A five-year-old Haas VF-2SS with the Next Generation Control, probing, a 30-station side-mount changer and a 4th-axis drive hammered at $36,600 on 18 November 2025 after 69 bids, which is 43.6% of the $83,995 Haas lists it for today, and the buyer paid 15% on top of that. Nobody publishes numbers like that as a series. The dealers hide their prices, the big industrial auction houses hide their results, and the two government surplus platforms either hide closed prices behind a login or leave them public but unindexed. So we went to the houses that do publish and read every closed CNC lot we could reach: 144 CNC machine tools, 142 of them sold, across 15 Machinesused.com auctions (13 of them with a CNC machine tool), 7 Hansen Auction Group sales and 2 K-BID liquidations, from June 2023 to 8 September 2026, every row with a URL in data/realized-prices.csv. This piece covers what the hammer does with age, Haas against everyone else, the controller cohort that trades at $100, what the three houses charge and how fast they want the machine gone, the bill between the hammer and the first chip, the five checks before wiring money, and behind the wall the model-and-year lookup table and the premium ranking.
Source: Open Factory Bid-Tab Price Book, used-CNC realized-price file (compiled from Machinesused.com closed catalogues, Hansen Auction Group bidding API, K-BID closed item pages; Jun 2023 to Sep 2026)
The 31 Haas lots with a model year fit an exponential with a half-life of 3.9 years (annual retention 0.836), the 82 other builders fit one with a half-life of 4.1 years (0.845), and the Haas curve starts from a higher intercept, so at ten years the fitted Haas hammer is ~$30,000 against ~$12,000 for the field; the spread of the dots around either line is the reason the curve is a guide and not a quote.
What a Hammer Price Is and Who Publishes One
A hammer price is the final accepted bid before the buyer’s premium, sales tax, rigging and freight. It is the only used-machinery price that is not an ask. In What a Haas VF-2 Really Costs in 2026 we opened 63 used VF-2 listings on 10 September 2026 and found 3 with a price; in The Used and Refurbished Market Nobody Indexes we found the same wall around transformers and gensets, with GovDeals showing current bids on open lots and nothing on closed ones. The Bid-Tab Price Book exists because public procurement awards are the one place transaction prices for electrical gear appear by law. Machine tools have no equivalent, so this file is the v0 substitute: realized prices from auction houses that leave their closed catalogues on the open web.
Three did. Machinesused.com in Eagan, Minnesota keeps every past auction’s catalogue with the final bid, the bid count and the close timestamp on each lot, and its lot pages carry manufacturer, model, year, serial, control and weight; 15 past auctions from 19 August 2025 to 18 August 2026 gave us 122 CNC machine tools. Hansen Auction Group in Wisconsin runs on a bidding platform whose API returns each lot’s status, winning bid and bid count, and its 8 September 2026 New Berlin dispersal is the freshest sale in the file. K-BID, a Minnesota network of independent auctioneers, leaves closed item pages public with the high bid, the close time and a “Reserve Not Met” flag where it applies. The other 20 or so venues we opened are in the access log in research/notes.md: GovDeals closed prices behind a login, PublicSurplus closed pages public but not listable, GSA Auctions a JavaScript shell, HiBid’s search API returning zero ended lots for any status value, BidSpotter and Proxibid blocking, eBay serving an error page.
The result is 171 rows, of which 144 are CNC machine tools, 142 of those sold, with a model year on 115 and a control named on 89. The remaining 27 rows are EDMs, desktop and educational CNC trainers, two 3D printers and a router, kept in the file and left out of every statistic below. It is a Minnesota and Wisconsin file: 113 of the 144 machine-tool lots sat in Minnesota and 20 in Wisconsin. The roadmap for this piece promised 1,800 lots. We have 144 with a public URL each, and 144 is the number this article uses.
The Curve: Half Its Value Every Four Years
The scatter above is the whole market in one frame. The median hammer across the 142 sold machine tools is $3,919; 32% went for under $1,000 and 55% for under $5,000; the gross was $1,009,566 before premiums. By type, the 61 vertical machining centers ran a median $5,526, the 44 lathes and turning centers $3,312, the 15 CNC knee and bed mills $3,536, the 18 Swiss and CNC automatics $874, the 3 horizontals $7,355, and the single 5-axis, a 2013 Mazak VCU-400A 5X, $11,150. The median lot drew 40 bids and the busiest drew 202. These are no-reserve liquidations by and large: Machinesused sold 122 of 122 and Hansen 19 of 19.
