Free Boat Value Lookup: What Replaced NADA Guides (2026)

You searched “NADA boat values,” landed on a page that wanted your name and email before it would show you anything, and you still don’t have a number for the boat you’re staring at. NADAguides.com doesn’t exist anymore — the domain redirects to nada.org and dead-ends in a 404. The values didn’t disappear, but they moved, and the free versions and the paid versions now measure noticeably different things. Here’s where a normal buyer gets a real number in 2026, and what each source is actually telling you.

The short answer

Three lookups will hand you a number today without charging you anything:

• J.D. Power boat values — the direct descendant of NADA Guides, at jdpower.com/boats. Free, no account required. You pick make, model, year, engine and options, and it returns an average retail value for a base-equipment boat.
• Boat Trader Price Checker — free, no signup, at boattrader.com/price-checker. Enter year, make, model and ZIP, set a search radius, and it returns low, median and high price points drawn from listings across the Boats Group marketplace.
• BUCValu — free, but the consumer tier is capped at three unique price views over a four-month period. The same boat can be viewed unlimited times; it’s three different boats you’re rationed to.

The books that dealers, lenders and insurers actually run on are not free:

Source	What it costs (2026)	Who it’s for
J.D. Power boat values (web)	Free, no account	Consumers
Boat Trader Price Checker	Free, no account	Consumers
BUCValu consumer	Free, 3 views / 4 months	Consumers
ABOS single-boat lookup	$32.95 one-off	Anyone
ABOS Marine Blue Book	$334.95/year	Dealers, lenders, insurers
J.D. Power Marine Appraisal Guide	$391/year, or $220 single edition	Trade
J.D. Power Marine Connect (online)	$504/year, single user	Dealers
SoldBoats (BoatWizard)	Subscription, gated	Brokers, dealers, surveyors, lenders, insurers

The practical verdict: run two free lookups, not one, and treat the gap between them as the real answer. A single number from a single source is a false precision that will cost you money in the negotiation.

Where NADA actually went

J.D. Power acquired NADA Guides in 2015 and folded the marine data into its own valuation business. The NADAguides consumer brand has since been retired. Nothing was lost in the move — the same guide is still published — but it’s now sold under J.D. Power’s names, and that’s why searching “NADA boat value” scatters you across a dozen lead-capture sites that are simply wrapping J.D. Power’s data behind a form.

That’s the trap worth naming. Sites like ValueMyTradeIn and various dealer trade-in widgets return “NADA boat values” only after you hand over a name, email and often a phone number. They’re using the same underlying J.D. Power data you can get for free at the source, and your contact details are the price. Go to jdpower.com/boats directly.

What each source is really measuring

This is where most buyers go wrong. These tools are not four attempts at the same number — they’re four different questions.

A book value is a modeled figure for a model, not a boat. The J.D. Power Marine Appraisal Guide publishes three separate figures for each boat: Used Trade-In, Average Retail and High Retail. Coverage runs to boats up to 60 feet, and it carries about 15 years of pricing history. Critically, the printed guidebook uploads only three times a year — January, May and September — with the companion app refreshed six times a year. That’s a considered, slow-moving number, which is exactly what a lender wants and exactly what a buyer negotiating in August against a market that moved in June does not.

ABOS is the other book. Published by Price Digests and running since 1949, ABOS covers model years 1976 to present across inboards, stern drives, outboards, sailboats, pontoons, houseboats, personal watercraft, outboard motors and trailers. It reports MSRP, Retail, High and Low. It is genuinely a business-to-business product — the $334.95 annual subscription is aimed at insurers, finance firms, government agencies and dealers — but the $32.95 single-boat lookup is open to anyone and produces a downloadable report. That’s a fair price if you’re about to spend $60,000 and want a third, independent opinion.

BUCValu is built differently, and says so. BUC states its values come from “Used Boat Sales Reports received from corresponding dealers, brokers and surveyors, and through analysis of current listing prices.” Two things matter in that sentence. It blends actual reported sales with asking prices, and it leans on the broker channel. Its default output also assumes a vessel in BUC condition in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic — the free tier hands you a condition table and expects you to adjust for your own region and condition by hand. Automatic condition and location adjustment is a paid feature.

Boat Trader’s Price Checker is not a book at all. It reads live marketplace inventory by make, model, year and location and reports what sellers are asking right now. It is the most current of the free tools and the most contaminated by wishful pricing, because an asking price is a seller’s opening bid, not a transaction.

The one source that measures completed sales is the one you can’t have. SoldBoats, inside Boats Group’s BoatWizard platform, holds actual brokered sale prices and days-to-sale, and access is restricted to brokers, dealers, surveyors, marine lenders and insurers. There is no consumer-facing sold-price database for used boats in the United States. That single fact explains most of the frustration in this search.

Why boat book values are weaker than car book values

Car valuation rests on an enormous, VIN-level transaction pool — J.D. Power’s own pricing page describes analyzing over 20 million vehicle transactions a year, and that page is about automobiles. Marine has no comparable volume. Boats sell in the thousands per model-year, not the hundreds of thousands. Private-party sales, which are a large share of the used-boat market, are largely invisible to the books, which lean on dealer and broker reporting.

