event rather than an engineering one. It is a good reason not to build an argument on a single year-to-year difference anywhere in this series.

The second is how far apart two cars of the same model year can sit. In 2020, 2021 and 2022, EPA rated three Leaf configurations each year, and the shortest and longest are 149 and 226 miles — a spread of 77 miles, or 51.7 per cent of the shorter car. In 2023 through 2025 the spread is 63 miles. Even in 2026, where all three rated cars carry the same 75 kWh pack, wheels alone account for 44 miles: 259 on the 19-inch car against 303 on the 18-inch steel one. Model year is not the variable that decides how far a used Leaf goes.

The third is the energy column itself. On the 17 configurations where EPA both rates the car and names its pack size in the model string, the implied energy comes out above the nameplate figure every single time, from 103.8 per cent on the 2016 24 kW-hr car to 115.2 per cent on a 2026 75 kWh one. Something sits in that gap — energy lost in charging that the consumption figure counts, capacity the pack holds in reserve and does not hand to the motor, or both. EPA publishes neither quantity, so the gap is recorded here and not attributed. It is a good illustration of what a certification figure is: an answer to the question EPA asked, not to the question a buyer is asking.

Neither agency reliably records how big the battery is

The pack size is the number every used Leaf listing quotes and the number that decides everything about the car. It is worth knowing where it comes from, because on this nameplate it frequently comes from nowhere federal.

EPA writes the pack into the model name for some years and not others. It does so for 2016, where the two entries read Leaf (24 kW-hr battery pack) and Leaf (30 kW-hr battery pack); for 2019 through 2022, where the 40 and 62 kW-hr cars are named as such; and for 2026, where all three entries read LEAF 75kWh. Six model years out of sixteen.

NHTSA does the same thing on a different set of years, in the product index behind its complaint search. It lists a plain LEAF for every model year up to 2021, then from 2022 begins naming packs: LEAF (40 KWH BATTERY) and LEAF PLUS (62 KWH BATTERY). Five model years, 2022 through 2026.

Put the two lists together and seven model years remain in which neither federal agency records a battery size anywhere: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018. That is every car built before the pack sizes started appearing in model names, which is to say every car a buyer worrying about degradation is most likely to be looking at.

The two agencies do not always agree where they both speak, either. NHTSA’s index names the long-range car a 62 kWh battery in 2022 and a 60 kWh battery in 2024 and 2025 — the same nameplate, two figures, in the same federal index a couple of years apart. For 2026 NHTSA lists both a 53 kWh and a 75 kWh Leaf while EPA has rated only the 75. None of that means anyone is wrong. It means a nameplate figure is a label, labels are rounded and restated, and a used buyer should treat a pack size in a listing as a claim about the model rather than a measurement of the car.

Six model years share one rating

Here is the cleanest available demonstration that an EPA figure describes a model and not a vehicle. From 2020 to 2025 — six consecutive model years — the entry Leaf carries an identical rating: 149 miles of combined range, 30.43 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles, 111 MPGe, 8 hours on a 240-volt supply. Not similar. The same four numbers, republished six times.

It is not the only repeat in the series. The 215-mile, 32.28 kilowatt-hour configuration appears unchanged across 2019 to 2022. The 226-mile car repeats across 2020 to 2022, and the 212-mile SV across 2023 to 2025. The entry car’s figure had already been drifting downward one mile at a time before it settled: 151 in 2018, 150 in 2019, 149 from 2020 onward.

For a buyer this has a specific consequence. If you are comparing a 2020 Leaf against a 2024 Leaf, the federal rating cannot help you at all — it is the same rating. Whatever separates those two cars is condition, history and how they were used, and none of it is in the certification. Reading the rating and stopping there is reading a fact about the model line and mistaking it for a fact about the car.

The same logic runs the other way and is worth saying, because it is the honest version of the degradation worry. A rating that has not changed in six years is also a rating that tells you nothing about how a six-year-old example of that car is doing now. The certification was performed once, on a new vehicle, and it is never re-run.

Hours on a 240-volt supply, and why they went up

The charge-time column is the least-read number on an electric car’s label and, on a used Leaf, one of the more useful. EPA defines it as the time to charge a fully empty battery from a 240-volt supply, and it publishes it for every model year of this nameplate.