A used CNC machine tool in this file loses about half its hammer value every 3.9 years if it is a Haas and every 4.1 years if it is not, and past 25 years the builder’s name is worth almost nothing. Both fits are least squares on the log of the hammer against age at sale, and both are in data/fit.json with the points in data/hammer-vs-age.csv. The top of the frame belongs to a 2015 Doosan Mynx 6500/40 at $66,500 on 13 January 2026 and a 2018 Haas VF-4SS at $59,000 on 18 November 2025. The bottom belongs to a 1998 Haas VF-4 at $252 on 17 March 2026 and a 2001 Roku-Roku GR-658N graphite machining center on a Fanuc 16i at $2 on 28 April 2026. Both of those were running machines with a listed control. Age did that.
The shape matters for anyone modelling a purchase. The Haas VF-2 TCO we published in March carried a $30,000 resale assumption at year ten on a $70,995 machine, 42% of list, anchored on one dealer’s sold price. The auction file says a ten-year-old Haas hammers at a median 24% of today’s list (n=6 in the 11 to 15 year bucket, min 14%, max 34%), and the buyer then pays a 15% premium, so the asking-to-hammer gap the dealers protect is real and it is about a third. The Equipment Price Benchmark will replace both numbers with contributed invoices when it has eight of them in a cell; until then the hammer is the only realized price anyone can point at.
Haas Against the Field, at List
Haas is the one builder that publishes list prices, which is why it sits where it does on the OEM Disclosure Scorecard and why we can express its hammers as a share of a current price. We read 22 current US list prices from machinetoolindex.com, which republishes Haas’s list with a “verified 2026-08-31” stamp: VF-2 $70,995, VF-2SS $83,995, VF-3SS $101,995, VF-4 $92,995, VF-4SS $107,995, ST-20 $77,995, TM-1 $46,995, EC-400 $244,995 and the rest in research/notes.md. Twenty-three of the 32 Haas lots are models Haas still sells; the HL-2, SL-10, SL-20, VF-0, VF-0E and VM-3 are not, and get no percentage.
Source: Open Factory Bid-Tab Price Book
The buckets read 44% at 0 to 5 years (one lot, the 2020 VF-2SS), 46% to 55% with a median of 50% at 6 to 10 years (the 2019 ST-20 at $36,100 and the 2018 VF-4SS at $59,000), 14% to 34% with a median of 24% at 11 to 15 years (n=6), 3% to 19% with a median of 9% at 16 to 20 years (n=8), and 0.3% to 10% with a median of 4.5% past 21 years (n=6).
Under eight years old, a Haas hammers at roughly half of what Haas charges for the same model new, and a buyer who adds the 15% premium and $9,000 to $22,000 of landing costs is paying 65% to 80% of list for a machine with no warranty and no installation. That is the arithmetic that the dealers’ asking prices hide. Machinio’s asking band for 2016 to 2022 VF-2s was $41,900 to $62,900 when the Haas piece read it in September 2026; the 2020 VF-2SS hammer plus premium comes to $42,090, the floor of that band, for a machine one grade up. A 2014 VF-2 hammered at $23,550 on 14 October 2025 with 2,031 hours stated, against the $22,750 KD Machinery marked as sold on a 2008 VF-2: a dealer’s sold price for a machine six years older than the auction lot, and the two numbers are $800 apart.
Below eight years the Haas curve and the field’s are far apart, and the reason is supply as much as brand. Of 113 dated machine-tool lots, only 9 were younger than ten years, and 3 of those 9 were Haas. The young machines that do reach auction are the ones a shop bought on a five-year note and lost; the Machinesused Superior Machine sale that produced the 2020 VF-2SS and the 2018 VF-4SS was a complete-shop auction “by order of secured party”, and the October 2025 Regal Machine sale that produced the 2019 ST-20 at $36,100 and a 2013 VF-2SS at $28,455 was the same kind of event. When USMTO orders hit $3.44 billion in the first half of 2026 on fewer units, the machines that came off shop floors were the ones that had been paid for.
