Dacia Duster review – a budget family SUV favourite
Top 10 best new cars under £20,000
With a budget of up to £20,000 you can get into some of the most impressive small cars on the market and even an SUV or EV
While a budget of £20,000 to spend on a new car used to be a healthy amount for British buyers, the cost of new models has shot up somewhat in recent years. The arrival of more complex hybrid and electrified engines along with complex infotainment and safety kit has really pushed the price of new cars upwards.
There’s good news though. While the pool may be a bit smaller, there are still some excellent cars costing less than £20,000. In fact, you can even buy our Carbuyer Car of the Year for under this threshold, and it’s a fashionable and family-friendly SUV – not a tiny city car.
Here we’ve put together a list of the best new cars you can buy for less than £20,000, and it includes quite a few of our favourite small cars. Plus, since today’s superminis and city cars are better than ever, you get plenty of capability for your money. Decades ago, superminis were mainly only for use around town, as they were a little too loud and inefficient on the motorway.
Although you might be able to find deals and offers that bring a car that costs more than £20,000 down below that figure, we’ve stuck to models that have a list price under that mark. This keeps things consistent, and you may find that you’re able to source some of the cars below for less than £20,000 with a bit of haggling.
Most of the models we’ve picked out here are superminis, because they offer the best value for money at this price point. You can also spend close to this figure on a city car if you want something nimble and manoeuvrable around town with top-of-the-range features. An SUV is even within reach if a high-riding car is more to your tastes on bumpy UK roads. Read on for our 10 favourite new cars for less than £20,000.
- Priced from around £19,000
The Dacia Duster is not only our Small Family Car award winner, but we also declared it our Car of the Year for 2025, and starting from just under £19,000 its incredible value played a big part in its success. We also love its rugged styling, which might have been achieved on a budget, but still looks contemporary.
The Duster is super practical for families, with plenty of ground clearance and chunky wheels and tyres for clearing speed bumps and pot holes on the school run, while its 517 litre boot can swallow plenty of luggage. For less than £20k you can get a version capable of running on petrol or LPG, but you will be limited to Essential trim with its utilitarian steel wheels. There’s also no infotainment screen, but Dacia does provide a handy phone holder so you can use your smartphone’s navigation apps.
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- Priced from around £19,000
If you don’t want or need a tall SUV, the sleek Renault Clio could fit the bill instead. A recent facelift means it looks razor sharp, with vertical daytime running lights to help it stand out. It might be compact and easy to park, but the Clio feels like a grown-up car from behind the wheel, thanks to reassuring handling and plenty of big-car safety and tech features.
For this price the entry-level Evolution is well within budget, while the Techno just squeezes beneath it with pennies to spare. Even the former gets alloy wheels, a seven-inch touchscreen with Apple CarPlay/Android Auto and rear parking sensors, while Techno adds bigger wheels, front parking sensors and a reversing camera. Its TCe petrol engine is nippy enough for urban driving as well as the occasional motorway jaunt, and it returns up to 54.3mpg. If you don’t mind blowing the budget by just over £1,500 a fully hybrid E-Tech version is also available.
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- Priced from around £18,000
Speaking of hybrids, that’s exactly what you get with the MG3 Hybrid+, and it costs from £18,500 in SE trim, while Trophy exceeds the budget by £500. That’s remarkable value for a full hybrid, and a big part of the reason we rate it so highly. Now shared with the larger MG ZS Hybrid, the combined 192bhp from its electric motor and petrol engine make it feel very nippy, yet it can still return up to 64mpg.
If you spend most of your time driving around town or in stop and start traffic, the MG3 is in its element, because it has an automatic gearbox and spends a lot of time with its engine turned off at slower speeds. That makes for quiet and smooth progress, for a hassle-free experience. Even the SE trim comes with a generous 10.25-inch infotainment screen, adaptive cruise control and rear parking sensors.
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- Priced from around £20,000
Quite simply, the Skoda Fabia is one of the best-value cars you can get for under £20,000, making it another top pick. It’s well-built and comfortable, and while it doesn’t reinvent the wheel in terms of its petrol engine options, it’s still economical and shouldn’t cost a lot to run.
One of the main selling points of the Fabia is its impressive practicality in keeping with Skoda’s ethos. For a car its size, the Fabia has a class-leading 380-litre boot, meaning it’s more usable than most other superminis, and while it’s based on the same underpinnings as the SEAT Ibiza and Volkswagen Polo, it stands out on its own as a particularly capable all-rounder. Better yet, for under £20,000 you get the SE Edition spec featuring 15-inch alloys, an 8.25-inch touchscreen, an eight-inch Virtual Cockpit and even dual-zone air-conditioning.
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- Priced from around £19,000
The latest Vauxhall Corsa has gone from strength to strength, outliving its main rival, the now-discontinued Ford Fiesta. The Corsa is a very popular car, frequently featuring in the best-selling cars list and for good reason – it’s more refined than ever before, feels good to drive and is cheap to run in any guise.
