U.S. government surplus · 116,471 confirmed sales
The median government auction sells for $210, and it's a Ford Pickup
From May-August 2026, American federal, state and local agencies sold 116,471 items at public auction for a combined $289 million. Stack every one of those sales up by price and you get the curve below - a very long tail of almost worthless stuff, and a short head of things people fight over.
Every confirmed sale, by price
Bar height is how many lots sold in that price band. Bar color is how many people typically bid. Hover or tap to see what actually sold at that price.
Around the middle. Hover or tap the chart to see what sold at any price. Right now:
3 Pallets(12) Microfridges
Knoxville, TN
3 Point Rotary Cutter/PRE-OWNED/DS18350/98192/DSP
Frankfort, KY
Lot of Hand Tools, Pocket Knives and Multi-Tools
Montgomery, AL
122061/ 1998 Torino tilt trailer. Pros 26-09 #12
Miami, FL
≥ marks a lot whose source stopped reporting at close, so the real winning bid is that or higher.
116,471 completed U.S. government lots we can confirm sold, 6 May 2026 to 31 August 2026. Source: govauctions.app
The shape of the story
The single most common price in the whole dataset is $10, which is where a great many agencies set their opening bid and where a great many lots stop.
The money is somewhere else entirely. The cheapest half of these lots, about 58,000 sales, accounts for 1.2%. The most expensive one percent accounts for 39%. Almost all of the value in government surplus is in vehicles, heavy equipment and real estate; almost all of the volume is chairs, monitors, filing cabinets and pallets of electronics.
The far right of the chart gets strange. Eighteen UH-60L Black Hawk helicopters came out of Fort Hood and Alabama in this window, most of them attracting exactly one bidder at around $1.5 million. A former federal building in Grand Rapids went for $3.1 million. But the single highest confirmed hammer price of the summer was not an aircraft or a building. It was 45 reels of fiber optic cable in Fresno, at $1.82 million, with thirteen bidders.
One more thing worth noticing: the bars have a visible sawtooth through the middle of the chart. Bids cluster hard on round numbers, so bands containing $10, $25, $50 and $100 hold two to three times what their neighbors do.
The color carries the other half of the story. Nothing below about twenty dollars attracts more than a single bidder on a typical lot, and the count climbs steadily rightwards until lots over a few thousand dollars are drawing twenty, thirty, sometimes a hundred people.
Where each category sits
The bar is the middle half of that category's sales, the dot is its median, the line reaches its 90th percentile, and the color is the same competition scale as the chart above.
The numbers
| Price band | Lots sold | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Under $10 | 5,051 | 4.3% |
| $10 to $100 | 39,497 | 33.9% |
| $100 to $1,000 | 37,166 | 31.9% |
| $1,000 to $10,000 | 29,517 | 25.3% |
| $10,000 to $100,000 | 5,056 | 4.3% |
| $100,000 to $1,000,000 | 163 | 0.1% |
| $1,000,000 and up | 21 | <0.1% |
Percentiles: 10th $12, 25th $40, median $210, 75th $1,492, 90th $5,050, 99th $26,820. Mean $2,481, which is above the 75th percentile, because the mean of a distribution like this one describes almost nothing.
Browse the live data yourself
Everything on this chart has already closed. Here is what is open for bids right now:
Method
The population is every completed U.S. lot in our archive from a government seller that we can confirm sold, closing between 6 May 2026 and 31 August 2026: 116,471 auctions worth $289,019,966. “Confirmed sold” means the lot closed with at least one recorded bid. Lots that ended with no bidder, and lots where our sources do not report enough to tell either way, are excluded, which is why this count is smaller than our full completed-auction archive.
52% of these winning bids are re-fetched from the bid history after the lot closed. For the rest, the price is the last bid we observed and the real hammer price is that or slightly higher; those are the ones marked ≥ on the cards above. Both are included in the curve, since a floor price still lands in the right band at this resolution. Every lot named individually on this page is a confirmed winning bid. Prices are hammer prices and exclude buyer's premium, taxes and fees.
The horizontal axis is logarithmic, so each band covers prices within about 1.46x of each other and equal widths mean equal ratios rather than equal dollars. The bars are raw counts. The line is a Gaussian kernel density over log price with a bandwidth of 0.16 decades, drawn because bidders cluster on round numbers and the resulting sawtooth obscures the shape; the bars are left visible underneath so you can see exactly what the smoothing did. 13 lots priced under $1 fall off the left edge of the chart and are counted in every total.
Free to cite with attribution to GovAuctions. See also who actually wants the government's surplus and the State of Government Surplus report.