Then there’s the boat itself. Two same-year hulls can differ by an engine repower, a $12,000 electronics package, a trailer, a canvas set, and 900 hours. A book value has no field for any of that. It also has no field for engine hours, which is the single largest condition variable on most powerboats — see boat engine hours: how many is too many for how much that moves a price.

What our listing data shows about the spread

We track used-boat listings across the US market — 417,714 listings observed to date, 41,284 of them currently active. Within that, the subset where make, model and year are all cleanly identified collapses to 1,947 distinct boats spread across 1,200 make/model/year combinations once repeat postings of the same hull are merged.

That distribution is the whole story:

• 919 of 1,200 model-year combinations (76.6%) had exactly one boat on the market.
• Only 12 of 1,200 (1.0%) had ten or more distinct boats listed.

For three-quarters of the used-boat market, there is no comp set at all in a national scan. That’s not a failing of any particular tool. It’s the market. Any single “value” you’re handed for one of those boats is a model output, not an observation.

Here is what the well-covered cohorts look like — every row below rests on at least 10 distinct boats after de-duplicating reposts:

Boat	Listings	25th pct	Median ask	75th pct	Full range
2023 Yamaha AR190	18	$29,500	$32,000	$33,000	$27,500–$35,000
2003 Boston Whaler 13 Sport	17	$7,500	$7,900	$9,500	$7,500–$17,000
1984 Catalina 30	15	$7,000	$12,000	$16,000	$3,000–$29,000
2015 Tracker Pro Team 175 TXW	13	$11,500	$11,500	$12,000	$10,500–$16,500
1983 Catalina 30	11	$7,500	$17,700	$17,900	$5,000–$22,995
1997 Key West 1720 Sportsman	11	$10,000	$10,500	$11,000	$9,000–$12,000
2015 Nautique Super Air G23	10	$97,499	$97,499	$109,499	$96,450–$119,499

Look at the 1984 Catalina 30: same builder, same model, same model year, and asking prices from $3,000 to $29,000 — nearly ten to one. A book value for that boat is a single point inside a cloud that wide. Compare the 1997 Key West, where the whole market sits between $9,000 and $12,000. The book is roughly as useful as the underlying market is tight, and you can only know which case you’re in by looking at the comps yourself.

The number the book gives you describes a boat that doesn’t exist

Read the fine print on a J.D. Power boat page and you’ll find a model note along the lines of: values represent boats with basic equipment, and some values may need to be adjusted higher for heavily equipped boats. That’s an honest disclosure, and it means the figure on your screen is for a stripped hull with the standard engine, no trailer, no electronics, average condition, and no hours.

Your actual boat differs on every one of those axes. Before you use a lookup number in an offer, adjust it for:

• Engine hours and engine age — the biggest single mover on any powerboat.
• Repower history — a two-year-old outboard on a fifteen-year-old hull is worth far more than the book’s base figure.
• Trailer — often valued separately, and worth $2,000 to $8,000 on a trailerable boat.
• Electronics — a modern MFD, radar and transducer package rarely returns full value, but it isn’t zero.
• Region and season — a pontoon in Minnesota in October and the same boat in May are different transactions.
• Freshwater vs saltwater history — see saltwater vs freshwater boats for how much that changes what you should inspect and pay.

Depreciation is the other half of the picture. If a book value looks high or low against the asking price, the age curve usually explains it — boat depreciation explained walks through where the curve is steep and where it flattens.

When a lookup isn’t enough

Free lookups are fine for deciding whether to keep talking to a seller. They are not enough when a third party has to accept the number:

• A marine lender or insurer will want a fair market value stated in a written survey by an accredited surveyor. Budget $18 to $30 per foot plus haul-out — the full breakdown is in how much does a boat survey cost.
• A charitable donation, estate, or divorce settlement needs a formal appraisal, not a screenshot.
• A rare, heavily modified, or over-60-foot boat falls outside the guides entirely. J.D. Power’s marine guide stops at 60 feet.
• An insurance claim is settled against agreed or actual cash value in your policy, not against a free website.

What to do next

A fifteen-minute sequence that beats any single lookup:

1. Get the book number free at jdpower.com/boats. Note all three figures if you can see them — trade-in, average retail and high retail. The spread between trade-in and high retail is your negotiating room.
2. Run the same boat through Boat Trader’s Price Checker with your ZIP and a wide radius. Write down low, median and high.
3. Pull ten real comps yourself on Boat Trader, YachtWorld, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Same model, within two model years, and note the hours on each. This is the step almost nobody does, and it’s the one that wins the negotiation.
4. If the boat is over about $40,000, buy the $32.95 ABOS lookup as a tiebreaker. It’s a rounding error against the purchase.
5. Verify the hull is what the listing says it is before you price it — a HIN check confirms builder and model year. See boat HIN lookup guide.
6. Convert the range into an actual offer using the boat’s specific flaws and hours, not the midpoint. Is this boat overpriced? and how much to offer on a used boat cover the arithmetic.

And if you’d rather skip the tab-juggling: paste the listing into BoatVerdict and you’ll get a buy / inspect / avoid verdict with fair-price context and red flags, free — built from live listing data rather than a book that updates three times a year.