Are ticket stubs going up in value

We went through every graded ticket sale from June, July and August 2026 and pulled out the ones that had been sold before. The same ticket, sold twice, is the only fair test there is.

20 Sept 2026

A little, and not for everyone. This summer 110 tickets came up for sale that had already sold once before. 63 made more than last time, 47 made less, and the typical one brought about 10% more. The exception is anything last bought in the 2021 to 2022 rush. Those sold for less than half of what their owners paid.

If you have a stub in a drawer, that is the useful version of the news. Prices are firm, the famous tickets are still making famous money, and nothing here says you need to rush. The rest of this post is where those numbers come from and what they mean for an ordinary ticket, which is almost certainly what you have.

What actually sold in the last three months

We follow graded ticket sales at the big sports auction houses and on eBay. Graded means the ticket was sent to a company, nearly always one called PSA, which checked it was real, scored its condition from 1 to 10 and sealed it in a hard plastic holder. Graded sales are the ones worth counting, because the grade tells you what condition the ticket was in, and the price means very little without that.

Between 1 June and 31 August 2026 we recorded 1,209 graded ticket sales worth $2,374,160 in total. The middle price, the one with half the sales above it and half below, was $336. The middle half of all sales landed between $134 and $976.

Two things are true in that chart at once. Six sales in every ten went for under $500, and remember these are the tickets somebody thought were worth paying to have graded, so the ungraded ones in most drawers sit lower still. And at the other end, 18 sales out of 1,209 took 39% of all the money. The ticket market is a large number of modest sales with a very small number of enormous ones on top. Any headline you read about it is about the 18.

The fair test is the same ticket, sold twice

You cannot tell whether prices are rising by comparing this summer's average with last summer's. Different tickets sold. One Babe Ruth ticket turning up in July moves the average more than hundreds of ordinary stubs do. The only comparison that holds still is a single ticket, identified by the certificate number printed on its holder, selling and then selling again.

That happened 110 times this summer. What the ticket did depended almost entirely on when it was last bought.

Read the second row. In 2021 and early 2022 a lot of money arrived in collectables all at once, tickets included, and prices went to places they have not been back to. Anyone who bought then and sold this summer mostly took a loss, and a heavy one. Everyone who bought before that rush, or after it, mostly did fine. The market is not falling. It already fell, about three years ago, and it has been climbing steadily from the lower level since.

The same thing happened to a stub from Pele's first World Cup match, graded 2. It made $11,400 in March 2022 and $4,188 this June. If you are holding a ticket and remembering a price you saw in a news story around then, this is the reason it may not be on offer now.

It runs the other way too. A perfect 10 full ticket from Shohei Ohtani's first major league game sold for $9,600 in April. The very same ticket sold again in August, sixteen weeks later, for $21,000. A player still adding to his story can move a price faster than anything else in this market.

Summer against last summer

With that warning about averages on the table, here is the comparison anyway, done as carefully as it can be. Taking only the four auction houses we hold complete records from for both years (Heritage, Goldin, Fanatics Collect and Lelands), the summer of 2025 had 823 sales with a middle price of $320. The summer of 2026 had 851 sales with a middle price of $427. About the same number of tickets changed hands, and the typical one cost a third more.

Some of that is better tickets being sent to auction rather than the same tickets getting dearer, which is exactly why the resale test above is the one to trust. But the two agree on direction. We have left eBay out of this comparison because eBay sales reach our records a few months late, and counting a half-arrived summer against a full one would show a drop that is not real.

What the big money was spent on

Look at the grade column before the price column. A 3 is a ticket with creases and worn corners. A 1.5 is rough by any standard. They made $70,150 and $52,460 because of the day printed on them, not the state they were in. Five of the seven are firsts or lasts, a debut or a farewell. That pattern has not changed in the years we have been following sales, and this summer did nothing to disturb it.

You can see every recorded sale of that ticket on its price page, and the same for the Mantle debut stub.

Does age help

On the whole, yes, and this summer's sales show it cleanly. Here is the middle price by the decade the event took place.

Two wrinkles are worth a second look. The 1940s dip below the 1950s, a decade the famous names (Mantle, Mays, Pele) pull up. And the busiest decades are the recent ones: more tickets from the 1990s changed hands than from any other decade, about a quarter of them Michael Jordan and his Bulls. Recent tickets are where the volume is. Old tickets are where the price is. We go into why in are old ticket stubs worth anything.

One more from the same sales. Torn stubs outsold untorn full tickets on price, a middle of $427 across 430 sales against $244 across 461. That is not because a torn ticket is better. It is because the older, more valuable games survive mostly as stubs. Among this summer's sales from events before 1970, stubs outnumbered full tickets 188 to 60, because tickets were torn at the gate and few people kept one whole. From 1970 onwards it flips, 366 full tickets to 221 stubs.

What this means for the ticket in your drawer

There is no hurry. Nothing in the last three months looks like a peak you need to catch or a slide you need to get ahead of. Prices for tickets bought at sensible times are drifting up at roughly 10% between sales. Selling this month or next spring is unlikely to be the decision that matters.

Be wary of any price from 2021 or 2022. If the figure in your head came from an article or a listing in those two years, more likely than not it has come down since. Look at what your ticket sold for in the last twelve months instead. We explain how to tell a real sold price from a hopeful one in asking price against sold price.

The day still matters more than anything else. A rough ticket from a day people remember beat a flawless ticket from an ordinary one all summer, as it always has. So the first job is the same as ever: find out exactly what game you are holding. The full method is in how much is a ticket stub worth.