Have you priced motorcycle tires lately? Holy cow! I’d call it sticker shock, but it’s more than that—I’m calling it sticker bludgeoning instead. If you’re shopping for tires in March like I am, well, we picked just about the worst time to do it. By the time I finished digging into it, I realized two things: Why tires got so expensive and when the best time is to buy them if you don’t want to get hammered.
TL;DR Version
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- Worst time to buy: March through May.
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- Best time to buy: Before you need them! Plus also November through January.
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- Bonus tip: Watch for model closeouts and manufacturer incentives like rebates.
It’s been just over a year since I last bought tires, and I was completely stunned by how expensive they’ve gotten. The tires I bought in November 2025 were for my 1976 BMW R 90/6 (i.e., skinny and bias-ply). Thinking I might need to put tires on my 2015 R 1200 GS before summer inspired my looking at tires, but given the prices, I’m doing the research now and not buying tires for a while. I’ll wring every last mile I can out of the tires on the bike by diligently keeping my tire pressure correctly set and trying to modulate my throttle hand.
By the way, when I bought those Metzeler Road Tec 01 tires for my Slash 6, they cost $121 (front) and $149 (rear) from Revzilla and came with free shipping to my door. The front (3.25×19) is out of stock and soon to be discontinued with the rise of the Road Tec 02, but an equivalent front (90/90-19) is now $168 and the rear (4.00×18) is $174. That’s an increase of $70!
I started to think I might need tires for my 2015 R 1200 GS ahead of riding season. I’ve currently got Dunlop Mutants on the bike, and I like them a lot. I don’t ride off-road, but I appreciate how they perform in sloppy weather and on the few hard-packed dirt roads on which I occasionally find myself. On the road, they’re solid tires, giving a secure feel and plenty of feedback through the chassis. The sizes for my GS are 120/70R19 (front) and 170/60R17 (rear), and here’s what I found on Revzilla in late March 2026.
NOTE: This list is limited to what I could find with both tires in stock at the moment of my search. Prices are listed as front/rear.
What I discovered was a wide variety of tires, but they were all expensive—except the Shinko 705s, which kicked the table off at $140/$192. However, the 705 is a 70/30 ADV tire—which I don’t need or care to use—and I’ve heard a lot of anecdotal reports that they don’t last long. Some stories I’ve heard even involve people buying three tires at once—one front and two rears—because the rears especially wear out quickly. All things considered, I include them here for completeness because if I don’t, some yo-yo on the internet will discount my work because I didn’t include Shinko.
Interestingly, the other 70/30 ADV tire on my list—the Continental TKC 70—came in as the most expensive of them all at $276/$344. With sales tax in my home state of Virginia, a set would cost me $660! That’s pretty rarified air for tires, especially since I don’t need a 70/30 tire. Nobody would believe I ride off-road even if I had these equipped.
Another eye-wateringly expensive option is Metzeler’s ME888 ($235/$340), a hard touring tire known for long life and the capacity for heavy loads. You see the ME888 mostly on beastly cruisers, which honestly makes them a pretty good candidate for an overloaded two-up ADV bike like my GS.
Knocking those three tires out of contention, everything else currently available exists in a $100 range between $425 and $525, from the Bridgestone Battleax T41 ($183/$242), a 90/10 ADV tire, to Michelin’s justifiably popular Road 6 ($231/$294) long-life touring tire.
I’m leaning towards a road tire or possibly a sport-touring tire, rather than even a 90/10 ADV tire. I want long life and good wet weather performance and don’t need to pose or chase cred in the parking lot. I don’t keep it secret that I treat my GS as a touring bike. That knocks out the Battleax T45 and the other ADV tires: Pirelli’s Scorpion II and III ($208/$267 and $222/$285, respectively) and the Continental Trail Attack 3 ($210/$272). I’ve had Trail Attacks before and they are fantastic tires, but if I’m going in on road-oriented tires, they’re off the list.
I’ve had several different Bridgestone tires in the past and they always feel weird to me no matter how long I give them to break in. This eliminates their sport-touring tires, the Battleax T32 GT Spec ($211/$255) and T33 ($216/$267).
