The 10 Best Compact Sedans to Buy in 2025
The compact sedan segment has never been more competitive. With hybrids now affordable, standard safety tech on every trim, and starting prices holding steady despite inflation, 2025 is a great year to buy.
We spent four months driving a dozen contenders back-to-back — from daily highway commutes to weekend mountain runs — to find which cars truly earn a place in your driveway. Here's what surprised us, what disappointed us, and which models we'd actually hand our own keys to.
Fuel economy remains a top concern for buyers in this segment, and the gap between hybrid and non-hybrid trims has narrowed in price while widening in efficiency. A compact sedan hybrid today can genuinely achieve 50 MPG combined without the buyer paying a large premium over the gas version.
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Toyota Corolla
Reliability remains the segment's most argued-about metric. Long-term owner surveys from J.D. Power and Consumer Reports consistently place Japanese nameplates at the top — and the nameplate with the most wins is no surprise to anyone who's followed this segment for the past two decades.
Safety tech has become table stakes. Every car on our list now comes standard with automatic emergency braking, lane-keep assist, and adaptive cruise control. The differentiator in 2025 is how well-calibrated those systems are at highway speeds and in stop-and-go traffic.