Rivian R1S Lease Numbers: $18,000 Off, $1,021 a Month

The $18,000 everyone latched onto is not one discount. It is four separate line items, sitting in three different places on the contract, and two of them only exist because I leased instead of bought. I still ended up over $1,000 a month.

I went into this with four things I wanted. Payment under $1,000. No money down. A two year term instead of three, so I could get out sooner. And the large battery pack with premium sound, because the Gen 1 audio was okay but I am used to the Tesla sound system. I got two of those four. Here is the full breakdown, because a headline number without the contract underneath it is not worth much.

The trade-in offers that made this possible

The whole deal hinges on what my R1T was worth, and that number moved a lot.

On December 7, 2024, with about 7,400 miles on it, Rivian offered me $57,410. My payoff at the time was around $68,000. That is over $10,000 of negative equity. The next day, out of curiosity, Tesla offered $43,000 for the same truck. That one was laughable, and I only asked because we were looking at a Cybertruck to replace the Model X that was getting bought back.

Fast forward to May 9, 2025. The truck was at 10,663 miles and Rivian offered $58,230 against a payoff of about $63,000. So roughly $5,000 of negative equity. The gap did not close because the truck got more valuable. It closed because I kept making payments.

Rivian’s first proposal was to roll that negative equity into the new lease, which would have put me around $1,300 a month. I said no. I do not want an R1S that badly, and I genuinely love the R1T. I told them the negative equity was the whole problem, and if they could not solve it there was nothing to talk about.

Then on June 25, 2025 they came back. New trade-in value on the R1T: $61,290, up another $3,060 from May. And an email saying that if I applied my referral credits to the new lease, the negative equity was effectively handled and I was back to zero, with the incentives stacked on top. That is the offer that actually made this happen. Everything below follows from it.

If you want the longer version of why I was even entertaining this, I wrote about it in why I’m trading my R1T for the R1S Gen 2.

What the R1S actually costs before any deals

The configuration I landed on, a Gen 2 R1S dual motor:

• Dual motor: $83,900
• Performance upgrade: $5,000
• Glacier White: $1,750
• Ocean Coast interior: $2,000
• Sound and Vision: $2,500
• Subtotal: $95,150

Where the $18,000 comes from

Four items, and they do not all appear in the same section of the paperwork:

• $3,000 for trading in an EV, which was the R1T
• $2,500 to offset Sound and Vision, making it effectively free
• $5,000 incentive on the large pack with performance upgrade, which is exactly what that option costs, so it also nets out to free
• $7,500 federal EV tax credit

Those first two drop the subtotal to $89,650. The other two land elsewhere on the contract. Add them up and it is $18,000 on the nose.

Worth saying plainly since this post is now a year old: that $7,500 credit is gone. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended both the consumer credit and the commercial credit that dealers use on leases, for vehicles acquired after September 30, 2025. I said in the video it was going away in September. It did. So this exact deal is not reproducible today, and that is the single biggest reason the numbers below will not match what you are quoted.

The contract, line by line

This is the part most deal videos skip.

• Gross capitalized cost: $91,450
• Capitalized cost reduction: $12,999.98
• Adjusted capitalized cost: $80,596.89

Those three do not reconcile on their own, and the gap is the interesting part. $91,450 minus $12,999.98 is $78,450.02. My adjusted cap cost is $2,146.87 higher than that, and $2,146.87 is exactly my remaining negative equity. It is still in there. The referral credits I had did not erase it, because those credits do not apply to the cost of the vehicle. They go toward delivery and fees.

You can see that in the due at signing. The contract says $4,172.71, of which $3,171.84 is taxes and fees. After my referral credits, what I actually handed over was $2,123.09. So the credits went to fees, not to the car.

Two more numbers off the contract: depreciation amortizes $23,396.39, and the residual is $57,200.50. That residual is about 60% of the configured price, which is generous and is a big reason the payment is not worse than it is.

Those also pin the money factor down better than my calculator did. Depreciation is $649.90 a month over 36. The rest of the $939.27 is $289.37 of rent charge, and $289.37 divided by ($80,596.89 + $57,200.50) is 0.00210, a 5.04% APR equivalent. In the video I said 0.00208 and 4.99% off an online calculator. Rebuild the payment at 0.00208 and you get $936.52. At 0.00210 it comes out to $939.27, which is exactly what I pay.

On sales tax I said 7.75% in the video. That is wrong, and my own numbers give it away. $939.27 before tax and $1,021.46 after only works at 8.75%. At 7.75% the payment would be $1,012.06. Guy math. The payment is still the payment, I just had the rate wrong when I googled it.

The payment itself, on a 36 month term:

• Before tax: $939.27
• With tax: $1,021.46

The three things I wanted and did not get

I asked for a payment under $1,000 and came in at $1,021.46. I asked for a two year term and signed 36 months. And I gave up the all-terrain wheels, because the interior and the exterior color mattered more to me and something had to go. I lived on 21 inch road wheels on the R1T for 15 months across a good number of off-road trips and it was fine, so I am threading the needle a little here.

I did get the one I cared most about, which was no money down. I ran the math on putting cash in and it barely moved. $500 down brings it to $988.97. $1,000 down brings it to about $971.

Both of those came out of that same online calculator, and they do not hold up under a second look. The first $500 saves $32.49 a month, which is $1,169 over 36 months, more than I put in. The next $500 only saves another $18. Real cap cost reduction does not work like that, so treat them as ballpark. The $971 I was quoting from memory anyway, I said in the video I could not find the screenshot.

The point stands though. Over 36 months it is close to a wash, and I would rather keep the cash, especially since Rivian came back to me with a surprise deal once already. If they do it again for a Gen 3, I want to be free to move.

One fee I did avoid: no $495 disposition fee. This was not a lease surrender, they bought the truck as a trade-in. Rivian paid Chase the remainder and rolled what was left into the new lease.

What it did to my insurance

I run Tesla Insurance, which in California will cover non-Tesla vehicles. Three cars, before and after:

Vehicle	Before	After	Change
Model Y Performance	$187.65	$184.16	-$3.49
R1T, then R1S	$152.52	$168.07	+$15.55
Cybertruck	$340.51	$345.63	+$5.12
Total	$680.68	$697.86	+$17.18

One correction there too. In the video I called the R1S line a $15.15 increase. It is $15.55, and my own totals prove it: only $15.55 makes $680.68 turn into $697.86. More guy math.

About $17 a month more overall, before a 3% discount that runs until my September renewal. The Cybertruck line is inflated because they projected me at 33,000 miles a year based on my first few months with it, when I had free supercharging and drove it everywhere. They told me it would correct at renewal. I still have to pay it until then.

So did I get a good deal

I think so, but I want to be careful about what that means. The $18,000 is real and it is documented above. It is also $12,500 of it that came from a tax credit and a lease-only battery incentive, and one of those no longer exists. Strip the credit out and the story is a good deal on a car I liked enough to move for, not a miracle.

If you understand lease math better than I do, and plenty of you do, tell me what you would have negotiated differently. I read the comments.

More on the R1S since this one: the first night camping in it at Big Bear, and my honest take on the R2 versus the R1S now that I have lived with a Gen 2.

If you are shopping a Rivian and my numbers helped, using my referral does not cost you anything and it helps me keep making these.