Should I repair scratches on my leased car?
Quick answer: Sometimes. Scratches over 25mm sit beyond fair wear and tear and are chargeable, but shallow ones can often be polished out and deeper ones reduced. If the clear coat is broken through to primer or metal, you are paying either way -- so the question becomes whether a cosmetic repair beats the recharge, not whether to fix it at all.
The scratch question at the end of a lease is rarely simple. Whether it is worth repairing depends on the depth, the size, the location, and what the repair will actually cost against the likely recharge. The answer is different for each scratch on each car -- which is why we get a steady stream of cars in for pre-inspection assessments and very rarely give the same answer twice.
Check the depth first
Run your fingernail across the scratch. If it doesn't catch, the clear coat is probably intact -- the mark is sitting in the top layer of the paint system, and there is a good chance it can be polished out. If your nail catches, the clear coat is broken. That changes the options considerably.
Depth matters because intact lacquer responds to machine polishing. The process removes a thin layer of the clear coat, taking the scratch with it. A scratch that has broken through to the colour coat, primer, or bare metal is a different category -- the lease company treats it as broken paint, which carries more weight on the inspection report than a surface-level mark.
When polishing is the right move
If the clear coat is intact and the scratch is reasonably fine, polishing is almost always worth attempting before the hand-back inspection. The cost of a machine polish on a scratch or a cluster of light marks is well under the recharge for a full panel. If the mark comes out entirely, you avoid the charge. If a 30mm scratch comes down to 20mm, it moves from chargeable to within fair wear and tear tolerance -- and that is a meaningful saving. For the exact thresholds that determine which scratches get charged, see will I be charged for scratches.
The complication is that you don't always know what the result will be until you try. We have seen scratches that looked deep turn out to be surface-only, and marks that looked fine that had actually cut through the lacquer. If you're unsure, an assessment before any repair is worthwhile -- a botched DIY polish on broken paintwork can spread the damage rather than reduce it.
When a SMART repair makes sense
Scratches that have broken the clear coat but sit in a contained area -- the corner of a bumper, the bottom edge of a door, a sill, the area around a wheel arch -- are often well-suited to a localised SMART repair. A properly done cosmetic repair in those locations blends without repainting the whole panel, and the cost typically comes in below the panel recharge. Scratches are one of several issues addressed in end of lease repairs -- the linked article covers what else typically comes up before hand-back.
In more visible, central areas like the full face of a door or a long mark across a bonnet, the comparison is tighter. It is still worth getting a quote first. One pattern we see: a scratch that starts at the body line and runs to the edge may only need the edge area treated if the body-line section is within tolerance on its own. Splitting the job like that is not always obvious without experience, but it can be the difference between a £120 repair and a £400 one.
The touch-up paint tip -- and what it actually fixes
Stone chips along the bonnet leading edge, door edges, and sills are a different problem to scratches. A chip tends to break through quickly -- the impact punches down through the layers -- which makes it broken paint even when it looks minor. A touch-up paint pen matched to your colour code, bought from a motor accessory shop for under £10, seals the exposed metal and takes the chip out of the recharge bracket. The ideal time to buy one is when you first pick up the car. A pen that has been sitting in the glovebox gets used; one you mean to buy someday usually does not.
The important limit: touch-up paint fixes chips, not scratches. A linear scratch through the paintwork does not respond to a pen the same way. An uneven or over-applied touch-up along a scratch can make the area harder to polish later and, in a visible location, sometimes worse than the original mark. For scratches specifically, get a professional opinion before reaching for the pen.
When accepting the recharge makes sense
A long scratch running across the middle of a panel -- a full-width door mark, a bonnet scratch from stone chip fallout, a deep drag across the bootlid -- through to primer or metal, is worth pricing honestly against the recharge. Respraying a panel at a bodyshop will often cost more than the lease company's recharge figure, which is typically set below retail bodyshop rates. For those situations, the answer may genuinely be to leave it and pay the recharge on return.
Where it is different is on the less visible areas of the car -- lower sills, rear bumper corners, beneath the door step. A SMART repair there is both cheaper than a panel respray and usually below the recharge. It is worth repeating that people often spend too much money repairing lease cars. A bodyshop will offer bodyshop solutions; a SMART repair company will offer SMART repair solutions. Neither will necessarily tell you that the cheapest option is accepting the recharge. Getting advice from someone without a stake in which repair type you choose is worth more than it costs.
Getting a pre-inspection assessment
We regularly see cars in the weeks before a planned hand-back, and the pattern is consistent: people who try to fix everything spend more than they need to, and people who fix nothing often find charges they could have avoided. A proper pre-inspection goes through the car methodically, identifies which scratches are chargeable, which can be polished out, which need a SMART repair, and which are genuinely below the threshold and not worth touching. The total repair cost is nearly always less than a guess -- and considerably less than finding out at the return inspection that there were scratches you didn't realise were chargeable.
If you want to know where you stand before the car goes back, bring it in. We will tell you honestly what we can fix, what it will cost, and what we would leave alone. Our guide to professional end-of-lease car preparation covers the full process from pre-return walk-round to collection day. If you are picking up a new lease car, having a ceramic coating applied at the start of the term provides a level of paint protection that makes this kind of scratch much less likely over three or four years of lease.
For everything else on returning a lease car cleanly, see our end-of-lease car preparation guide.