govauctions/us-gsa-surplus-auctions

U.S. Government (GSA) Surplus Auction Dataset

This dataset lists completed U.S. federal surplus auction lots sold through GSA Auctions (https://gsaauctions.gov), one row per lot. It is compiled and published by GovAuctions.app (https://govauctions.app) and is the lot-level companion to the GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index (https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index).

Canonical page: https://govauctions.app/research/open-dataset Source repository, updated monthly: https://github.com/benswork-space/us-government-surplus-dataset

Attribution required (CC BY 4.0). If you use this data, credit it as:

Source: U.S. Government (GSA) Surplus Auction Dataset, GovAuctions.app, https://govauctions.app/research/open-dataset (CC BY 4.0)

Coverage

11,694 lots with auction end dates from 2026-05-06 to 2026-08-31 (since May 2026, when our archive begins), across 55 states and territories and 17 categories. 7,504 lots have a recorded bid. Snapshot generated 2026-09-01. GSA Auctions only: other federal, state and local government sales are not in this file.

Files

• us-gsa-surplus-auctions.csv: the lots, CSV (RFC 4180).
• us-gsa-surplus-auctions.json: the same lots as a JSON array.
• manifest.json: row count, date range, columns and licence, machine-readable.

Columns

Column	Meaning
id	Stable lot id.
title	Lot title as listed by GSA (a U.S. government work).
category	Normalized category.
condition	Condition as reported by GSA, when present.
seller_type	Selling level, for example federal.
state	Lot location, two-letter state or territory code.
city	Lot location city, when present.
zip	Lot location ZIP code, when present. Read it as text: leading zeros matter.
currency	Always USD.
starting_bid	Opening price. Empty on every row: GSA does not expose one on the listings collected. Kept for schema stability; a blank is not $0.
current_or_final_bid	The current or last observed bid. A bid level, not a confirmed sale price.
bid_count	Number of bids observed.
buyer_premium_pct	Buyer's premium percentage, when applicable.
sold	true, false or unknown. Derived; unknown when the outcome could not be determined.
ended_at	Auction end date, YYYY-MM-DD, UTC.
source_url	Link to the original GSA listing.

What the numbers are, and are not

• Bids, not settled prices. current_or_final_bid is the current or last observed bid. Awards can fall through, so treat it as a bid level. Prices are heavily right-skewed; use medians, not means.
• The sold flag is derived. In this snapshot 7,423 lots are true, 4,145 are false and 126 are unknown. Filtering on sold != false keeps the unknowns; filter on sold == true for a positive sale signal.
• starting_bid is empty on every row. Do not read a blank as $0.
• Data only. No images and no personal information: every seller is a federal agency.

Licence and citation

GSA listings are works of the U.S. government and are not subject to copyright (17 U.S.C. 105). This compilation is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Please attribute:

Source: U.S. Government (GSA) Surplus Auction Dataset, GovAuctions.app, https://govauctions.app/research/open-dataset (CC BY 4.0)

Citation:

GovAuctions.app (2026). U.S. Government (GSA) Surplus Auction Dataset, snapshot 2026-09-01. https://govauctions.app/research/open-dataset

Updates

The dataset is rebuilt on the 1st of each month and added here as a new version. Each version replaces the files with a larger snapshot; the date range above says what a given version covers.

Related

• GovAuctions.app Surplus Price Index, frozen monthly median prices by category for the US, UK, Canada and Australia: https://govauctions.app/research/surplus-price-index

Load it

from datasets import load_dataset

lots = load_dataset("govauctions/us-gsa-surplus-auctions", split="train")