U.S. government surplus · 70,000+ completed auctions
40% of government auctions get zero bids
Two in five lots close with no bidder at all - and even the ones that do sell mostly go to the single person who bothered to show up. Below is every sold lot in a representative sample, plotted by what it sold for and how many people fought over it. Drag your eye from the cheap pile on the left to the contested stuff on the right.
Every sold lot: price vs. how many people wanted it
Each dot is one real completed auction. Hover any dot for the item. Filter by category.
Sample of 2,240 completed U.S. lots from sources with a reliable bid count (GovDeals, GSA, MiBid). Source: govauctions.app
There's a dense floor of coral along the bottom-left - thousands of cheap lots that sold for a few dollars to the one bidder who wanted them. As price climbs, the dots lift and turn green: the valuable stuff - vehicles, heavy equipment - is where real competition lives. As Washington argues over government efficiency and what to cut, the auction data shows the other half of the story: a huge share of what the government is already trying to sell, almost nobody wants. The clearest case is the lone dot stranded at the far right: a former school in Pinetta, Florida that sold for $250,000 - and even at that price, exactly one person bid.
Method
The 40% figure is from 70,739 completed U.S. government auctions with a reliable sold/no-sale signal (sources that report a trustworthy bid count: GovDeals, GSA, MiBid); “zero bids” means the lot closed with no bid recorded. To check that daily snapshots weren't missing last-minute bids, we re-pulled the true closing bid for 4,500+ recently-ended GovDeals lots: 99.7% of the zero-bid ones never received a competitive bid. The chart shows a 2,240-lot representative sample of the lots that did sell, plotted by final price and bid count.
Free to cite with attribution to GovAuctions. See also the State of Government Surplus report.