Bennington vs Sun Tracker vs Harris: 3,742 Used Listings

You are scrolling three pontoon listings the same evening: a Bennington that wants $24,000, a Harris at $18,500, and a Sun Tracker at $16,000 — all around 22 feet, all roughly the same decade. Every forum thread tells you Bennington is the good one and Sun Tracker is the cheap one, and none of them tells you whether the $8,000 spread is buying you anything. So we measured it. This is what 3,742 used listings for those three brands, across 49 states, actually say about what each one is worth after ten years, and what the price difference is really paying for.

The short answer

Bennington asks the most, Sun Tracker asks the least, and Harris sits between them while being the bigger boat. At the ten-year mark the medians are $21,000 for a Bennington, $17,995 for a Harris and $15,900 for a Sun Tracker.

But the finding that should change how you shop is this: all three depreciate at almost exactly the same rate. Retention from the 3-to-7-year band to the 10-to-14-year band is 57% for Bennington, 56% for Harris, 55% for Sun Tracker — a spread far too small to call a difference. The badge sets the dollar level you start from. It does not change how fast you fall.

And past fifteen years, even the dollar level collapses together: $13,000, $12,500 and $12,000. On an old pontoon, the name on the fence is nearly worthless and the condition of the deck is nearly everything.

What this rests on

Every price below comes from our own database of active and recently listed US private-party and dealer boats: 1,121 Bennington listings, 2,144 Sun Tracker and 477 Harris, filtered to real used boats between $800 and $2,000,000 with a stated model year. We publish no figure with fewer than 10 listings behind it, and every cell in the main table carries at least 57.

Two honest caveats. These are asking prices, not recorded sale prices — the real transaction runs below them, and by a wider margin on the old boats than the new ones. And a pontoon listing rarely states tube count, so a two-tube and a tritoon sit in the same bucket. That inflates the top quartile of every brand, Bennington most of all.

What each brand asks, by age

Age band (model years)	Bennington	Sun Tracker	Harris
3–7 years (2019–23)	$37,000 (n=273)	$28,750 (n=555)	$32,000 (n=57)
10–14 years (2012–16)	$21,000 (n=162)	$15,900 (n=217)	$17,995 (n=69)
15–24 years (2002–11)	$13,000 (n=172)	$12,000 (n=261)	$12,500 (n=77)
Retained at 10–14 yrs	57%	55%	56%

Median asking price. 1,843 listings fall inside the three age bands above, from a total sample of 3,742.

Read the middle row twice. The whole “Bennington holds value” argument is worth $5,100 on a ten-year-old boat — real money, but not the different-league gap the brand loyalty implies. And note where Harris lands: it asks $3,000 less than Bennington at ten years old while the median Harris in our data is 24 feet against Bennington’s 22. You are getting two more feet of boat for less money, from a Brunswick brand with a comparable structural warranty.

The spread inside each brand matters as much as the median. For that same 10-to-14-year band:

Brand	25th percentile	Median	75th percentile
Bennington	$15,000	$21,000	$31,990
Sun Tracker	$13,500	$15,900	$21,000
Harris	$16,000	$17,995	$23,000

Bennington’s top quartile runs away from the others because its high-horsepower tritoons live up there. If you are shopping a two-tube 21-footer with a 90 hp motor, the number that should anchor your offer is the 25th percentile, not the median — and at that end Bennington and Sun Tracker are $1,500 apart, not $5,000.

Where each brand sits in the market

The three you keep meeting are not three competitors of the same kind. They are three different distribution strategies.

Bennington — Elkhart, Indiana, founded 1997, and the volume leader — Polaris called it the leading US pontoon manufacturer when it bought the business. Polaris bought its parent Boat Holdings in an all-cash deal worth about $805 million in July 2018, the largest acquisition in Polaris’s history at the time. Bennington is the volume premium brand, which is exactly why its used listings are so easy to price: 1,121 of them across 42 states in our sample.

Sun Tracker — built by White River Marine Group in Springfield, Missouri, and sold through more than 130 Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s Boating Centers plus independent dealers. That retail machine is why it is the most common of the three in our data by a wide margin — 2,144 listings across 47 states, more than Bennington and Harris combined. It is the entry point to pontoon ownership for most of America, and the used supply reflects it.

Harris — Fort Wayne, Indiana, founded in 1957 by brothers Pete and Ernie Harris, and a Brunswick brand since the 2005 Harris-Kayot acquisition. Harris builds genuine premium pontoons, but with a thinner dealer network: 477 listings in 37 states. Fewer buyers recognize the name, which is precisely why it is the value play on the used market.

That last point deserves emphasis, because it is the actionable one. 52% of used Harris listings ask under $15,000, against 29% for both Bennington and Sun Tracker. Meanwhile only 6.7% of Harris listings ask $50,000 or more, versus 12.2% for Bennington. Harris is a premium builder priced by a market that does not know it is one.

The warranty is a resale asset — and it usually does not reach you

This is the one place brand genuinely changes a used buyer’s outcome, and almost every listing gets it wrong.