It went from 7 hours in 2011 to 12 hours in 2026. The pack, on the years the file names it, went from 24 kWh to 75. So over the run the battery grew far faster than the ability to fill it, and a modern Leaf takes longer to charge at home overnight than an early one did.

Divide the named pack by the published hours and you get an implied delivery rate: about 3 kilowatt-hours an hour on the 2016 24 kW-hr car, 5 on the 30 kW-hr and 40 kWh cars, 5.64 on the 62, and 6.25 on the 2026 75 kWh cars. Read those as implied, not as a specification — the rate absorbs whatever charging losses the published hours contain — but the ladder is real, and it is shallow next to the pack. Over the same span the named pack more than tripled while the implied rate roughly doubled.

One row in that ladder is worth calling out because it inverts what people expect. In 2016, EPA rated the 24 kW-hr Leaf at 8 hours and the 30 kW-hr Leaf at 6. The bigger battery charged faster. Whatever the reason, the practical point stands: on this nameplate you cannot infer charging speed from pack size, and two cars of the same model year can differ on it.

That is also a limit of the EPA file worth stating. EPA publishes one rating per configuration it chooses to rate. It does not enumerate every onboard-charger option a manufacturer offered, so the hours in the table describe the configuration EPA tested and not necessarily the car you are looking at. If overnight charging time matters to you — and on a car that spends its life plugged into a house, it does — it is a thing to establish on the specific vehicle rather than to read off a table.

The thing you came for is not in the federal record

Everything above is what the federal data holds. Here is what it does not, stated as plainly as it deserves: no federal source measures how much capacity a used Leaf has lost.

EPA does not, because EPA certifies new vehicles. The figures in the table were produced once, on a car with no miles on it, and the agency does not re-test the vehicle later and publish an updated number. There is no in-service range figure for any vehicle in that database, electric or otherwise.

NHTSA does not either, and the way it does not is instructive. Its complaint record for a vehicle returns a complaint number, a manufacturer, crash and fire flags, injury and death counts, an incident date, a filing date, a partial VIN, a component label, a free-text summary and a product block. It carries no odometer reading. It carries no state-of-health value. And the component label is a single top-level string: across all 1,487 Leaf complaints, spread over 32 distinct component labels, not one carries a sub-label. A capacity complaint and a twelve-volt accessory fault arrive under the same word.

The recall file, oddly, is more specific than the complaint file. Recall records use a three-level component string, and the campaigns discussed below are filed under ELECTRICAL SYSTEM:PROPULSION SYSTEM:TRACTION BATTERY. The taxonomy exists. It is simply not applied to complaints.

You can count words in the free text instead, and it is worth doing once so nobody has to guess. Of the 1,487 complaints, 451 — 30.3 per cent — use the word battery at all. But narratives reaching for capacity vocabulary of any kind number 47, which is 3.2 per cent of the file. Broken down: 23 complaints use a form of “degradation”, 19 pair the word battery with capacity or health, 13 mention bars in a battery or capacity context, 6 say state of health, and 6 describe range being lost or dropping.

Those are counts of words, not measurements of batteries, and they should not be read as a rate of anything. What they establish is narrower and still useful: the defining used-market anxiety about this car is close to absent from the federal safety file, and it is absent for a structural reason. NHTSA collects safety defect reports. A battery that still works but holds less than it did is not a safety defect, so it does not generate a filing, so it does not appear in the count. An absence in a dataset is evidence about the dataset first.

The same caution applies to the claim you will read everywhere about why this particular car degrades — something about how its pack is cooled. That may well be right. It is not in either federal file: EPA records no cooling architecture and NHTSA’s complaint taxonomy has no field for it. So this page does not repeat it as fact. It tells you instead what the record holds, and what to measure on the car.

What the complaint file does count, and one trap in it

The complaint file is worth reading for what it does hold, provided you read it carefully. Across the nameplate it contains 1,487 complaints. The largest component label is ELECTRICAL SYSTEM at 770, or 51.8 per cent of the file. Then SERVICE BRAKES at 262 (17.6 per cent), UNKNOWN OR OTHER at 245 (16.5 per cent) and FUEL/PROPULSION SYSTEM at 200 (13.4 per cent). A complaint can carry more than one label, so those shares do not sum to the file.

