Every price on Equipment Values is a closed sale in US dollars, read from the seller's own public results, and every statistic is computed from those sales by one stated method. This page is that method, so a reader can tell what a figure means before using it.
Where do the sold prices come from?
Equipment Values reads closed sales from three auction families: Ritchie Bros., Purple Wave, and the Sandhills auctioneers whose results post on MachineryTrader, TractorHouse and TruckPaper. Each row carries the house, the sale date, the place and, where the house prints one, the lot number and the serial or VIN. The site holds 117,609 sales from the 24 months through November 3, 2026, across 1,413 auction houses. New sales are added nightly from public sale results, and the appraisal team reviews the figures before they publish. Public sale records, such as county sealed-bid sales, and dealer sales are the next sources being added. Heavy Equipment Appraisal does not buy, sell, broker or auction equipment, and the figures on this site come from other companies' closed sales.
Which price is counted?
The statistic on every page is the hammer price, the amount the winning bid reached before the buyer's premium. Ritchie Bros. prints hammer. Purple Wave prints a contract price that includes a ten percent buyer's premium, so the hammer is derived by removing it, and the row says so. Sandhills auctioneers print the price as published, with no stated premium, so those rows count as published and the row says so. A sales list shows the published price with its basis tag beside it.
What do the statistics mean?
The median is the middle sale: half the counted sales closed above it and half below. "8 in 10 sold between" is the 10th to the 90th percentile of the counted sales. A year band groups model years so each band holds enough sales to mean something; an hours band or a miles band does the same for the meter. The count beside every figure is the number of sales behind it, and a figure with fewer than ten sales is not published as a statistic.
What is left out?
- A sale that appears twice, at the same house or republished by another, counts once. The key carries the lot number, so two identical machines sold on the same day both count.
- A row with no price, or a sale date after the day it was read, is a parse defect and is excluded.
- A price flagged as suspect, such as a figure that cannot be a whole-machine sale, is listed on the sales list with a tag and left out of every figure, chart and lookup.
- Attachments, tools and import mini units sold new as their own lots are typed out of the hub statistics, so a hub median counts whole used machines of the type it names. A cheap real machine is a real sale and stays in.
- Sales held outside the United States are left out of every figure; those priced in US dollars are listed with a tag. The statistics are US sales in US dollars.
- A listing, an asking price or a dealer list price is never counted. Only closed sales.
What can the numbers not show?
A sold-price median is what similar machines sold for, not the value of one machine. A model year is on 89% of rows. An hour meter is on 15% of all rows, because trucks carry miles instead and attachments have no meter; on whole machines where the seller prints one, the share runs from six in ten to nine in ten by type. Miles are on 6% and a serial or VIN on 21%, so condition, configuration and meter are known for some rows and not others, and a year band says nothing about the hours inside it. Buyers, locations and seasons move prices, and each seller's mix changes month to month. The figures describe the market; a certified appraisal settles the value of your machine, from your own hours, condition and configuration, for a stated use.
Corrections
Corrections to the method are dated and listed here, with the figure they changed.
- : statistics basis set to hammer; attachments, tool lots and import mini units typed out of hub statistics; the dedupe key carries the lot number; a change figure is shown only when the prior window holds at least half the current window's sales and at least 10.