MGA values: the Twin Cam premium, the coupé discount, and a market that has slipped

The MGA was the car that made MG modern, and MGA values still carry a little of the 1950s in them: 890 recorded sales since 1994, about 80 a year lately, at a median of £19,400, with the middle half between £14,800 and £26,100. Seven in ten of the cars offered find a buyer. The spread runs from a £922 project to £152,000 for a Twin Cam with competition history, and most of the record is a single kind of car, the pushrod roadster, restored, sold in the United States, where nine in ten MGAs were delivered new.

The MGA model guide covers the 1500, the 1600 and the Mk II, the Twin Cam and what to check. This page is about the money, and about a market that has been going quietly downhill for longer than most owners would like to admit.

Three engines, one price, and then the Twin Cam

The variant table on this page shows how little the market cares about the pushrod engines. The 1500 of 1955 to 1959 sits at £18,300, the 1600 of 1959 to 1961 at £19,100, and the plain “A Roadster” line, which mixes them with the 1600 Mk II, at £18,700: the differences are inside the noise. The 1600 cars have disc front brakes and a little more power, the early 1500s have the purer details the purists want, and buyers pay the same for either in the same condition. The fixed-head coupé, sold alongside the roadster throughout, makes ten to fifteen per cent less, a smaller discount than the MGB GT’s because the MGA coupé is the prettier and rarer car.

Then there is the Twin Cam. MG built 2,111 of them between 1958 and 1960, with a 1,588cc twin-overhead-camshaft engine, disc brakes all round and centre-lock steel wheels, and the engine’s habit of burning pistons on the wrong fuel kept them cheap for thirty years. No longer: the 94 recorded Twin Cam roadster sales have a median of £38,700, double a pushrod car, with the middle half between £31,000 and £47,400 and the rare Twin Cam coupé at £28,900. The De Luxe, the Twin Cam’s chassis and brakes with a pushrod engine, built in a few hundred after the Twin Cam was dropped, carries its own smaller premium. Above all of them sit the cars with competition history, and the record sale in the data, £152,000 in 2015, was a Twin Cam roadster with it.

What moves the price of an MGA

The chassis first. The MGA is a separate-chassis car, and the frame rusts at the outriggers, the spring hangers and the battery carriers, and bends at the front in a modest shunt; the body, aluminium and steel, rusts at the sills, the floors and the rear wings. A car on a sound frame with honest paint sits in the middle of its range, and a full body-off restoration, with the tub off the chassis, costs more than any pushrod MGA is worth when finished, so the £35,000 car is one somebody else has paid for.

Then the steering wheel. Because nine in ten MGAs went abroad, a genuine home-market right-hand-drive car is scarce in Britain and sells at a premium of ten to twenty per cent over an equivalent left-hand-drive one; a car converted to right-hand drive, of which there are many, sits between and should be described as converted. A Heritage certificate confirming the car’s original market, colour and engine is the start of any serious price. Originality counts a little more on an MGA than on an MGB, with period colours, wire wheels and the correct engine adding, and the accepted upgrades (a five-speed gearbox, a 1,800cc MGB engine in a pushrod car, electronic ignition) neutral to slightly negative. Mileage barely matters on a car that has usually been rebuilt.

Why the median has fallen

The chart shows a car whose market peaked early. The yearly median was £23,800 in 2012 and £24,400 in 2016, the high points, sat between £20,000 and £23,500 through the pandemic years, and fell to £16,600 in 2025; restated in today’s money the MGA has lost about half its value since 2016 and a third since 2020.

The usual sample effect applies, as the online auctions bring more ordinary left-hand-drive cars into the record each year. But the MGA shares the Big Healey’s problem: it is a 1950s sports car, and the buyers who wanted one because they remembered it are leaving the market faster than younger buyers are arriving. The Twin Cams have held their money and the best restored roadsters have held most of theirs; it is the ordinary pushrod car, the bulk of the record, that is cheaper in real terms than it has been in twenty years. For a buyer who wants the prettiest MG ever built, that is the moment.

Where MGAs change hands

The record is mostly North American, through the online platforms, and a single week in August 2026 shows it: four pushrod roadsters sold there between £5,000 and £18,400, and a Twin Cam made £38,800 at a sale room in Britain. The home-market right-hand-drive cars mostly pass through the MG clubs and the specialists, at prices a little above the auction range. Whether a recorded price includes the buyer’s premium varies by sale, which is one more reason to read the usual range rather than any single result.

Insuring, restoring, selling

For an agreed-value policy a good pushrod roadster belongs in the upper half of its range, a Twin Cam in the upper half of its own, and a coupé a little below the roadster. On restoration the arithmetic is the Healey’s in miniature: a body-off rebuild costs more than a pushrod car is worth, so the right buy is the car already restored, and the cheap project is for someone doing the work themselves. If you are selling, spring is the season for an open car, the median for the variant is the honest expectation, and the Heritage certificate and a photograph of the chassis rails are what move the price at the viewing.

Related

The MGA sits between the MG T-series it replaced, which sells for a little less, and the MGB that replaced it, which sells for less than half. Its rivals in period, the Triumph TR3 and the Austin-Healey 100, bracket it in price. For how all the figures on this site are compiled, see what classic cars sell for.