Source: Open Factory Bid-Tab Price Book
Haas machines 0 to 10 years old ran a median $36,600 (n=3), 11 to 20 years $11,562 (n=18), and 21 years and older $3,450 (n=10); the Japanese and German majors (Mazak, DMG Mori, Okuma, Kitamura, Matsuura, Brother, Miyano, Star, Citizen) ran $18,300 at 11 to 20 years (n=5) and $880 past 21 (n=20); the Korean and Taiwanese builders (Doosan, Hyundai Wia, YCM, Sharp, Acer, Femco, Kia) $6,187 at 11 to 20 (n=18) and $100 past 21 (n=5); the US toolroom and legacy names (Milltronics, Fadal, Hardinge, ProtoTRAK, Fryer, Bridgeport, Tree) $17,050 at 0 to 10 (n=5), $6,706 at 11 to 20 (n=10) and $2,027 past 21 (n=10).
Between eleven and twenty years a Mazak or Mori holds a median $18,300 against $6,187 for the Korean and Taiwanese tier, a 3x gap that vanishes after year twenty when both trade for the price of the rigging. The named lots make the point. A 2012 Mazak QuickTurn Nexus 200-II took $21,600 and a 2013 Mazak VCN 510C-II took $28,111 on Mazatrol controls that Mazak has since replaced; a 2010 Hyundai Wia F500 Plus on a Fanuc took $5,775 and a 2006 Daewoo Doosan 320/40 took $600. The exceptions run the other way too: the 2015 Doosan Mynx at $66,500 was the most expensive lot in the file, and a 2020 Milltronics VM4020 at $46,500 beat every Haas but the VF-4SS. What the tiers agree on is the floor. Past twenty years, 20 Japanese and German machines ran a median $880 and 5 Korean and Taiwanese machines a median $100. For a buyer, that floor is the interesting number: it says a 1996 Okuma LB15 II on an OSP700 control changes hands for $100, and the risk is entirely in the control.
The $100 Control Cohort
Every lot page names the control when the auctioneer bothered to, and 89 of the 144 did. The pattern in those 89 is the clearest single finding in the file, and it is not about age.
Source: Open Factory Bid-Tab Price Book
Eleven machines on Yasnac controls, median age 24 years, hammered at a median $100, and 73% of them went for under $1,000; eleven on Fanuc 16, 18 or 21 series controls, median age 25, hammered at a median $356 with 55% under $1,000; two Fadals ran $388; twelve on pre-Smooth Mazatrol, median age 19.5 years, ran $6,301; nine Haas machines on the Classic control, median age 18, ran $7,355; five Milltronics on Centurion 8 and later ran $6,875; two on Mitsubishi M7 or M8 controls ran $11,946; and the three Haas machines on the Next Generation Control, median age 6, ran $36,600.
A working machine with a Yasnac or a 1990s Fanuc control is worth its scrap weight plus the cost of the rigger’s time, and the same iron on a control the builder still supports is worth $5,000 to $7,000. FANUC America’s own product page marks the 0i-MF, 0i-TF, 31i-B, 31i-B5 and 32i-B as “Legacy” and sells the Plus versions as current, and Wikipedia dates the last Series 0 controls to a production run that ended in 1998; the 16, 18 and 21 series in our lots are a generation older than what FANUC now calls legacy. Yaskawa’s Yasnac line is gone from every current machine in the file. The lots say what that means at the hammer: a 2001 Miyano MTV-T310 on Yasnac for $505, a 1999 Kia Super KiaTurn 15 on Yasnac for $100, a 1992 Matsuura MC-800VF on Yasnac for $100, a 1998 Femco Durga 25E on a Fanuc OT for $100, a 2003 Mazak PFH-4800 horizontal for $100. Against those, a 2007 Doosan Puma 300MSC on a Fanuc 18i-TB drew 60 bids and $7,100 at Hansen on 8 September 2026: an 18i, but the i-series, with a live-tool spindle and a chip conveyor, and the description said “machine was tested and all axes appear to function per seller”.
We cannot separate the controller discount from the age discount inside one brand with this n. Haas moved to the Next Generation Control in the middle of the last decade, so every Haas in the file younger than nine years has it and every Haas older than eleven does not; the 43% to 55% of list on the NGC machines and the 3% to 34% on the Classic machines is one effect measured twice. What the file does show is the floor by control family, and the floor is where a buyer’s risk lives: a board for a Yasnac or a Fanuc 16 is a used part from a breaker, not a catalog item, and the hammer already knows it.
Where the Machines Sell, and How Fast They Want Them Gone
The volume in this file is lumpy because liquidations are lumpy. Machinesused runs a multi-shop online auction most months and a complete-shop sale when a secured party calls; Hansen sells a machine shop when an owner retires or a bank repossesses.