While a £20,000 budget won’t allow for you to stretch to an electric model, you could get a 1.2-litre petrol with a manual gearbox. It has a 10-inch central display, 3.5-inch trip display, alloy wheels, LED headlights and a faux-leather steering wheel. Other kit includes auto wipers and high beam, and driver assistance tech such as lane-keep assist, so it hardly feels spartan.
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- Priced from around £18,000
The Dacia Jogger is a new name in the UK, although European buyers have had it for a while now. This is a seven-seater MPV that, even in top-spec trim, costs well under our £20,000 budget. There aren’t any other models that you can buy brand new that come with seven seats for as cheaply as this, but it’s not a bargain-basement package; you get loads of equipment for the money, plus a good engine and it’s even enjoyable to drive.
The motor has 108bhp and the car is fairly lightweight, so performance is okay, and the manual gearbox is easy to use. The Jogger is comfortable and very spacious, plus it comes with lots of modern kit including smartphone connectivity, keyless entry, LED headlights, heated seats, blind spot warning and autonomous emergency braking.
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- Priced from around £18,000
Citroen is a brand known for its focus on value and quirkiness. The C3 starts from just under £14,000 and has a distinctive look to it that means it stands out a little more than many other cars at this price. It even has a fairly stylish interior that you could add plenty of equipment to while staying well within your £20,000 budget.
Another area Citroen is renowned for is comfort, and the C3 is no exception. It may not be the most sporty or engaging to drive, but the C3’s soft suspension means it glides over bumps and potholes around town. It’s also easy to drive and see out of, so it should be a very competent car to live with.
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- Priced from around £20,000
The SEAT Ibiza is a fantastic choice if you want something fun to drive but also practical enough for a small family. It’s also really good value with a 1.0-litre turbo petrol with 94bhp in SE trim coming in just under the £20,000 barrier. Like the Fabia, this comes with 15-inch alloys and an 8.25-inch display, but SEAT also throws in metallic paint as standard. Exceed the budget by less than a grand, and SE Technology throws in 16-inch wheels, a 9.2-inch screen and air-conditioning.
The 94bhp engine is a cracking engine for a supermini, as its turbocharger means it has a little extra power from lower in the rev range – you can get up to speed quicker, making junctions and roundabouts easier to navigate. It’s also frugal, returning up to 55.7mpg and emitting just 116g/km of CO2.
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- Priced from around £16,000
Forget any notion of just squeezing under the £20,000 threshold here; walk into a Kia showroom and you can have any Picanto you like from the range and still come in under budget. Starting from under £16,000 in ‘2’ trim with a 1.0-litre petrol engine, even the range-topping GT-Line S trim with a 1.2-litre petrol and automatic gearbox nudges over £19,000.
We wouldn’t recommend spending that much on a Picanto anyway – the best value is found with a 1.0-litre manual, and the GT-Line trim strikes us as particularly good value for around £17,000. It’s only in insurance group five too, so it’s ideal for new drivers, or just cutting down motoring bills.
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- Priced from around £15,000
Want to spend less than £20,000 and enjoy zero-emissions motoring? While it’s not quite the only show in town – there’s also the Leapmotor T03 – we reckon the Dacia Spring is currently the best way to access sub-£20k electric driving. You don’t even have to stick to the basic Expression trim, because even the Extreme version starts from £17,000.
In fact, it’s the latter we’d pick, because it comes with smart 15-inch wheels with copper and black covers, a 10.1-inch touchscreen, front and rear parking sensors and even a reversing camera. Perhaps even more importantly, it also gets a more powerful 64bhp electric motor, so while it’s no rocket it does at least keep up with traffic more easily. The Spring can manage up to 140 miles from a single charge and it has a top speed of 78mph, so it can tackle dual carriageways and motorways as well as city centres.
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Best new cars under £20,000: price and score list
Below you’ll find a full table of the best cars for under £20,000 with their price and Carbuyer score.
| Best small hybrid car ranking | Make and model | Priced from | Carbuyer rating (out of 5) |
| 1 | Dacia Duster | £19,000 | 4.2 |
| 2 | Renault Clio | £19,000 | 4.4 |
| 3 | MG3 | £18,000 | 4.3 |
| 4 | Skoda Fabia | £20,000 | 4.4 |
| 5 | Vauxhall Corsa | £19,000 | 4.1 |
| 6 | Dacia Jogger | £18,000 | 4.0 |
| 7 | Citroen C3 | £18,000 | 4.0 |
| 8 | SEAT Ibiza | £20,000 | 4.2 |
| 9 | Kia Picanto | £16,000 | 4.2 |
| 10 | Dacia Spring | £15,000 | 4.0 |
Top 10 best cars for under £20,000
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