How to price used guns: Blue Book, GunBroker completed items, and your own sales
A used gun is priced three times: when you make the offer, when you tag it, and when you mark it down. Each time there are three places to look. Here is what each is good for, and how to turn them into an offer that leaves you a margin.
Three places to look
1. A price guide
The Blue Book of Gun Values is the standard reference for model, variation and condition grades. Its app sells access by subscription (the App Store lists Standard at $4.95 a month or $49.95 a year, and Premium at $9.95 a month or $99.99 a year, as of September 23, 2026). A guide is a good sanity check and settles what a thing is. It cannot tell you what the gun will fetch in your town this month.
2. Completed sales online
On GunBroker, the active listings are asking prices, not sales. GunBroker’s help center explains that to search closed auctions you use Advanced Search and select the Completed Items tab; Quick Search only searches active listings. Check that each completed listing actually sold, and remember that an online buyer pays shipping and a transfer fee your walk-in customer does not.
3. Your own sales
What the same model, in similar condition, sold for across your counter is the most local evidence there is. FirstCash, the largest U.S. pawn operator, says in its annual report that it values items first by using its POS to recall recent selling prices of similar merchandise in its own stores, then checks blue books, online marketplaces and auction sites.
Work the offer back from the resale
Decide the price it will sell at, then work backwards:
- Expected resale: from your own recent sales of the model, checked against completed online sales.
- Target margin: the margin you need on used guns to cover the time it sits and the cost of the shop.
- Offer = expected resale × (1 − target margin).
Example with made-up numbers: a pistol you expect to sell at $450, with a 35% target margin, supports an offer of about $292 (450 × 0.65). Paying $340 instead leaves a 24% margin, and $50 over on every trade adds up fast.
A common rule of thumb for customers, from the firearms site Pew Pew Tactical, is that a trade-in brings about half of what the gun resells for, and an outright sale to a shop about 30% to 40%. That is a practitioner’s rule, not data, but it tells you what a customer who has done their homework expects.
Price for the days, not just the dollars
A model that sells in a week can carry a thinner margin than one that sits for four months, because the cash comes back to work sooner. Look at days to sale by model or at least by type (handgun, rifle, shotgun) in your own history, and ask more margin of the slow ones.
Measure used against new
If you sell new guns too, compare the margin on each in your own books, and then the used margin by the buyer who took the gun in. A trade-in bought too high shows up there first, and it is the quickest way to see who at the counter is giving margin away.
Where PawnCounter fits
PawnCounter’s used-gun desk reads your sales and your bound book (any ATF A&D export as CSV) and quotes a trade-in range from what the same model sold for in your shop, with used against new margin and a view by buyer. It is part of Pro. It is a pricing tool only: your acquisition and disposition records stay in the system you keep them in today.
Sources
See these numbers for your own shop.
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