When we are buying a brand new electric guitar, usually it is with the intention that it is going to be a guitar for life, or at least one that’s going to be with you for the fullness of time. But what if you have to sell it?
It happens to the best of us. A vet bill, the washing machine breaks, you need the cash, and the guitar goes on the market. Heck, sometimes you just need the space. But has your instrument held its value?
Well, according to fresh price data published by the online gear retail giant Reverb, it depends on the market – and it depends on the brand, too.
Reverb has conducted a survey of the market for used guitars over the past six years. It gathered final sale prices from its platform, standardized the prices using their 2019 stats as a baseline and gave them an Index Value of 1000, and then charted the price fluctuations in a snazzy graph.
This Retail Price Index (RPI) details an era of market volatility, and when you think of the years 2019 to 2025, there are no prizes for guessing why.
The TL;DR is that there was a pandemic, everyone started baking bread or playing guitar. With the millions who chose to play guitar spiking demand, supply couldn’t keep up, prices rose, and after this period of mass hysteria, the prices for used guitars have fallen and stabilized.
And yet, throughout all this time, one brand has routinely and consistently held its value: PRS Guitars. Sure, it broadly followed the trend – prices rising during the pandemic, falling again – but they have not fallen in the same way as others.
“Take another look at how brands compare with one another, and you’ll see that PRS can be seen as a quiet champion amid years of volatility,” writes Reverb. “While PRS guitars didn’t see the same spike during the pandemic, they also didn’t fall off a cliff afterward. They’ve held value better than almost any other brand, with steady pricing and a reputation for consistency.”
Does build quality factor into a guitar holding its value? As Joe Bonamassa might say, a guitar is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. So, to the rational guitar player, build does matter – sure we have a lot of fun on cheap electric guitars and pawnshop oddities, but when you pick up a PRS, you know you are getting quality.
Indeed, Paul Reed Smith recently revealed that pro session players have had feedback from producers saying they have to use PRS guitars because they hold their tune better.
There are other key things players can take from Reverb’s RPI. Some surprising, others less so. What isn’t a surprise is that vintage guitars have held onto those pandemic-era price gains. Signature guitars have risen in popularity (there are so, so many of them it’s surely the the sheer number of models that’s juicing those stats).
Some have also proven to be good investments. Epiphone's Tom DeLonge ES-333 has doubled its value since 2019, so too has its Joe Bonamassa Signature "Treasure" Firebird I. The EVH 5150 Striped Series is up 40 per cent on its 2019 value while Fender's Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar is up 71 per cent.
But what is noteworthy is how the impact of tariffs and other inflationary pressures have yet to see any impact on the used market.
“It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the eye-catching headlines that prices are either crashing like never before or will go through the roof due to tariffs and inflation,” says Reverb. “However, the data that we see from millions of transactions on Reverb tells a different story.”
But we should add, this is historical data. The data take into account the inflationary events of the past few years but it might be some time before we see the effect of tariffs on used prices.
What about surprises? Well, how about this: it was a Squier guitar that proved the best investment over the last six years. The Hello Kitty Stratocaster is up 275 per cent from 2019, and that’s even accounting for its 27 per cent price slump in the past year, presumably because there was a new one we could buy.
You can check out more stats at Reverb.
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