What Is My Boat Worth? A 5-Minute Comp Method (2026)

You are about to set a number, and the number is either going to cost you months of your boat sitting unsold or cost you thousands you did not have to leave on the table. If you are buying, the same number is the difference between a fair deal and a polite fleecing. The instinct is to look up a book value and be done. That instinct is wrong, and this guide gives you the method that replaces it — the same one an appraiser uses, compressed into about five minutes.

The short answer

Your boat is worth the median asking price of 8 to 15 comparable live listings, minus about 8 to 10 percent, adjusted for condition.

That is the whole method. The work is in the word comparable, and this is where most people go wrong. We ran the spread on our own listing corpus — 23,166 active used-boat listings across 129 makes, current as of August 2026 — to see how much a comp set tightens as you narrow it:

How you define “comparable”	Cohorts	Listings behind it	Top quartile ÷ bottom quartile
Same boat type	12	1,094	3.98x
Same type + within 5 model years	45	856	2.58x
Same type + 5 model years + 5 feet of length	26	363	1.64x

Read that bottom row carefully. Even after you match type, age, and length, the boat at the 75th percentile still asks 64 percent more than the boat at the 25th. That residual spread is condition, engine, trailer, electronics, region, and how badly the seller wants out. It is not noise you can average away — it is the part you have to judge with your eyes.

The top row is the real lesson: “same kind of boat” leaves you a 4x price range, which is not a valuation, it is a shrug.

Why a book value is not an answer

Guide books are useful and they are not the answer. Here is what actually exists in 2026, and what each one can and cannot see:

• J.D. Power (formerly NADA Guides). J.D. Power absorbed NADA’s marine valuations in 2015 and still publishes free low, average, and high retail figures by year, make, and model. Lenders and insurers use it as a benchmark. What it cannot see: your engine hours, your soft transom, your salvage title, or the fact that nobody in your region wants a 24-foot cuddy this year.
• ABOS Marine Blue Book, run by Price Digests. Subscription or single-lookup, covering 1976 to current model year for powerboats, sailboats, pontoons, PWC, outboards, and trailers. Dealers, surveyors, and lenders lean on it. If your boat is older than 1976 or a low-volume build, it simply is not in there.
• SoldBoats, the sold-price archive behind YachtWorld. This is the only broad source of actual transaction prices — and it is a paid subscription for brokers and surveyors, not the public. You can ask almost any broker to pull a report on a specific make and model, and many will do it for free to earn your listing. That is the single best free move available to a seller of a brokerage-sized boat.
• A marine survey. A pre-purchase survey report includes a stated fair market value and a replacement value, which is what your insurer and lender will ask for. That costs real money — see how much a boat survey costs — but it is the only valuation that has physically touched your boat.

Every one of those, except the survey, is describing a type of boat. You own a specific boat. The comp method closes that gap.

The five-minute method

Do these in order. Do not skip step three.

1. Define the comp set, in this priority order. Same boat type. Then within five model years. Then within five feet of length. Then, if you still have enough listings, the same make. Match the drivetrain if you can — an outboard and a sterndrive of the same size are different products with different maintenance economics.

2. Search nationally, not locally. This is the step everyone gets wrong. Your state probably has three comparable boats listed, and three listings do not make a market. Pull the whole country, then note where the outliers are. If you want the fast version of this, our free boat value lookup does the national pull for you.

3. Throw out the ends. Delete the highest and lowest listing first. The top one is a dreamer or a boat with $30,000 of electronics; the bottom one is a project, a scam, or a typo. Both wreck a small-sample average.

4. Take the median, not the mean. With 8 to 15 listings, one $90,000 outlier drags a mean into fantasy. The median is the middle listing, and it is stubbornly honest.

5. Subtract the asking-price premium. Every number you just collected is a hope, not a sale. Cut 8 to 10 percent off the median as your baseline market value.

6. Adjust for your boat specifically. Up or down, from the list in the next section.

If you end up with fewer than eight usable listings, widen the year band before you widen the length band. Age is more forgiving than size.

Asking price is not value, and we can show you by how much

Step five is the one sellers resist, so here is the evidence. We track price changes on live listings. Of the 928 active listings we watched change price:

What happened	Count	Share
Price cut	798	86%
Price raised	80	9%
Net unchanged	50	5%

Among the 798 cuts, the size of the reduction broke down like this:

Percentile	Reduction from first asking price
25th	5.6%
Median	9.2%
75th	16.0%

The average cut was 12.4 percent. That is the discount off asking that the market extracts from sellers who guessed high — before a buyer has negotiated a dollar. A median cut of 9.2 percent is why “median asking minus 8 to 10 percent” is the right baseline, and it is also why a boat that has already been listed for four months is not a $40,000 boat because the ad says $40,000.

