This site earns from advertising. Reviews are our own opinions from boards we rode; nobody pays for a review.

What 121 surfboards cost and sold for: the real numbers

Updated 2026-09-19

Across 121 sold boards I recovered about 62 cents of every dollar I paid, as at May 2026, from the register. That is the headline. What it hides is which brands and styles held most of that value, and which gave most of it back.

Where the totals come from, and what I could actually use

Those two totals are the register's own running sum across every sold board since I started keeping one. To work out which brands and styles held value best, I went row by row and kept only the boards with a clean, numeric purchase cost and a clean, numeric sale price. That left 114 of the 121 sold boards usable for this kind of comparison. Seven fell out: two were acquired for free, so there is no cost to recover against, and five more show a purchase cost of zero or a sale price that was not a real, clean dollar figure. None of that changes the two totals above, which stand as recorded. It only means the brand and style breakdown below is based on 114 boards, not 121, and I have said so at each step.

On the 114 usable boards, the recovery rate runs about 60%, close to the register's own overall figure. The small gap between that and the headline number comes from the boards this comparison had to leave out.

What held value best, by brand

Looking only at brands with at least three sold boards in the usable set, so a single good or bad sale cannot swing the whole line, five brands recovered more than two thirds of what I paid for them:

What gave back the least, by brand

At the other end, two brands with at least three sold boards each recovered around a third of what I paid:

Christenson sits in the middle of the pack, recovering about 55% across 8 sold boards. DHD also sat at 52%. None of these are bad boards. Every one of them earned its keep before it left. They simply gave back less of the purchase price than the boards above.

What held value best, by style

The same three-board minimum applied to style groups. Modern-shaped boards recovered the most:

Hybrids and grovellers sat lowest: hybrid boards recovered 44% across 7 boards, and grovellers recovered 45% across 3 boards. Step-ups sat at 50% across 3 boards. A short-lived, small-wave specialist board seems to be the hardest style to get money back on, likely because it only suits a narrow run of conditions for the next buyer too.

A few boards, dollar for dollar, session for session

Numbers mean more attached to an actual board. The Lost Puddle Jumper was one of the most surfed boards in the whole log and sold for $400 against $1,150 paid. The Christenson Nautilus sold for $690 against $1,600 paid. The Jim Banks Magic Carpet sold for $600 against $1,550 paid. On the other side of the ledger, the Firewire Seaside Volcanic sold for $970 against $890 paid, one of only a handful of boards in the entire log that sold for more than it cost.

Questions people ask

Do surfboards ever go up in value?

Rarely, and only at the margins in this log. A small number of boards sold for close to or slightly more than their purchase price, usually a board bought at a good price early and sold quickly in solid condition. The far more common outcome is recovering somewhere between half and three quarters of the purchase price.

Which brand held its value best?

Among brands with at least three sold boards in the usable data, Album, McTavish, Campbell Brothers and Bing all recovered more than two thirds of their purchase price. That is a small sample within one surfer's log, not a market-wide claim.

Does riding a board more often reduce what it sells for?

Not clearly, from this data. The Lost Puddle Jumper was one of the more heavily used boards and still recovered a similar share of its cost to boards ridden far less. Condition and how well the style suits the next buyer seemed to matter more than how often a board got ridden.

Why did some boards not make it into this comparison?

Seven sold boards either had no purchase cost on record, were acquired for free, or had a sale price that was not a clean number in the register. They are still part of the 121 boards and the overall recovery rate; they are just left out of the brand and style breakdown so the percentages are not distorted by a division against zero or a missing number.

For the full sold list, see the sold boards list. For what I actually check before buying a used board, see buying a used surfboard, and for how the ask and sold columns compare across the whole log, see how to price a used surfboard. The filters I run before I let a board go are on selling filters, and the process itself is on how to sell a surfboard. More on the sell hub.