How much is a ticket stub worth

Most ticket stubs are worth a few hundred dollars and a handful are worth six figures. What separates them is not age, and it is not condition.

17 Aug 2026

Across 7,202 public auction sales of graded ticket stubs, the middle price is $407. A quarter sold for less than $149. Seven in ten sold for less than $1,000. If you are holding a stub from an ordinary game, that is your answer, and the rest of this page explains what would have to be true for it to be worth more.

The whole spread

Ticket stub values are not spread evenly. Most sit in a tight band of a few hundred dollars, and then a very small number run away from the pack. Here is the shape of it.

Every figure here is a price someone actually paid at public auction, buyer's premium included, at Heritage Auctions, Goldin, Fanatics Collect and Lelands. We track 19,263 graded ticket sales in all. This page uses the 7,202 of them that are stubs, and the gap is worth explaining rather than hiding. Out go 1,025 bulk lots of many tickets at once, and 1,666 that were ungraded or graded by somebody other than PSA. The biggest cut is 7,619 full tickets and 744 passes, which are different objects and sell for different money. What is left is stubs.

All of them are sales of graded stubs, read on 18 August 2026, and 99% of them happened from 2013 onwards. An ungraded stub in a drawer is a different market with different prices, and we do not quote it here.

What decides the price is the day, not the ticket

Two stubs off the same press, from the same season, in the same condition: one is worth a couple of hundred dollars and the other makes six figures. The only difference is what happened at the game. Buyers are not paying for a piece of card. They are paying for proof that somebody was in the building on a day that turned out to matter.

That is why debuts dominate the top of the market. Nobody knows a debut is historic while it is happening, so almost nobody keeps the ticket, and the handful that survived are the only physical record of a career starting.

Being a stub is not the handicap you have been told

The received wisdom in collecting is that a full unripped ticket beats a stub, because it is rarer and it looks better. That holds often enough. It does not hold at the top. The highest price in our records, the $480,000 Robinson stub, beat the most famous full ticket in the hobby, Michael Jordan's NBA debut, by $12,000 on the same night at the same auction.

Condition matters less than people expect too, at least once the moment is big enough. That $480,000 stub is graded 2 out of 10. Another copy of the same ticket, graded 1.5, made $324,000. Nobody buying Jackie Robinson's first game is doing it for the corners.

So what should you do with yours

Start with the date printed on the front, because that is the only thing on your stub that identifies the moment. Everything else, the team, the seat, the price, is shared with tens of thousands of other tickets from the same season. Find your date on the calendar and you will see what was played that day and what copies of it have sold for.

If nothing famous happened, the honest expectation is tens of dollars, not thousands, and no amount of grading changes that. If something did happen, the difference between a graded copy and a loose one in a drawer is usually the largest single number in this whole discussion.