What age does to the number

Depreciation is the second-biggest lever after size, and it is steeper than most owners expect. Here are median asking prices by age band from our corpus, restricted to types where every cell rests on at least ten listings:

Boat type	0–5 yrs	6–10 yrs	11–15 yrs	16–20 yrs	21–30 yrs	Listings
Ski / wake	$125,000	$79,000	$55,000	$31,000	$15,000	344
Center console	$62,500	$35,000	$36,000	$24,677	$14,950	279
Pontoon	$38,900	$27,000	$17,500	$11,900	$8,500	436
Bass boat	$27,000	$25,000	$17,000	$13,500	$8,000	352
Aluminum fishing	$21,000	$21,500	$15,500	$9,000	$9,000	508

A few things jump out. Ski and wake boats fall hardest — the median 21-to-30-year-old wake boat asks 12 percent of what a nearly new one asks. Aluminum fishing boats barely depreciate after year 15, holding around $9,000; simple hulls with no core and no upholstery to rot have a real floor. And bass boats hold value through year 10 better than anything else on this list.

Two cautions on this table. These are asking prices, not sold prices, so apply the same 8 to 10 percent haircut. And length is not controlled for within each type — the reason cruisers and sailboats are absent is that their age bands are dominated by size mix, which makes the age signal meaningless. For the mechanics behind the curve, see boat depreciation explained.

The six adjustments that actually move the number

Once you have your baseline, move it for these — and only these. Everything else is a rounding error.

1. Engine hours and engine age. This is the biggest single adjustment and it is really a repair-timing question, not an hours question. A four-stroke outboard past 2,500 hours should be priced with a repower in the math; an inboard gas engine past 1,000 hours should carry the cost of manifolds and risers. Our guide on engine hours has the thresholds by engine type.
2. Structural condition. Wet deck core, soft stringers, a spongy transom, or serious blistering are not a discount — they are a different boat. Repairs run into five figures. A survey finding here typically moves a price by thousands because both sides are now negotiating against a written number.
3. Trailer. A roadworthy trailer on a trailerable boat is real money and is frequently listed as “included” without being priced in. Check what a comparable trailer alone lists for.
4. Electronics and rigging. Modern MFDs, radar, a trolling motor, or new canvas add value, but at roughly half to a third of what they cost new. Nobody pays retail for used electronics.
5. Region and season. Shallow local markets swing prices hard. In our data, pontoons from model years 2011 to 2020 showed a median asking price of $25,000 in California, $19,800 in Florida, and $18,900 in Arizona across 39 active listings. Selling a northern boat in February is its own discount.
6. Documentation. Clean title, service records, one owner, and a recent survey are worth real money because they remove the buyer’s uncertainty. Title trouble does the reverse, hard.

If you are selling: what you will actually net

Market value is not proceeds. Run the subtraction before you decide whether to sell at all.

• Private sale: you keep the price, minus listing fees and your time. Expect 30 to 120 days for a fairly priced boat.
• Brokerage: the industry-standard commission is 10 percent, with 6 to 10 percent the common range and more room to negotiate on larger boats. On a $60,000 boat, that is $6,000 off the top.
• Dealer trade-in: fastest and lowest. Expect meaningfully less than private-party value, because the dealer is buying at a price that leaves them a margin plus reconditioning.
• Carrying costs while it sits: slip, insurance, and winterizing keep running the whole time you hold out. Three months of them frequently exceeds the $2,000 you were arguing over.

One more seller note: if you want agreed value insurance rather than actual cash value, your insurer will want proof of value — a bill of sale, an appraisal, or comparable-sale data — and on boats roughly 27 feet and over will typically require a full SAMS or NAMS survey. That survey doubles as your valuation document.

If you are buying: turn the number into an offer

Your comp median minus 10 percent is market value, not your offer. Your offer is market value minus the documented work the boat needs. That distinction is the whole negotiation, because it moves the conversation from opinion to arithmetic.

The sequence that works: build the comp set, name the fair value out loud, then let the survey findings do the arguing. A single documented finding on a $45,000 boat routinely moves the price by thousands, because now both sides are negotiating against a written repair estimate instead of a feeling. Our guides on whether a boat is overpriced and how much to offer take that the rest of the way.

What to do next

Right now, in this order:

1. Write down your comp definition — type, year range, length range — before you search, so you cannot quietly widen it to justify a number you already want.
2. Pull 8 to 15 national listings, drop the top and bottom, take the median.
3. Subtract 9 percent. That is your baseline market value.
4. Apply your adjustments for engine hours, structure, trailer, electronics, and region — and write down the dollar figure for each, so the number survives an argument.
5. Sanity-check against a guide number. If your comp median and the J.D. Power average retail are more than about 25 percent apart, one of them is describing a different boat. Find out which.
6. Sellers: ask a broker for a SoldBoats pull on your make and model. It is free to ask and it is the only real transaction data available.

Then stop refining. A comp median with honest adjustments lands within a few percent of what your boat will trade for, and another hour of research will not beat it. If you would rather have it done for you, paste a listing and get an instant verdict — you will get a Buy Score, the red flags, and fair-price context built from live comparable listings.