Between 2025 and June 2026, 26 auction companies cataloged 24,436 estate auction lots through Gavelist, photographing them with 101,455 photos. For 3,274 of those lots, we matched the catalog records to actual settlement reports from completed no-reserve sales — so we know not just what was in the estates, but what it sold for.
This post publishes the aggregate numbers. The short version: the median estate auction lot hammers at $6, sell-through at no-reserve sales runs 96%, and the top 10% of lots produce 53% of the revenue. Those three facts together explain most of what makes estate auction economics hard — and where the time actually pays off.
Methodology
All figures come from the Gavelist production database as of June 10, 2026:
- Catalog corpus: 24,436 lots across 147 cataloging jobs from 26 auction companies, primarily estate and onsite auctions in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. 18,651 lots have complete AI-generated descriptions; category figures below use that described corpus.
- Sale outcomes: 3,274 lots matched to uploaded post-sale settlement reports across 5 completed sales (HiBid-platform, no-reserve). 3,207 sold lots had a recorded hammer price above zero. Prices are hammer only — buyer’s premium excluded.
- Caveats: The outcome sample skews to one region and to no-reserve estate sales. It is not a national price index, and hammer prices at no-reserve sales run well below retail-replacement values. Where a subsample is small, we say so.
What’s actually inside an estate
Category distribution across 18,651 described lots:
| Category | Lots | Share of corpus |
|---|---|---|
| General household | 6,038 | 32.4% |
| Toys & collectibles | 4,218 | 22.6% |
| Pottery & glass | 2,870 | 15.4% |
| Tools | 1,459 | 7.8% |
| Antiques & furniture | 1,248 | 6.7% |
| Art | 593 | 3.2% |
| Designer goods | 484 | 2.6% |
| Jewelry | 433 | 2.3% |
| Electronics & audio | 428 | 2.3% |
| Sports memorabilia | 328 | 1.8% |
Two things surprise most people here. First, “general household” — the kitchenware, linens, décor, and miscellany — is a third of everything. Second, toys and collectibles outnumber antiques and furniture more than three to one. The popular image of an estate auction is brown furniture; the actual median estate is closer to a collectibles shop with a kitchen attached.
Structurally, 80.7% of tiered lots are standard single-item or small-group lots, 12.3% are box lots, and 7.0% are feature lots — the standout pieces an auctioneer pulls forward for individual attention.
What it sells for: the $6 median
Across 3,207 sold lots with recorded prices, total hammer was $42,481. That works out to:
- Median hammer price: $6
- Mean hammer price: $13.25 (the mean is more than double the median because a small number of strong lots pull it up)
- Sell-through rate: 96.0% (3,144 of 3,274 matched lots sold — the expected result at no-reserve, where nearly everything finds a price)
Within the matched lots that carried tier labels (a 408-lot subsample, so treat the feature figure as directional):
| Lot tier | Sold lots | Median hammer |
|---|---|---|
| Feature lot | 13 | $27 |
| Standard lot | 361 | $6 |
| Box lot | 34 | $1 |
A feature lot’s median is 27 times a box lot’s. That ratio is the entire argument for tiering your effort: the box lot and the feature lot each take a photo session and a description, but one of them is worth real money.
Where the money concentrates
Ranking all 3,207 sold lots by hammer price:
- The top 10% of lots produced 53.0% of total hammer revenue.
- The top 20% produced 68.1%.
By category, revenue per lot diverges sharply from lot counts. General household is the biggest category by volume but one of the weakest per lot; tools are the quiet workhorse:
| Category | Sold lots | Total hammer | Avg per lot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tools | 405 | $10,499 | $25.92 |
| General household | 1,056 | $9,700 | $9.19 |
| Toys & collectibles | 666 | $7,967 | $11.96 |
| Pottery & glass | 488 | $4,675 | $9.58 |
| Antiques & furniture | 210 | $3,654 | $17.40 |
| Jewelry | 37 | $1,451 | $39.22 |
Jewelry posts the highest average per lot ($39.22) on a small sample; tools post the highest total because volume and price are both solid. If you are deciding which categories justify extra photography and longer descriptions, this table is the answer: jewelry, tools, and furniture pay for the attention; general household mostly doesn’t.
The $6 lot problem
Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic the median creates. At a typical 35% seller’s commission, a $6 hammer earns the auction company about $2.10. If a staff member spends four minutes photographing and writing that lot at $18/hour, the description alone cost $1.20 — 57% of the commission, before pickup, setup, or settlement touch the books. (Illustrative math; your commission structure and labor rates will vary, but the shape of the problem doesn’t.)
The data says the median lot cannot carry meaningful per-lot labor. It also says you cannot simply skip the cheap lots: they are 90% of the catalog and still produce 47% of the revenue in aggregate. The workable strategy the numbers point to is asymmetric effort — near-zero marginal time on the standard and box lots, human attention concentrated on the ~10% of lots that produce half the money. That is, candidly, the workflow problem Gavelist was built around, and it’s why we’ve written before about the real cost of manual cataloging and faster estate cataloging workflows. But the unit economics hold whatever tooling you use: a cataloging process that costs more than ~$1 of labor per lot is underwater on the median estate lot.
Operational benchmarks from the corpus
A few additional aggregates auctioneers ask us about:
- Average job size: 212 lots. The largest single cataloging job in the corpus was 1,156 lots.
- Photos per lot: 3.6 average, 3 median. Multi-photo coverage (overview plus marks, condition, and detail shots) is now the norm even at high volume — relevant if you’ve read our piece on why every angle matters for AI identification.
- Estimate coverage: 18,144 of 24,436 lots (74%) carry an AI-generated low/high value range at catalog time.
One honest finding on those estimate ranges: matched against no-reserve hammer prices, 83% of sold lots hammered below the catalog low estimate. Catalog estimates describe what an item is worth in a retail or replacement context; a no-reserve country auction is a wholesale market. Anyone — human appraiser or AI — quoting retail-context ranges will sit above no-reserve hammer results, which is exactly why estimates belong in marketing and insurance conversations, not in revenue projections for a no-reserve sale.
Key takeaways
- The median estate auction lot sells for $6 at no-reserve (mean $13.25, n=3,207 sold lots, PA/OH/WV, 2025–2026).
- No-reserve sell-through runs 96%.
- 10% of lots generate 53% of revenue; 20% generate 68%.
- Feature lots hammer at a median 27x box lots ($27 vs $1).
- General household goods are 32% of estate lots; toys and collectibles (23%) outnumber antiques and furniture (7%) three to one.
- Tools are the top revenue category in total; jewelry leads per lot at $39.22 average.
- Per-lot cataloging labor above roughly $1 is underwater on the median lot.
Citing this study: figures may be cited as “Gavelist Lot Data Study (2026),” based on 24,436 cataloged lots and 3,274 matched sale results from 26 auction companies, published June 2026 at gavelist.com. We’ll refresh the numbers as the matched-sale sample grows.