Honda's Best-Selling Cruiser of 2025: The Rebel 500
Updated: Sep 2
The 2025 Rebel 500 got a revised seat and a revised handlebar position, and nothing else. It is still the best-selling cruiser in the industry, and for once that is not our inference. It is Honda's own wording, applied to the Rebel 500 by name.
This is the one year in this series where the single-model claim is on the record. In its 2026 model year release Honda calls the Rebel 500 the industry's best-selling cruiser, singling out the 500 instead of claiming the Rebel 300 and 500 as a pair the way nearly every earlier release did. Honda still publishes no US sales by model, so this remains a company claim rather than a counted figure, but it is the clearest single-model statement any of the four manufacturers in this series has made. We still stop at cruiser rather than stretching it across Honda's whole street range.
The 2025 Rebel 500
471cc liquid-cooled parallel twin, 27.2 inch seat, 408 pounds at the curb, 414 with ABS and 419 for the ABS SE. Prices held at $6,499, $6,799 and $6,999, unchanged from 2024. Honda Europe publishes 31.9 lb-ft at 6,000 rpm for the 25YM bike, and Honda's US operation still publishes no torque figure for this engine in any year.
The change for 2025 is a revised seat and handlebar position on both the Rebel 300 and the Rebel 500. That is an ergonomics update, not a mechanical one. It is also, in six model years, the only time Honda has gone back and adjusted how the rider sits on this bike, which makes it more significant than the size of the change suggests. The Rebel 1100 range was updated for the same model year.
The quote, and what Honda did next
Attribution matters on this one, so here it is explicitly: the phrase the industry's best-selling cruiser comes from Honda's 2026 model year release, not from 2025 marketing and not from an independent count. Every other Honda claim quoted across this series has been a paired claim covering the Rebel 300 and 500 together, or a segment claim about small-displacement or entry-level cruisers. This is the first time Honda has put a single model's name in front of the superlative.
What Honda did alongside that claim tells you where the line is going. For 2026 the non-ABS Rebel 500 is dropped entirely and ABS becomes standard at $6,799. The automatic E-Clutch goes onto the Rebel 300. Which means the automation that started with the Rebel 1100 DCT at $9,999 in 2021 has, in five model years, reached the cheapest bike in the family.
Read the two moves together and the direction is obvious. Honda spent the period from 2021 to 2026 taking the two things that stop people buying a first motorcycle, the clutch and the fear of locking a wheel, and making them somebody else's problem. It started at $9,999 on the most expensive Rebel and finished as standard equipment on the cheapest. Nothing in the engine or the chassis changed while that happened.
One qualifier on all of this. A model-level claim is not a brand-level one, and the two moved in different directions. Kawasaki passed both Honda and Harley-Davidson for the US number one position in 2025, so Honda holding the best-selling cruiser and Honda leading the American market are separate statements, and only the first one is currently supportable.
How to read the 2025 bike as a buyer
If you have sat on an earlier Rebel and found the reach or the seat did not suit you, the 2025 revision is the single change in six model years aimed at exactly that complaint. It is worth a test sit rather than an assumption in either direction, because the specification sheet will not show you the difference: seat height is 27.2 inches on this bike as it has been on every other one in this series.
Between a 2025 and a 2024, the engine, the chassis, the seat height and the prices are identical. What differs is the seat and bar position and, on the SE, three pounds of curb weight. That is a thin argument for paying a used premium, and a reasonable argument for going and sitting on both.
If you are buying new around the model changeover, the $6,499 non-ABS bike is the one leaving the range. ABS at $6,799 is what the Rebel 500 becomes, and paying $300 to avoid the version the manufacturer discontinued is not a difficult call. For how the bike holds up past the showroom, we collected owner accounts in our Rebel 500 owner reports.
Standing at the end of six model years, the summary is short. Honda refreshed this motorcycle once, in 2020, adjusted where the rider sits once, in 2025, moved the price by $300 in total, and led the segment throughout. Over the same period Harley-Davidson rebuilt the Street Glide, Indian replaced the Scout's engine, and BMW replaced the GS. Honda's answer to a changing market was to leave a $6,499 motorcycle alone, and that answer kept working.
The short version
2025 is the year the Rebel 500's claim finally got specific, on the back of a change to where the rider sits and nothing else. For the wider picture, see the best-selling motorcycles of 2025, and for the Rebel against Harley-Davidson, Indian and BMW in the same year, see our 2025 four-brand comparison.
Cover photo: "Honda CMX500 Rebel parked at Hogs for Hospice, Leamington, Ontario, 2025-08-02" by Chris Woodrich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
