MGF and TF values: the cheapest sports car in the record, where a head gasket costs more than the car

The MGF and the TF are the last MG sports cars, and MGF values are the lowest of any sports car on this site: 369 recorded sales since 2006, about 50 a year lately, at a median of £1,760, with the middle half between £1,150 and £2,875. Four in five of the cars offered find a buyer, the highest rate of any MG in the record, because nothing here is over-estimated. The spread runs from £240 to £21,300 for one exceptional car in July 2026, and the whole of the middle sits at a level that creates the family’s defining problem: a head gasket and a pair of sills can cost more than the car.

The MGF and TF model guide covers the mid-engined layout, Hydragas, the K-series and the specials. This page is about the money, and about what a four-figure median does to a car’s chances of survival.

TF over F, and both under two thousand

The variant table on this page has two lines and not much between them. The TF of 2002 onwards, 192 recorded sales, has a median of £2,005, with the middle half between £1,340 and £3,235; the MGF of 1995 to 2002, 177 sales, sits at £1,651, between £1,000 and £2,600. The TF’s premium is about a fifth, which is what the market pays for coil springs in place of Hydragas, the stiffer body, the restyled nose and five more years on the clock.

What the table does not show is any of the versions the enthusiasts care about. The record lumps the Trophy 160, the VVC cars, the LE500 and the run of special editions into those two lines, so each one is priced on its own file when it appears rather than by any median here. The pattern in the sales themselves is plainer than the badges: tidy cars with history at £2,500 to £4,000, good low-mileage examples and specials at £6,000 and up, and everything else in a four-figure crowd where condition is the only variable that moves.

What moves the price of an MGF

The head gasket, first and effectively only. The K-series engine’s gasket failures are the family’s reputation, they are entirely fixable with the uprated parts, and the difference between a car with a documented repair and a car with an unexplained coolant top-up is most of the price. After that, the sills and the rear subframe mountings, which rot and which cost more to cut out and replace than most of these cars are worth, and the hood, which is a few hundred pounds either way.

Then the ordinary things that matter more here than anywhere else on this site: a thick history file, one or two owners, a low mileage, a working hood and an interior that has not been rained on. On an MGF the Hydragas ride height tells you whether the suspension has been looked after, and a car sitting low has a bill attached. Specification barely registers: the VVC engine, the manual or the CVT, the F or the TF are worth a few hundred pounds between them, and none of it survives contact with a rotten sill.

The cheapest cars in the record

The chart needs its early years discounted. Before 2021 the record holds fewer than fifteen sales a year, and the swings, £3,330 in 2020, £1,210 in 2017, are samples rather than markets. From 2021 the volume arrives, and with it a clearer line: £2,259 in 2022, £2,050 in 2023, £1,670 in 2024, £1,650 in 2025 and about £1,612 so far in 2026. Restated in today’s money that is a fall of roughly a third since 2022.

The fall is less a verdict on the cars than a description of which ones now reach a sale room. Every winter takes a share of the neglected examples, because at £1,500 a head-gasket job is an economic write-off, and the cars that remain divide into the cared-for ones that trade privately and inside the clubs, and the tired ones that go to auction. A median built increasingly on the second group falls even when good cars hold. That is the same mechanism that ran through the Midget record twenty years earlier, at four times the money.

For scale: the MGF’s £1,760 sits against £4,600 for a Midget, £7,300 for an MGB and £15,100 for an MGC. It is the cheapest way into a mid-engined convertible with a proper chassis anywhere in this data, and the only car here that regularly sells for less than the cost of its own repair.

Where MGFs change hands

The record is British and unglamorous. The regional sale rooms do most of the work, and a single week at the end of July 2026 shows the whole market: an MGF at £1,000 and a TF at £6,000 at the same Yorkshire sale, an MGF at £1,630 in the south, and TFs at £2,700 and £1,800 elsewhere in the north. The £6,000 and the £1,000 were sold on the same day by the same auctioneer, which is the clearest possible statement that condition, not model, is the variable. The good cars, the specials and the low-mileage survivors mostly change hands inside the MG clubs and through the specialists before any sale room sees them.

Insuring, restoring, selling

For an agreed-value policy a sorted car belongs at the upper end of its range, because the replacement cost of a good one exceeds its book value; a project is insured for what it is. On restoration the arithmetic is the bluntest on this site: sills, a subframe and a head gasket together exceed the value of almost any MGF or TF, so the only sensible purchase is the car somebody else has already sorted, and the only sensible project is one you intend to keep. If you are selling, the head-gasket receipt is the document that sets the price, the hood and the interior do the rest, and the honest expectation for an ordinary car is its median, with the four-figure crowd’s ceiling around £4,000.

Related

The MGF and TF are the last of the line that runs from the T-Series through the MGA, the MGB and the Midget; their rivals in period were the Mazda MX-5 and the Toyota MR2, and their closest British relation the mid-engined Lotus Elise, which sells for ten times as much. For the decade that produced the MGF, see British classic cars of the 1990s. For how all the figures on this site are compiled, see what classic cars sell for.