Source: Open Factory Bid-Tab Price Book
From August 2025 to September 2026 the three houses closed 126 CNC machine-tool lots, 25 of them in November 2025 and 23 in December, none in February or May 2026, and the gross hammer ran $274,000 in October 2025 and $253,000 in November against $8,000 in September 2026; 18 earlier Hansen lots from June 2023 to August 2024 sit in the CSV and not in the chart.
Two months, October and November 2025, carried $527,000 of the $1,009,566 gross in the file, because that is when the two complete-shop liquidations closed. For a buyer the implication is scheduling, not price: the good machines come to market in the weeks after a lender moves, and the backlog arithmetic in The $306k Machine put a Japanese builder’s order-to-ship at about seven months in mid-2026, so the shop that can watch three catalogues in October buys a 2020 machine in November and cuts chips in December. The EV plant liquidations we covered in January are the same mechanism at a scale where BidSpotter houses run the sales and the results never reach the open web.
Source: Open Factory Bid-Tab Price Book. Data: sell-through-by-house.csv
Machinesused sold 122 of 122 CNC machine-tool lots at a median 42.5 bids and a median hammer of $5,015 with a 15% premium; Hansen sold 19 of 19 at a median 23 bids and a median $220 with a 10% buyer’s fee; K-BID sold 1 of 3, the other two being a 2014 Haas VF-2SS bid to $10,000 and a 2013 Haas ST-20 bid to $7,500 that both closed “Reserve Not Met” on 22 July 2025, under a 15% premium capped at $1,500 per item.
The terms are the other half of the price. Machinesused’s Superior Machine lot page says “ALL PAYMENTS DUE BY WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER, 19, 2025 4PM CT”, one day after the 18 November close, and “This item must be removed between Monday, December 1, 2025 and Thursday, December 4, 2025”, with an exclusive rigger on site those days and a $350 shipping-bracket fee “automatically added to this invoice”; cards are taken only to $2,500 with a 3% charge, so a $42,090 invoice is a wire. Hansen’s New Berlin terms give the buyer 60 days to remove and charge 3.75% on cards, and every lot description ends “buyer is responsible for rigging and removal of item”. GovDeals’ Norco transformer lot in our used-market piece gave ten business days at a 15% premium. The removal window is a cost: a buyer without a rigger booked and a truck scheduled before the hammer falls is paying storage or forfeiting the deposit, and the RFQ template we published for new equipment has no clause for it because a factory order does not need one.
From Hammer to First Chip
The hammer is the largest line in landing a used machine and not the whole bill. We built the rest from the public rate cards that exist and marked the lines that do not have one.
Source: Open Factory Bid-Tab Price Book, Hymson maintenance benchmark table, auction terms (Machinesused.com, Hansen, K-BID). Data: rigging-cost-table.csv
On the 2020 VF-2SS the premium is $3,660 at Hansen’s 10% or $5,490 at Machinesused’s 15%; the bracket fee is $350; loadout, freight for 150 miles and set-in-place run $2,500 to $7,500 across the three lines; the electrical drop for a machine that wants 220 VAC three-phase at 70 A or 440 VAC at 35 A runs $1,200 to $4,000; distributor startup at $150 to $225 an hour for 8 to 16 hours runs $1,200 to $3,600 plus $300 to $1,500 of travel at $1.50 to $2.00 a mile; the total is $8,860 low, $15,740 base, $22,440 high, or 24%, 43% and 61% of the hammer.
A $36,600 hammer is a $45,000 to $59,000 machine on the floor, and the 15% premium is the only line in that bill that a bidder can price to the dollar before bidding. The rows marked (A) in data/rigging-cost-table.csv are ours: no rigger or flatbed carrier we could reach publishes a rate card, DAT’s flatbed benchmark blocked our fetch, and the auction houses name the exclusive rigger without naming his price. The rows that are not marked (A) come from Hymson’s maintenance benchmark table, which gives $150 to $225 an hour for OEM distributor service labour, $250 to $400 for a 5-axis or laser specialist, $1.50 to $2.00 a mile for travel and the line “A simple 1-day repair often costs $2,500+ when travel is added”, and from the auction terms themselves. The Haas TCO piece carried $4,000 to $8,000 for freight, rigging and install on a new machine delivered by the distributor; the auction version is higher because the buyer is paying two riggers, a carrier and a startup call that the distributor would have bundled, and because the premium is a cost a factory order does not have. Quote Check exists to hold a distributor’s bundled quote against these lines; the same arithmetic run in reverse says a distributor’s $70,995 VF-2 delivered and installed is competing against a $45,000 to $59,000 five-year-old one, not a $36,600 one.