Brand	Structural coverage	Everything else	Transfer to second owner
Bennington	Limited lifetime on tubes, gates, channels, motor mounts, railings	10-year bow-to-stern	Transferable within 10 years of original purchase, then capped at 10 years from that original date, through a dealer
Harris (Brunswick)	Limited lifetime on tubes, crossmembers, decking, motor mount, fence rail — decking against warp, rot and delamination	10-year bow-to-stern	Through a Harris dealer
Sun Tracker (White River)	“10+LIFE” — lifetime on certain items including plywood decking, to the original retail purchaser	10 years parts and labor on all other portions	May be transferred once

Notice what the fine print does to a ten-year-old boat. All three headline a “lifetime” structural warranty, and on all three the meaningful coverage is measured from the original purchase date, not from your purchase date. Buy a 2014 pontoon in 2026 and you are, in practice, outside the window on everything that matters. Ask the seller for the original bill of sale and the registration paperwork anyway — if there is transferable coverage left it is worth real money, and if the seller cannot produce the documents, that tells you something too. Our boat depreciation by brand guide shows the same pattern across the wider market: transferable warranty props up the five-year price and does almost nothing at fifteen.

What actually separates these boats at ten years old

Since the depreciation curves are effectively identical, the badge is not the variable you should be optimizing. These are:

• Deck condition. All three have built the bulk of their volume models on plywood decking under the flooring. Water gets in around fittings, seat bases, and the transom cutout, and it rots from the top down where you cannot see it. Walk the entire deck in bare feet, press hard along the perimeter and around every rail post and seat base, and lift a corner of carpet or vinyl if the seller allows it. A full deck replacement runs into five figures on a 22-footer — more than the entire brand premium you were arguing about. Our guide to soft spots in a boat floor walks the inspection in detail.
• Tube integrity. Look for creases, dents at the nose cones, weld cracks along the seams, and any tube that sits visibly lower at rest. A tube holding water will change how the boat trims and is expensive to fix properly. Beaching habits do more damage here than brand does — a Bennington beached on rock every weekend is worse than a Sun Tracker that never left a lift.
• Wall thickness is a spec, not a brand. All three offer different tube gauges across their model tiers, with heavier walls on the performance and tritoon lines. Do not assume; find the model-year spec sheet or brochure for the exact model in front of you.
• The engine, which is not the boat brand. Almost every one of these carries a Mercury or Yamaha outboard, and on a ten-year-old pontoon the motor is the single largest repair exposure. Read boat engine hours: how many is too many before you price anything.
• Furniture and wiring. Vinyl and foam are the first things to fail on a boat stored uncovered, and rewiring a 15-year-old pontoon is a real weekend and a real bill. Budget it explicitly rather than discovering it in May.

Recalls on the record

From the USCG recall database, none of these three has a systemic pontoon defect on file, but a few campaigns are worth knowing when you shop a specific year:

• Bennington — bimini top may break, model-year 2007 pontoon and deck boats, 4,105 units (campaign opened 5/29/2007); fuel tank leak on the model-year 2006 I-Series, 773 units (6/20/2006).
• Sun Tracker / Tracker Marine — capacity label on the model-year 2009 Party Barge 200, 265 units (1/12/2009); fuel system on the model-year 2003 Bass Buggy 18 and others, 762 units (3/10/2003).
• Harris-Kayot — kill switch may not operate, 1,081 units (11/21/2000), plus two ventilation campaigns on inboard-powered deck boats from 2007 and 2008.

Check the specific hull you are buying by HIN rather than trusting a brand’s general reputation.

Where you will find each one

Supply drives price locally more than brand does. Sun Tracker dominates the West and Southwest — 476 listings in California, 199 in Arizona. Bennington concentrates in Florida (120), Texas (104) and Michigan (104). Harris is thin everywhere but leans Midwest, with Michigan its single biggest market at 58 listings. If you are in a state where a brand is scarce, expect to pay a premium for it and to wait — and see boat prices by state before you decide whether a tow is worth it.

What to do next

1. Stop shopping the badge and start shopping the band. Decide your length and horsepower first, then use the tables above to know what a fair ask looks like in that age bracket. All three brands are legitimate boats.
2. If your budget is under $20,000, look hard at Harris. It is the underpriced brand of the three — half its listings sit under $15,000, and the median Harris is two feet longer than the median Bennington.
3. If you want the easiest resale, pay the Bennington premium knowingly. You are buying a deeper buyer pool and better dealer coverage, not a slower depreciation curve.
4. Spend the inspection money on the deck and the outboard, not the brand debate. Walk the deck barefoot, check every tube, and pull true engine hours. The used boat inspection checklist covers the full sequence.
5. Anchor your offer on the 25th percentile, not the median, if the boat has a small motor, worn furniture, or no service records. Our guide on how much to offer on a used boat shows how to put the repair list into the number.

Still deciding between a pontoon and something with a V-hull? Start with pontoon vs deck boat, and once you are sure, the pontoon buying guide covers tube count, gauge, and trim levels in depth. When you have a specific listing in hand, paste it and get an instant verdict — you will get a Buy Score, the red flags, and fair-price context against listings like it before you call the seller.