Pennsylvania caps the dealer documentation fee at $490 (37 Pa. Code §301.4(b)(2) (documentary preparation fee, CPI-adjusted)). The cap is indexed and republished; the figure on file is the one published for the period beginning 2026-01-01.
6.34% (state 6% + average local 0.34%)state rate verified against a primary source; local average approximation from an aggregator — verify with the state · source
Trade-in tax credit
yes — a trade-in reduces the taxable amountverify with the state
State table checked 2026-07-14
Reading this page
Legal and expensive are two different questions.
The documentation fee is the dealership’s charge for preparing the paperwork. It sits next to the government fees on the buyer’s order and is easily mistaken for one. It is not: it is dealer revenue, not a tax. Where the state sets a cap, a fee above it is a question for the dealer and the statute. Where the state sets none, the fee can be entirely legal and still worth negotiating. This page answers only the first question; your report answers the second against your actual quote.
Where the rule is unverified
When a jurisdiction’s rule on file rests on a secondary source or an internal estimate, this page says so and points you at the state agency instead of asserting a figure. That is the same posture the report takes: a cap is never fabricated, and neither is its absence.
What Carlarity checks
Your quoted documentation fee against this rule — and, where a verified cap exists, whether the quote exceeds it.
Title, registration and sales tax on your deal, computed from the same state table shown here.
Every dealer add-on on the order, classified and benchmarked, with the government and lender lines kept out of the negotiable total by construction.
The out-the-door price, so the doc fee is judged as part of the whole and not as a line on its own.
Figures come from Carlarity’s documentation-fee regulation table and state tax table, verified on the dates shown. Nothing on this page is legal advice. Verify with the state agency before relying on a cap, and check the quoted fee against your own buyer’s order.