January Is the Biggest Month for Classic Car Auctions, by Far
January is upon us. It’s not exactly driving season, but luckily for auction watchers we don’t have to wait until the weather gets nice to see tons of cool cars come out of the woodwork. In fact, the first month of the year is the biggest one on the auction calendar by quite a bit.
How big are the January auctions? Check out the chart below.
Each January, the world’s largest collector car auction happens at Mecum’s year-opening blowout in Kissimmee, Florida. It regularly sees over 3000 vehicles offered. In 2024, there were 4000. Within a couple of weeks of Kissimmee and on the other end of the country, Barrett-Jackson also holds its biggest sale of the year in Scottsdale, Arizona, with the number of consignments hovering around the 2000-vehicle mark in recent years. Barrett-Jackson was the first major classic car auction to hit TV screens in the ’90s, and the Scottsdale event became so well-established that other Arizona auctions put on by the likes of RM Sotheby’s, Bonhams, Gooding & Co. and Worldwide Auctioneers have popped up during the same week.
The vehicles consigned for the Barrett-Jackson and Mecum sales range in value from blue-chip European classics to cheap, four-figure winter projects. There is literally something for everyone, and that’s because of the vast and overwhelming quantity of automobiles on offer. Even with the explosive growth of online auctions that are run 24/7/365, when it comes to how many classics there are to bid on, January absolutely dwarfs February through December.
January is the biggest month in terms of dollar value, too. August does come close, though. When it comes to the number of vehicles sold, August is about average, but it’s also the month of Monterey Car Week, the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, and a group of auctions that consigns more seven- and eight-figure cars than anywhere else in the world. In 2023 and 2024, for example, the various Monterey auctions only sold a little over 800 vehicles each, but the average price was nearly half a million dollars. The sheer volume of (mostly) American cars and trucks at Mecum and Barrett-Jackson still pulls in enough money to keep January as the most active month on the auction calendar, no matter how you look at it.
