The most and least competitive GovDeals categories (200,204 auctions analyzed)

How many people you're bidding against depends mostly on what you're bidding on. We looked at every GovDeals auction that closed from May 22 to October 29, 2026 with a confirmed result (200,204 lots, 179,405 of them sold) and counted the bidders on each sale. A farm tractor draws a median of 46 bidders. A desk usually draws one. Here's the full picture, and where the less crowded auctions are.

The headline numbers

The most competitive categories

Anything with an engine and a title is crowded. These categories draw 28 to 46 bidders on a typical sale and almost never fail to sell:

Fewer than 1 in 12 sales in these categories go to someone bidding against one other person or nobody (3% for tractors, 4.6% for pickups). Dealers, exporters, farmers and first-time flippers all watch the same listings, and bidding usually runs late. If you buy in these categories, the margin has to come from knowing the vehicle better than the crowd does, not from being the only person who saw the listing. See our truck trends and car trends posts for what these sell for by model, year and state.

The busiest category that doesn't need a title is laptops: a median of 18 bidders on a $231 median winning bid, with 97.6% sold.

The least competitive categories

At the other end, a typical sale draws one to three bidders, and a large share of lots don't sell at all:

Low competition here isn't a hidden opportunity on its own. These are bulky, pickup-only lots of office furniture and fixtures that cost more to haul away and resell than they sell for. When a desk goes for $10, the buyer is usually paying for the trip to pick it up. If you have a truck, a nearby lot and a local buyer lined up, these can still work. Otherwise the lack of bidders is telling you something.

Two categories are less clear-cut. Jewelry has a median of 4 bidders but an average of 13: most lots get little interest while a few are heavily contested, and 28% of jewelry lots don't sell. Coins, currency and precious metals sell 96% of the time with a median of only 3 bidders, because a buyer can price bullion against the spot price in seconds.

Two kinds of lots are left out of the rankings. Real estate tax sales almost never sell on GovDeals (0.3%) because the opening bid is set by the taxes owed. Vacant land draws one bidder at the median and sells 56% of the time. Both follow different rules from surplus auctions.

Competition tracks price almost perfectly

The clearest pattern in the data isn't about category at all. It's about price. The more a lot sells for, the more people are bidding on it:

Almost half of all sub-$50 lots go to the only person who bid. Above $1,000, only about 1 in 17 does. So the category rankings above are partly a price ranking: vehicles are crowded partly because they're expensive, and furniture is quiet partly because it's cheap. To find genuinely less-contested categories, you have to compare at the same price.

Same price, a third of the bidders: where to look

Here are categories compared only on lots that sold for $250 to $2,500, so price isn't driving the difference:

A $700 lot of laptops draws about 26 bidders. A $660 piece of test equipment draws 11. The difference is how easy the item is to understand. Anyone can price a riding mower or a laptop. Far fewer people can tell whether an oscilloscope, a loader bucket or an aircraft tug is worth bidding on, or know who would buy one afterward. That knowledge is the advantage in these categories. If you already know a niche, that's where you're most likely to win at a good price.

Two cautions. First, some niches depend on a handful of sellers (test and measurement lots came from just 19 sellers in our data), so supply comes in bursts. Second, fewer bidders only means a lower winning bid. It doesn't mean a profit. You still need a real buyer at the other end: price the item against what it actually sold for elsewhere, not against asking prices.

Big-ticket vehicles with less competition

The same pattern holds above $5,000. Truck tractors (median $8,050) and garbage trucks ($7,625) draw a median of 20 bidders, versus 32 for dump trucks at $6,500 and 38 for pickups. Specialist commercial vehicles have a smaller pool of buyers who can use them or resell them.

How we cleaned the data (and why it changed the answer)

Our first pass at this ranking looked strange: clothing, shoes, handbags and "other consumer goods" appeared to sell 95%+ of the time at $400–$525 with zero bidders. When we checked, almost all of those lots came from four seller accounts that sell pre-priced pallets. Their lots close at a set price with no bidding, and GovDeals still marks them sold. That's not an auction, so we removed those sellers' 11,119 lots. With them excluded, those categories look ordinary: clothing sells 90% of the time at a $36 median with 6 bidders, and other consumer goods sells 89% at $52 with 6.5 bidders.

We also found that Canadian sellers' lots are priced in Canadian dollars (7,138 lots in this data, mostly in Ontario and Alberta). Every winning bid in this post is in US dollars, converted at 1 CAD = 0.715 USD, the Bank of Canada average for the period.

How to use this

1. Pick your competition before you pick your item. In a 30-bidder category, expect the price to end near what dealers will pay. In a 10-bidder category, there's room for a lower winning bid.
2. Compare categories at the same price. A quiet $15 furniture lot isn't the same opportunity as a quiet $650 test-equipment lot.
3. Use what you already know. If you understand a trade (equipment, lab gear, telecom, aviation), those categories draw the fewest bidders at real prices.
4. Count removal costs on cheap lots. Under $50, nearly half of lots are won by the only bidder. The question is whether hauling it away costs more than it's worth.
5. Price against sold comps, not asking prices. See how we vet every sold comp for why that matters.

Methodology

We include every GovDeals auction with an end date from May 22 to October 29, 2026 whose outcome was confirmed by GovDeals' status, the bid history or the bid count: 200,204 lots, 179,405 sold. Lots we couldn't confirm either way are left out. We excluded the 11,119 lots from the four seller accounts that sell at a fixed price with no bids (sellers where at least 90% of 20 or more sales had no recorded bids). "Bidders" is the bid count on the sold lot, which can include more than one bid from the same person, so treat it as a measure of how contested a lot was rather than an exact head count. Rankings cover categories with at least 400 confirmed results, using GovDeals' own category labels. Winning bids are the final bid before the buyer's premium and taxes, with Canadian-dollar lots converted at 1 CAD = 0.715 USD. We don't publish per-lot resale estimates.