Now the trap, and it is a big one on this nameplate. Counts by model year are wildly uneven: 377 complaints against the 2019 cars and 328 against the 2020 cars, against 14 for 2017 and 19 for 2023. The 2019 and 2020 figures are also where the electrical share peaks, at 64.7 and 73.2 per cent.

Read naively, that says the 2019 and 2020 cars are far worse than their neighbours. Read the narratives and a different picture appears: 227 of the complaints in the file name recall campaign 24V700000 in their text, and a further 38 name 25V655000. A large part of that spike is people filing about a recall — about notification, about parts availability, about waiting — rather than about a fault they discovered independently.

That is a general lesson wearing a Leaf badge. A complaint count is a count of filings, and filings respond to being told to file. It has no denominator either: a model year that sold well produces more complaints than one that did not, before anything about the cars is considered. The point specific to this nameplate is sharper than the general caution. The largest year-on-year step anywhere in its file has a paperwork explanation sitting in plain sight in the free text, and anyone ranking Leaf model years by complaint count without reading the narratives will rank a recall mailing.

One small housekeeping note on the same file: NHTSA indexes a single complaint to a 2010 Leaf, a model year in which EPA rated none. It is in the total of 1,487 and not in the per-year table, which is why the two do not quite agree.

Three traction-battery recalls, and the eleven model years without one

NHTSA holds 20 distinct recall campaigns covering Leaf model years. Three of them name the traction battery.

Campaign 24V700000 was received on 20 September 2024 and covers 2019 and 2020 cars fitted with a Level 3 quick-charging port; NHTSA’s summary states that the lithium-ion battery may overheat during Level 3 charging, and the consequence recorded is an increased risk of fire. The remedy is a battery software update, and the record notes that owner letters were mailed June 3, 2026, and that this is a phased recall. That gap between the campaign being filed and letters going out is worth registering: a car can sit under an open campaign for a long time, and the state of the remedy is a thing to check by VIN rather than assume.

Campaign 25V655000, filed in 2025, is the same fault on 2021 and 2022 cars. Campaign 26V188000, received on 26 March 2026, covers 2026 cars and concerns internal damage to the high-voltage battery that can cause a short circuit within a module.

Then the absence, which is the part a used buyer should notice. Eleven of the sixteen model years have no traction-battery campaign at all: 2011 through 2018, and 2023 through 2025. Every early Leaf — every car in the era people worry about most — is in that list.

Do not read that as a clean bill of health. Read it as the boundary of what a recall file is. A recall is a manufacturer conceding an unreasonable risk to safety, usually under a specific standard. Capacity that fades with age and use is not that, so it does not generate a campaign, and the absence of campaigns tells you nothing whatever about how those packs are holding up. Two of the three battery campaigns that do exist concern heat during fast charging and the third internal damage to a module, all of which are safety questions. Range loss is a value question, and the recall system does not handle value questions.

If you are looking at any specific car, run the VIN through the federal recall lookup rather than relying on a model-year summary, including this one. Our guide to checking a used car for open recalls covers the mechanics, and the campaigns above are the ones to expect on this nameplate.

What to establish on the car in front of you

Given all that, the useful work happens on the vehicle rather than in a database. Five things are worth settling before money changes hands.

First, what the car actually is. Two Leafs of the same model year can be 77 miles apart on the federal rating, and the badge on the tailgate does not always separate them. Establish the configuration from the VIN and the door label, not from the advert — our Nissan VIN lookup guide covers what the manufacturer codes do and do not carry, and the answer includes the fact that no VIN encodes battery health.

Second, the capacity reading the car itself gives. Owners writing to NHTSA about this nameplate describe an indication in the instrument cluster that is separate from the charge reading and that they discuss in bars — 13 narratives in the file mention bars in a battery or capacity sense. Whatever a given car displays, that reading and anything a diagnostic tool can pull are the closest thing to a measurement anybody will produce on the day. They are manufacturer indications rather than federal figures, so treat them as one input, taken on a car that has not just been fast-charged or left out in the cold.

Third, a range check against the table above rather than against a general expectation. Find the row for the car’s model year and configuration, and compare it with what the car does in the kind of driving you will do. Because consumption on this nameplate barely moved across the whole run, that comparison is more informative here than it would be on almost any other electric car.

