Affordable long-distance one-way rentals?
 

Can anyone recommend a one-way rental between say Chicago and California or vice versa (for about one to two weeks)? Everything I found so far comes with hefty one-way or drop charges of $400 or up.
I have been able to find decent offers between California and Seattle, Denver, Nevada or Arizona, but for anything further I did not find anything useful.
Any hints would be greatly appreciated.

Man, you gonna have a tough time finding a rental company that will do this.

What I Suggest is thinking off the grid, doing something like checking sites like reddit and craigslist.com. Try to find someone who easy will rent you a car, or wants to move their car across the country. People pay 1200$ for someone to do this, so they might be willing to cut you a deal.

Go to the rental car forums here on FT, an search the discount codes threads of the major agencies for corporate codes. Some of these waive the one-way fees.

you are not going to find one.

You can find one way routes at certain times of year where you take cars from PHX/LAS to California and other states in MAy/June then back there in October. Similarly from FLorida you can find one way rental deals oin April outbound after eater week then back down to floriday in October/november

Could you please point out some example of such one-way rental deal for certain times of year? I'm looking for something in Oct./Nov., so that might fit.

Last summer we rented a car at SFO and returned it to SEA, driving for a week in between from one to the other. I think the total was around $700. Not sure what you consider "affordable." I consider that steep, but our trip was otherwise free except for food (used miles and points for flights and hotels), so it wasn't a big deal in the context of our overall trip budget.

SFO (or LAX) to SEA or vice versa can be had free of one-way-fees from certain European tour operators (they probably don't sell to North American residents though). I rented one with Alamo for ca. $450 all in and fully insured for 12 days last fall.

I was wondering whether anyone knows of similar offers for something like Midwest to California or Arizona.

I now found a solution: if you book Europcar/Advantage though certain German booking sites (e.g. Cardelmar or Check24) there is a one-way charge of explicitly 0.00 USD. This seems to work between all Advantage locations in the US.
A second option is to book with Hertz via German booking site billiger-mietwagen.de which gives me "no one-way rental fees" for itineraries between California and Chicago (but not reverse) and maybe others, too.
LAX/SFO to/from SEA with zero one-way surcharges (explicit nor hidden ones) can still be had with Alamo via a couple of German booking sites.
Those offers are likely limited to non-US residents, and of course payment is made in Euros (but prices are very competitive anyway, especially if you consider the insurance packages included).