The machine’s weight is the other input a bidder needs and the lot page usually gives it. The Superior Machine VF-2SS listed “Main Unit Approx Weight: 9000.00 lbs” and shipping dimensions of 112 by 94 by 98 inches; Hansen’s Doosan Puma gave 5,860 kg; a 2015 Fryer CM-15 that took $7,725 in August 2026 came with a Siemens 828D and its own weight line. Weight sets the forklift class, the trailer and the permit, and a 9,000 lb machine is a 15,000 lb forklift and a step-deck, not a box truck.
The Five Checks Before You Wire Money
Every dollar in the file was wired within a day or two of a close on an “as is, where is” lot, and the descriptions tell a buyer exactly what was and was not checked.
First, the hours. Only 4 of 144 lots stated an hour meter, and the one that stated all three was the Haas VF-5 at Hansen: “power on time reads 23380:11, cycle start time reads 4821:27:42, feed cutting time reads 3162:51:30”. That is a machine that sat powered for 23,380 hours and cut for 3,163 of them, and it hammered at $675 with 63 bids. Ask for the three timers and photograph the screen; a Haas records them and the auctioneer will read them off if asked before the preview closes.
Second, the control, by family and not by builder. The chart above says a Yasnac or a Fanuc 16/18/21 is a $100 to $400 machine and a Mazatrol Matrix or a Haas Classic is a $6,000 to $7,000 one at the same age. The lot page names it in the “Machine Control” field or the equipment line, and a buyer who cannot get a board for the control should bid the scrap price and not the iron.
Third, the test statement. Hansen writes “machine was tested and all axes appear to function per seller” on the Puma and “attempted to test but machine tripped the breaker” on a lathe in the same sale; Machinesused writes “NOT CURRENTLY OPERATIONAL” in the title of a 1998 Brother TC-229 that then took $100. The words are the warranty. There is no other one.
Fourth, the paper and the clock. The premium (10% or 15%), the card limit, the payment deadline (one day at Machinesused), the removal window (four days there, 60 at Hansen), the exclusive rigger’s dates and the $350 bracket fee are all in the terms before the auction opens, and the Lead-Time-Adjusted Schedule is the tool to run them against: a machine bought on 18 November that cannot be moved until 1 December and cannot be started up until an electrician has run a 70 A drop is a January machine.
Fifth, the reserve. K-BID shows it and the others do not run one, and the two K-BID Haas lots that closed at $10,000 and $7,500 with “Reserve Not Met” are the best-documented asking prices in the file: a seller who wanted more than 12% of list for a 2014 VF-2SS and did not get it. The Equipment Price Benchmark contribution form takes the number a buyer actually paid after a private treaty like that, and the Bid-Tab Price Book will carry the realized rows as the machine-tool sheet until there is a better source.
What to Do Monday
Pull the three closed catalogues before calling a dealer. Machinesused’s past auctions, Hansen’s results and any K-BID machine-shop liquidation give a buyer 144 realized prices with year, control and weight, and the Bid-Tab Price Book carries them as a file with a URL per row; a buyer who knows a 2013 to 2014 Haas VF-2SS hammers at $17,000 to $28,500 and a 2020 one at $36,600 is not negotiating from Machinio’s $41,900 floor. Price the landing before bidding, at $9,000 to $22,000 on a $36,600 machine, and book the rigger for the auction’s removal dates before the auction opens, because the rigger is named in the terms and the window is four days. Bid the control, not the badge: nothing on a Yasnac or a Fanuc 16 through 21 is worth more than the rigging, and the file has 22 lots to prove it. Ask for the three Haas timers or the Fanuc power-on counter in writing from the auctioneer during preview. And put every price paid, at auction or by private treaty, into the Equipment Price Benchmark, because the houses that publish are three, the ones that do not are twenty, and the Bid-Tab Price Book can only index what someone shows it.
Behind the paywall: the lookup table of all 32 Haas hammers by model and model year against today’s list, with the 2013 VF-2SS at 33.9% of list and the 1998 VF-4 at 0.3%, the 82 non-Haas machines by make, model and year in the CSV, and the ranking of nine auction platforms by buyer’s premium and whether the hammer is public, from their own terms.