Fourth, charging at the place the car will live. The published hours went up, not down, across this series, and the rate implied by the file is nearly flat. If the car will charge overnight from a domestic supply, the arithmetic of pack size against hours decides whether that works, and it is easier to discover before purchase than after.

Fifth, an inspection by somebody who is not selling you the car. The general case for that is made in our guide to the used-car pre-purchase inspection; on an electric car the specific ask is that the high-voltage system and the capacity reading are part of the scope, because a generic inspection checklist was written for a different kind of vehicle.

One more thing that is more a frame than a check. Mileage is a weaker guide on this car than it is on a petrol one, because the wear that matters most is on a battery, and a battery ages by calendar and by charging habit as much as by distance. Our page on how many miles is too many works the odometer question from complaint data across the general fleet; the caution to carry into a Leaf purchase is that a low-mileage early car is still an early car, and the odometer is not measuring the thing you care about.

Common questions

How much range does a used Nissan Leaf lose?

No federal source publishes a figure, and this page will not invent one. EPA certifies new vehicles and never re-tests a used one; NHTSA collects safety complaints, and its records carry no odometer reading and no battery state-of-health field. What the federal data does establish is why range is the right thing to check: because EPA consumption ratings for this nameplate barely moved between 2013 and 2025, a shortfall against the original rating reads mostly as lost stored energy rather than as an old, inefficient design.

What was the original EPA range for my model year?

It is in the table above, for every configuration EPA rated from 2011 to 2026. The short version: 73 miles in 2011 and 2012, 75 in 2013, 84 from 2014 to 2016 on the 24 kW-hr car, 107 on the 30 kW-hr car and in 2017, 151 in 2018, then 149 or 150 for the 40 kWh car and up to 226 for the 62 kWh one. Match the configuration, not just the year — several model years have two or three ratings.

Which Nissan Leaf model years should a used buyer avoid?

The federal record does not support a list of bad years for this car, and anyone offering one is going beyond it. Complaint counts vary enormously by model year, but the largest peaks — 377 complaints for 2019 and 328 for 2020 — are heavily inflated by filings that name recall campaign 24V700000 in their text, 227 of them across the file. What the record does support is a different framing: the early cars are short-range cars by design, so any capacity loss on them bites sooner in practical terms than the same proportional loss on a 226-mile car.

How big is the battery in a used Leaf?

It depends on the model year and configuration, and for seven of the sixteen model years neither federal agency records it. EPA names the pack in the model string for 2016, 2019 to 2022 and 2026; NHTSA’s complaint index names it from 2022 onward. For 2011 to 2015, 2017 and 2018 there is no federal figure at all, and the two agencies do not always match where both speak — NHTSA calls the long-range car 62 kWh in 2022 and 60 kWh in 2024 and 2025.

Is there a recall on the Nissan Leaf battery?

Three campaigns out of 20 name the traction battery. 24V700000 covers 2019 and 2020 cars with a quick-charging port; 25V655000 covers 2021 and 2022 on the same fault; 26V188000 covers 2026 cars. Eleven model years have no traction-battery campaign, which reflects what a recall is for rather than the condition of those packs. Always check the specific VIN, because campaign coverage is by production range and not by model year alone.

Does the EPA rating tell me anything about a specific used car?

Very little, and the clearest proof of that is inside the data. EPA published an identical rating — 149 miles, 30.43 kilowatt-hours per 100 miles, 111 MPGe, 8 hours on a 240-volt supply — for the entry Leaf in every model year from 2020 to 2025. One rating, six model years. It cannot distinguish those cars from one another when they are new, and it certainly cannot describe any of them after several years of use.

Why do two Leafs of the same year have different range?

Because EPA rates configurations, not badges. In 2020, 2021 and 2022 the gap between the shortest and longest rated Leaf is 77 miles. In 2026, where all three rated cars carry the same pack, the wheel choice alone accounts for 44 miles — 259 on the 19-inch car against 303 on the 18-inch steel one. Establish which configuration a car is before comparing its range with anything.

Does a Leaf’s mileage tell me how the battery is doing?

Not reliably, and the federal complaint record cannot help you test it either, because that record carries no odometer field at all. A battery ages with time and with how it has been charged as well as with distance, so a low-mileage early car is still an early car. Read the capacity indication on the vehicle and the range it actually delivers, and treat the odometer as one fact among several rather than as the measure.