The short list I’m left to choose from certainly contains no slouches. In addition to the Michelin Road 6, there are:
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- Dunlop Roadsmart 3 ($191/$234)
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- Metzeler Roadtec 02 ($205/$252)
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- Continental Road Attack 4 ($197/$274)
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- Dunlop Mutant ($220/$278)
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- Michelin Anakee Road ($207/$295)
It would be easy to choose the least expensive, but life is never that easy. I would be fine with the Anakee Road or Roadsmart 3, but I’ve never used tires from those model lines before. I’ve got good experience with the Roadtec 01 on my Slash 6. I’ve used the previous generations of the Road Attack on multiple occasions and had good results, and as I said above, I like the Mutants that are currently on the bike. I’ve heard great things about Michelin’s Road line, but never ridden on them before.
All that figuring means I’ll probably end up buying a set of Road Attack 4 tires—but not yet. That seems low enough to not seem unreasonable, but it’s still a lot of money for tires. All I can do now is wonder why motorcycle tires are so goddamned expensive and how they came to be that way.
As it turns out, it’s not that complicated. Motorcycle tires require specialized design and engineering staff to bring them to life, not to mention separate machines and specific materials to take things like lean angles, dynamic loads and shifting weather conditions into account. On top of that, the numbers aren’t in the manufacturers’ favor—they will never make as many motorcycle tires as they do tires for cars, trucks and SUVs. This means the economy of scale is not in our favor as motorcyclists; manufacturers have fewer units from which to extract revenue, and that drives the per-unit costs up.
When it comes to materials, motorcycle tires benefit from people with advanced degrees in chemistry, physics, thermodynamics and more, but the things getting thrown into the hopper to manufacture the tires are more or less common across the industry. Steel for reinforcement, natural and synthetic rubber, carbon black and a multitude of polymers and other things that provide durability, grip and stability—the costs for all these things do not exist in a vacuum and prices for raw materials everywhere are volatile and seemingly ever on the upswing. Add logistics (i.e., freight shipping) and supply chain issues like shortages to the ever-rising cost of labor around the world and it’s not hard to see why the per-unit costs on motorcycle tires continues to climb.
Analysts and experts expect the global motorcycle market to continue to expand, and that means more demand for motorcycle tires. It might not mean more demand for fat 190/55ZR17 rear tires for sport bikes, but a factory that makes those also makes tires for the mopeds, scooters and small-displacement motorbikes that drive urban mobility in some of the densest population centers on the planet. We should all be aware of and sensitive to the core equation of capitalism and consumerism: D – S = C, where D is Demand, S is Supply and C is cost. When demand goes up but supply does not, cost goes up—sometimes achingly so.
Finally, I can’t talk about the prices of anything without discussing the involvement of the U.S. government. With the closing of Dunlop’s motorcycle tire factor in Buffalo, New York, in 2024, there are now exactly zero motorcycle tire manufacturers operating in the United States. That means every motorcycle tire we buy is imported to here from somewhere else. Because of the tariff environment that’s existed since January 2025, the simple fact is that the cost of tires is going to be higher. As of this writing (22 March 2026), every country listed below in which motorcycle tires are manufactured is subject to tariffs on products they import into the USA. Where manufacturers and distributors cannot absorb these elevated costs, the tariffs are passed on to the consumers and that translates into higher prices for our motorcycle tires.
Manufacturing Regions for Motorcycle Tires
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- Bridgestone: Japan. The company invested $12.6 million in its Nasu plant to boost production to 90,000 tires per year by 2026.
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- Continental: Thailand, Germany.
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- Dunlop: Japan, Thailand, China, France, Germany, Brazil. The U.S. factory closed in 2024.
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- Michelin: Spain (premium/performance radials), Thailand (bias-ply), China, Japan, France (racing tires only).
