The average government auction is just 6 miles away.
55,738 live lots, almost all pickup only. The median US ZIP code has one 5.7 miles away.
55,738 live lots, almost all pickup only.
Every red dot is a vehicle or a piece of heavy equipment, blue is real estate, grey is everything else. Enter your ZIP and we will draw the line from you to the closest one.
It’s all about distance
Government surplus is sold where it sits. Shipping is usually unavailable, and the winner typically has about ten business days to turn up with a trailer and take it away. So the same truck is worth more to someone twenty minutes away than to someone two states over.
Most of the country is closer than it thinks
Share of the 42,151 US ZIP codes we could place, not share of people. We do not hold population data, so an empty rural ZIP counts the same as a dense urban one, which pushes these numbers down rather than up.
Auction deserts
Access is wildly uneven. The typical ZIP has 637 lots inside a 2 hour drive. The best has 5,108. These have nothing at all.
| Place | Nearest lot | Within 2 hours |
|---|---|---|
| Frenchville, ME 04745 | 157 mi | 0 |
| Saint Agatha, ME 04772 | 155 mi | 0 |
| Fort Kent, ME 04743 | 141 mi | 0 |
| Grand Isle, ME 04746 | 140 mi | 0 |
| Hinsdale, MT 59241 | 139 mi | 0 |
| Mapleton, ME 04757 | 139 mi | 0 |
| Van Buren, ME 04785 | 138 mi | 0 |
| New Sweden, ME 04762 | 136 mi | 0 |
| Limestone, ME 04750 | 135 mi | 0 |
| Ashland, ME 04732 | 135 mi | 0 |
Lower 48 only. Alaska is worse: several island ZIPs sit more than 400 miles from the nearest lot, which would otherwise be this entire table.
Methodology
- 55,738 live US lots with usable coordinates, from the sources we track, as of 2026-10-18. 7869 live lots had no usable coordinate and are excluded.
- Distances and the line on the map are straight lines between ZIP centroids and lot coordinates, not routed drive times. Real driving is longer everywhere, and much longer in mountains, on islands and around bays.
- Everything here is weighted by ZIP code, not by population, so none of these figures should be read as a share of Americans.
- Lots close constantly, so your answer can change hour to hour. The four cards beside the nearest one are picked for variety: a vehicle, a house, something odd, something under $100, whichever of those exist within a 2 hour drive.
Free to cite and republish with a link back. The full live dataset is also available.