govauctions/surplus-price-index

GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index

This dataset is the GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index: median final sale prices of completed government surplus auction lots, by category, for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. It is compiled by GovAuctions.app (https://govauctions.app) from the official government auction platforms it aggregates in each market.

Canonical page: https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index Methodology: https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index/methodology

Attribution required (CC BY 4.0). If you use or quote these figures, credit them as:

Source: GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index, https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index (CC BY 4.0)

Frozen monthly releases

The index is published as frozen monthly releases. Each release has a fixed id (for example US-2026-09) and its figures never change after publication, so a number cited from a release can still be checked later. Next month's figures are a new release with a new id, added to this dataset as a new version; earlier releases stay in the dataset unchanged. The live index on the website is rebuilt daily and will differ from any release.

Releases in this version:

Coverage

Each release uses a trailing 365-day window, but our archive of completed lots is younger than that. The September 2026 releases cover completed lots since May 2026 for the United States and Canada, and since June 2026 for the United Kingdom and Australia, up to 2026-09-04. They are not twelve months of data.

Files

• —price-index/govauctions-surplus-price-index-MARKET-YYYY-MM.csv: one file per release, one row per category. Every row carries its own source, source_url and license columns, so the attribution survives any subset of rows. This version contains price-index/govauctions-surplus-price-index-us-2026-09.csv, price-index/govauctions-surplus-price-index-uk-2026-09.csv, price-index/govauctions-surplus-price-index-ca-2026-09.csv, price-index/govauctions-surplus-price-index-au-2026-09.csv.
• —facts/govauctions-research-facts.csv (and facts/govauctions-research-facts.json): a snapshot of the citable-facts feed at https://govauctions.app/research/facts.json, taken with data as of 2026-09-10. 62 rows, one quotable sentence each.

Price index columns

Facts columns

What the numbers are, and are not

• —Price basis. hammer-estimated (US, CA): lots whose true hammer price was captured after close are used as-is; the rest are corrected for late bidding by a factor measured per category against lots where both figures are known. last-observed-bid (UK, AU): the last bid observed before close, which can understate the final price.
• —Levels only. No month-over-month or region-versus-region movement is published. It is withheld until the archive has six or more complete months, because with a shorter series a change in a category median mostly reflects a change in what was in the basket.
• —Flat-rate lots. mode_price and mode_share show the single most common exact price in a category and how many lots sold at it. When the share is high, the median partly reflects an agency's disposal policy rather than a market price.
• —Minimum sample. A category appears in a release only with at least 100 completed lots. The unclassified "miscellaneous" bucket is excluded.
• —Scope. A census of the platforms GovAuctions.app aggregates, not of all government disposal. Agencies that sell privately or locally are not in it.
• —Aggregates only. No individual listings, no images and no personal information.
• —Facts versus releases. The facts file is a dated copy of a feed that is rebuilt daily, so its values can differ slightly from the frozen releases. For example, the median for vehicles is 2,513 USD in release US-2026-09 (data as of 2026-09-04) and 2,500 USD in the facts snapshot (data as of 2026-09-10). To quote a number that will not move, cite the release.

Licence and citation

Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. You may copy, share and adapt the data, including commercially, provided you give attribution.

Attribution line:

Source: GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index, https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index (CC BY 4.0)

To cite one release, use its own citation, for example:

GovAuctions.app (2026). Surplus Price Index, release US-2026-09. https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index/us-2026-09

BibTeX:

@misc{govauctions_surplus_price_index,
  author       = {{GovAuctions.app}},
  title        = {{GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {Frozen monthly releases, US-2026-09, UK-2026-09, CA-2026-09, AU-2026-09. CC BY 4.0},
  howpublished = {\url{https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index}}
}

Updates

A new release for each market is published at the start of each month and added here as a new version. Release pages and the release history: https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index

Related

• —U.S. Government (GSA) Surplus Auction Dataset, lot-level federal data under CC BY 4.0: https://govauctions.app/research/open-dataset

Load it

from datasets import load_dataset

index = load_dataset("govauctions/surplus-price-index", "price_index", split="train")
facts = load_dataset("govauctions/surplus-price-index", "facts", split="train")