Rental car companies spent 2022 and 2023 getting hammered for gouging vacationers, so it’s worth paying attention to what they’re doing now that fleets are shrinking again. New fall data shows rental fleets are down for a fourth straight stretch, with fleet purchases falling 10% in April 2026 alone, according to Auto Rental News. By the old post-pandemic playbook, that kind of pullback should have sent daily rates soaring again. Instead, industry-wide pricing is projected to rise a modest 3.6% in 2026 before actually declining in 2027 — and the reason has surprised even the rental companies themselves.
Fleets Are Shrinking, But Not Because Demand Collapsed
According to Auto Rental News, new rental-vehicle purchases are down roughly 5% year-over-year, with Q1 2026 fleet purchases off about 4% and April 2026 purchases down a steeper 10%. That’s not because people stopped traveling. Vehicle miles traveled rose 1.6% year-over-year in March 2026 — the highest March reading on record — and TSA screening volumes were up roughly 2% in the first quarter before flattening later in the spring.
Instead, rental companies appear to be deliberately holding fleet size down rather than restocking aggressively, a strategy that industry forecasters expect to keep rates rising only modestly through 2026 before easing in 2027 as more off-lease vehicles — projected to grow supply 15% to 20% annually in the coming years — start flowing back into the market.
Where the Real Money Is Coming From
The clearest evidence that this isn’t a repeat of the 2022 price shock shows up in Hertz’s most recent earnings. The company’s revenue per day climbed 9% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2026, which Tech Times reported was its highest second-quarter rate on record outside the extraordinary pandemic-era conditions of 2022. Revenue per unit rose 8%, even though Hertz’s overall fleet was about 1% smaller than a year earlier.
Rather than simply charging more across a static fleet, Hertz appears to be squeezing more profit out of a leaner one. Vehicle utilization improved to 79% company-wide, and to 81% when excluding recalled vehicles — a 190 basis-point improvement. Just as notable: fleet depreciation costs, which spiked industry-wide after the pandemic used-car shortage, have fallen to $302 per vehicle per month, down from roughly $600 in the second quarter of 2024 — a 50% reduction in two years. Ninety-four percent of Hertz’s U.S. fleet now consists of 2025 and 2026 model-year vehicles, the company’s youngest fleet mix in over a decade, according to the same report.
Avis Budget Group’s second-quarter 2026 results tell a similar story. Utilization in the Americas hit 73.2%, the highest second-quarter level in company history, even as the fleet there shrank 5% year-over-year and rental days fell 2%, per Yahoo Finance’s coverage of the earnings call. Revenue per transaction rose 6%, and adjusted EBITDA in the Americas grew nearly 8% to the segment’s best second-quarter margin in three years — despite roughly 18,000 grounded vehicles tied to recalls that have cost the company more than $50 million so far this year.
What It Actually Means If You’re Renting This Fall
Put together, the data points to an industry that learned its lesson from the backlash over 2021 and 2022 sticker shock, but hasn’t fully reversed course on keeping fleets tight. Companies are choosing to run smaller, newer, better-utilized fleets rather than flooding lots with cars the way they did before the pandemic — and it’s working out well enough for their bottom lines that neither Hertz nor Avis has much incentive to change the strategy soon.
For travelers, that translates into rates that are edging up rather than spiking. Auto Rental News’ 3.6% projected increase for 2026 is well within the range of ordinary inflation, and the projected pullback in 2027 suggests companies expect today’s tight-fleet strategy to loosen once more off-lease vehicles become available. Booking early and comparing daily rates against weekly or monthly packages still matters, since utilization gains mean rental companies have less incentive to discount unsold inventory at the last minute than they did when lots were fuller.
The Takeaway
The surprise isn’t that prices are rising this fall — it’s that they’re rising so little given how much rental companies have pulled back on fleet size. Hertz and Avis have both discovered they can post record or near-record quarterly results by running fewer, younger cars more efficiently rather than by leaning on the kind of blunt price increases that made headlines a few years ago. That’s a meaningfully different dynamic than the last fleet crunch, and it’s one worth watching as companies decide how aggressively to restock heading into 2027.