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- Pirelli & Metzeler: Germany (primarily radials, sport and ADV), China (high-volume models), Brazil, Indonesia (primarily bias-ply), Argentina (Pirelli only)
Tariff Rates for Countries in Which Motorcycle Tires Are Made
This data came from the Center for Global Development (cgdev.org) and the UN Trade and Development (unctad.org) websites. The 2026 rates are what they call “trade weighted averages,” which takes into account a whole lot of things, while the 2025 rates are more closely aligned with manufacturing regulations and requirements, which are often affected by other things and can appear lower than what we actually see in operation. (NOTE: Imports from France, Germany and Spain are not typically subjected to individual tariffs, but rather the overall European Union tariff rates.)
We could see tariffs continue to fluctuate, possibly wildly, in the near future. In early March 2026, The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a huge number of tariffs based on the Trump administration justifying the tariffs with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The same week, President Trump used a different legal justification to announce a new 10% tariff on all goods entering the U.S., and a day after that, raised that tariff to 15%. These kinds of swift, unpredictable changes make it difficult for companies to plan and in some cases, has caused companies to shy away from importing anything into the United States at all. Obviously, this is not the case with motorcycle tire manufacturers, or at least not the ones with which Revzilla has distribution agreements.
How to Reduce Your Tire Cost
The real trick, then, is trying to find ways to reduce the cost of tires when it’s time for new ones on your motorcycle. There are always tips and tricks, after all! One thing you can do is ask your local dealer about price matching. Go in with hard data from an online retailer’s website and ask—politely!—if your dealer will match those prices. In many cases, they may already be doing so; Revzilla has become the 800-pound gorilla in the tire retailing world in a lot of ways. Still, prices aren’t going to come down and stay down in any meaningful way, so the bottom line is you can’t wait for prices to drop—you have to buy smart.
Keep an eye on other retailers and e-tailers for occasional sales, promotions, rebates and other specials. Michelin, Continental and Dunlop have all had promotions and rebates available to MOA members in the past few years and there’s no reason they wouldn’t continue to do so in the future. In addition, watch for news of a tire line being discontinued or superseded by a new model. When this happens, retailers will often drop prices by a lot to get rid of built-up stock and make room for the new model. For example, Metzeler recently released the Roadtec 02 model, which means Roadtec 01s are going to get cheaper sooner or later.
You can research average tire life until your brain hurts, but I’ve found the averages rarely apply to me. I still base my choices on them, because everything else is anecdotal. So if you know you’re going to ride 30,000 miles in the next year, buy two sets of tires when prices are lowest. Store them in a dry, climate-controlled place out of the sun; you can expect them to last a good, long time if stored like this.
Unfortunately, the worst time to buy new tires is March through May. Demand is increasing, inventories will start to drop and nobody is interested in giving either of us a deal. If you can plan ahead, buy between November and January when demand is the lowest. Watch for closeout sales when new models replace old ones and keep an eye out for rebates. Timing matters more than luck in this regard.
The lesson this has reinforced for me is that if you wait until you need tires, you’re going to pay whatever the market requires and you might not even get the tires you really wanted simply because they’re out of stock. I don’t need tires for my GS right now, and after doing this research, I’m glad I chose not to rush into buying anything. I just put new tires on the R 90/6, tires I bought in November. Sure, it was November 2025, but that wasn’t an accident. I planned it! Really!
If the GS tires start to look sketchy, I can live with letting the bike sit for a couple of months. That’s cheaper than overpaying—or worse, buying a set of 70/30s just because they’re in stock and I’m desperate. The last thing I want is to end up with tires that aren’t suited to my riding style simply because I have to have something right now.
Planning ahead and buying at the right time means that saving $50-100 on a set of tires is entirely realistic. That’s money we can spend on fuel and snacks instead of paying full price just because the calendar says it’s riding season.
Otherwise … enjoy your $500 tire bill as you realize it’s going to cost you even more money to get them installed.
Coming soon: buy a set of Continental motorcycle tires, get a year of MOA membership! Once this program goes active, it becomes a way you can save money—not on tires, specifically, but in general.
NOTE: A member commented to me that Revzilla—though big in the industry now—is not the only e-tailer selling tires over the internet. Check other major motorcycle parts and supplies vendors; they might have deals Revzilla does not.
If you’re interested in a way to save money by installing your own tires, check out the first video in a series I did with Mark Barnes on how to set up and use the Rabaconda tire changer. It’s easy enough that just about anybody can do it!