Want to buy a military plane, some gold coins and a $7,000 house? Welcome to the strange world of Government Auctions

Somewhere in America right now, in this time of sky-high mortgage rates and inflation, the government is selling a house for $7,200.

It's sold as-is by a federal agency that would rather be rid of it. And it's not alone. Of the 2,307 government-owned homes listed right now, 367 are under $100,000 across 39 states, 84 are under $50,000, and 23 are under $25,000. You can buy a house from the government for the price of a used car, and most people have no idea.

The government also sells seized gold coins and jewelry, decommissioned aircraft, police cruisers by the fleet, forklifts, ambulances, industrial kitchens from closed prisons, and in 2026, an entire school building for $250,000.

Despite the huge volume of bargain vehicles, electronics and real-estate, about 40% of lots get zero bids - nobody shows up at all.

Government surplus auctions are one of the last corners of American commerce where an ordinary person can routinely buy something for less than it is worth, because the competition just isn't there.

A gap that pays the rent

Every county, police department, school district, and federal agency accumulates stuff it eventually has to sell. By law most of it goes to public auction. In practice, those auctions are scattered across hundreds of obscure agency websites that almost nobody checks.

Anything with an obvious resale market - iPhones, popular truck models, brand-name tools - gets found and fought over. A pallet of 125 iPhones in our data drew 248 bidders. Everything else clears for a fraction of its value, or does not sell at all. A used Husqvarna riding mower went for $10, to the one person who bothered to click.

The people who do this for a living work that second bucket. They buy the $10 mower, replace a belt, and list it for $400. They buy the pallet nobody noticed. It is a quiet but real corner of the side-hustle economy: the resale world already runs on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, and government surplus is the underexploited supply feeding into it. The barrier is knowing where the auctions are.

What the whole market actually clears for

Because we archive final prices, the market has a number. Across the 120,852 completed U.S. auctions in our surplus price index window (May to August 2026), the median lot sold for $266. Not $266 off retail. $266, full stop. That is what the middle of the government's castoff is worth on the day it closes.

The categories underneath that median are moving in opposite directions. Over the trailing three months, government real estate is up 57% and heavy equipment is down 23%. Vehicles, the biggest category by volume, run a median of $2,100 a lot.

Prices are only half of it. The market report shows heavy equipment clears most reliably at 89% sell-through, with vehicles just behind at 88% - and both are the most contested, with vehicles drawing a median of 19 bids. At the other end, art and decor lots typically close with a single bid. The pattern holds everywhere in this market: the more obvious the resale value, the more people you have to beat.

Where the competition actually is

Bidding is not spread evenly. When we mapped 46,830 US government auctions by how many bids each lot drew, the heat concentrated hard in Texas, the South, and the rural West.

The map is live, so the hottest towns rotate. In late August 2026 the leaders were Thibodaux, Louisiana at 17.2 bids per lot, Gray, Georgia at 16.4, and Vinita, Oklahoma at 15.1. At state level the ranking is steadier: Kansas averages 8.3 bids per lot, Oklahoma 7.2, Missouri 6.8, while California sits at 1.0.

These regions churn out exactly the lots that resell well close to home - county and school-district fleet trucks, farm and shop equipment, work vehicles - and they have deep benches of local resellers who already know to check. In the big coastal metros the surplus skews thinner and the specialist buyers are fewer, so the same lot often draws a shrug.

There is a second reading of the same map: how far a lot climbs above its opening bid. On that measure Sioux Falls, South Dakota is the national outlier, with the average lot finishing at about 48 times where it started. A low opening bid is not a discount. It is bait, and in some markets it works.

Why so cheap?

It's cheap for a boring reason: the seller is not trying to make money. A county does not run a marketing budget for its old dump trucks. A federal agency holding a foreclosed home is not staging it for Instagram. They list where the law requires, wait the minimum time, and take what they get. The absence of a motivated seller is exactly what creates the opening for a motivated buyer.

There is a catch though, the cheapest homes are rough, sold as-is, and the smart buyers budget for repairs and inspect before they bid. The same discipline applies to a $10 mower or a pallet of phones. The edge is not that the stuff is free of problems. The edge is that so few people are looking that the price never gets bid up to what the item is actually worth.

The far end of the strange: a dollar, and a courthouse

Two things we built since first publishing this piece make the point better than any average can.

The first is the Dollar Wall, which shows every U.S. government lot open at a dollar or less. On the morning we last checked there were 837 of them: a buildable city lot outside St. Louis, police push bumpers for a Chevy Tahoe, a pair of silver earrings, a refrigerated storage trailer, a baby grand piano. Every one of those is a real listing at a real dollar, and most will close at or near it.

The second is the Museum of Things Nobody Wants, a gallery of lots the government cannot give away. The current collection includes a twenty-two-storey Miami-Dade courthouse listed at $35,410,000 that has sat since June without a single bid, $125,000 of EV chargers a transit district cannot move, and a water tower in North Carolina priced at $10, where what you are really buying is the job of taking it down.

Then there is the part of the catalogue that arrived through a seizure, an impound or a forfeiture. Taken tracks it live: 1,048 such lots on the block as we write, carrying about $5.5m in current bids. 315 are being sold out of law-enforcement property rooms, and 406 are vehicles that were towed and never collected. A seizure is not a conviction, and the listing tells you nothing about any person. It just tells you the item ended up on the same platform that sells the county's old filing cabinets.

Closing the information gap

That last problem - hundreds of agencies, no single place to look - is the one we're solving. GovAuctions.app pulls government auctions and government surplus auctions from across the country into one searchable feed, with sale-price history on tens of thousands of past lots so buyers can see what things actually go for before they bid.

The 40% zero-bid rate is not dropping to zero any time soon. There is too much surplus and too little attention. But every lot that gets found is one less deal left on the table - and, for the person who found it, a mower, a pallet of iPhones, or a $7,200 house that nobody else showed up for.

You can explore the full research behind this piece in our government surplus research hub, or browse live government auctions to see what is selling right now.