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:

Release	Market	Currency	Lots	Overall median	Coverage	Data as of	Price basis	Release page
US-2026-09	United States	USD	135,590	300 USD	since May 2026	2026-09-04	hammer-estimated	https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index/us-2026-09
UK-2026-09	United Kingdom	GBP	8,261	42 GBP	since June 2026	2026-09-04	last-observed-bid	https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index/uk-2026-09
CA-2026-09	Canada	CAD	9,227	270 CAD	since May 2026	2026-09-04	hammer-estimated	https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index/ca-2026-09
AU-2026-09	Australia	AUD	41,713	118 AUD	since June 2026	2026-09-04	last-observed-bid	https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index/au-2026-09

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

Column	Meaning
release_id	Frozen release id, for example US-2026-09. Never reused.
country	Market: US, UK, CA or AU.
currency	ISO 4217 currency of every price in the row.
category_slug	Category key.
category_label	Category name as used in the published sentences.
median	Median final sale price of completed lots in the category.
p25	25th percentile of the same prices.
p75	75th percentile of the same prices.
sale_count	Completed lots behind the figures.
mode_price	The most common exact price in the category.
mode_share	Share of lots (0 to 1) that sold at exactly mode_price. High values flag flat-rate disposal lots.
basis	Which price the figures are: hammer-estimated or last-observed-bid (see below).
window_days	Trailing window of the release, in days. Coverage is shorter while the archive is younger than the window.
data_as_of	Date of the data the release was cut from.
published_at	Date the release was frozen.
source	Attribution: GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index.
source_url	The release page that shows these figures.
license	CC BY 4.0.
license_url	Licence URL.

Facts columns

Column	Meaning
id	Stable fact id. Never renumbered or reused.
statement	One quotable sentence that already contains the number and names its source.
value	The number in the statement.
unit	currency, count or percent.
currency	ISO 4217 code when unit is currency.
sampleSize	Lots behind the value.
method	How the value was computed, in one line.
page	Page on govauctions.app that shows the number in context.
asOf	Timestamp of the underlying data.
country	Market: US, UK, CA or AU.
topic	market, category, region or sell-through.
windowDays	Trailing window of the value, in days.
caveat	A known way the number can mislead. Empty when there is none.
citeAs	Suggested citation for the row.
license	Licence URL (CC BY 4.0).

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")