The periodic table of government surplus

Every week, U.S. governments auction off the stuff they no longer need — squad cars, laptops, lab gear, even a helicopter. We sorted 30,498 closed lots in our tracked GovDeals dataset into 24 categories and charted what each one actually sells for. Tap an element to see a real lot.

Most people never see a government surplus auction. The agency's goal is simply to clear the item off its books, so the prices land in places that would surprise you — which is the whole reason this market is interesting to resellers. Here's the periodic table of what your tax dollars become, colored by the median hammer price in each category.

Most surplus is cheap. A little of it isn't.

The first thing that jumps out: half of everything the government sells goes for almost nothing. The typical furniture lot closes at $20. Office gear, home goods, bikes and art mostly trade in the double digits — that's the long, cool-blue tail of surplus, pallets of chairs and monitors that agencies just need gone.

Then there are the warm cells. Pickup trucks and heavy trucks & buses carry the highest medians (around $3,850 and $3,550), and the single most expensive lot we tracked was a 2002 Sikorsky S-76C+ helicopter at $620,000. The same auction site sells both — which is exactly why a tool that knows what each lot is worth is useful.

But the auction price isn't the resale price

Everything in the table above is the acquisition side — what people paid at the government auction. The whole point of GavelGap is the other side: what an item is actually worth on the open market afterward. When we can verify resale against a trusted source — real eBay sold listings, equipment historicals, MarketCheck — and the lot then closed below that value, we publish it as a "receipt."

Those gap figures are measured only on the trusted-source receipts, not on every category above — we don't publish resale estimates we can't independently verify. See the receipts →

How we got these numbers

Every figure here comes from GavelGap's own database of closed GovDeals lots. The category medians and counts cover 30,498 lots that actually sold (final bid above $0) across the period we've been tracking. We rolled GovDeals' hundreds of granular categories into 24 readable buckets; a handful of lots land in a neighboring bucket because of how the source site labels them.

This is a snapshot of our tracked dataset, not a census of all U.S. government surplus — GovDeals is one (large) marketplace, and we don't see every lot on it. "Median hammer price" is what half of sold lots in a category closed below; it's the auction price, not a resale value. The example lots are real closed sales, picked to be representative or memorable. None of this is financial advice.

Why the prices land so low

The spread between a government auction price and open-market resale isn't a glitch — it's structural. Government sellers are liquidating, not maximizing: the mandate is to clear surplus, and listings open low. And the audience is small, because most people don't know GovDeals exists. Fewer bidders plus a seller who just wants it gone equals hammer prices well below what the same item is worth to a buyer who finds it elsewhere. That's the entire thesis behind GavelGap — the hard part isn't believing a gap exists, it's knowing which specific lot has one big enough to clear shipping, buyer's premium, and your time.

Prefer the full-screen version? This story also lives as a standalone interactive page at gavelgap.com/surplus-periodic-table. Related reading: the life of a police cruiser and the best things to flip from government auctions.