The Field Guide

What does a winning bid actually cost?

The number on the screen is not the number you pay. Every house adds a buyer’s premium on top of the hammer price, and at this level the difference between 18% and 28% on the same card is real money. All fifteen publish theirs. Here they are in one place.

Put your own number in

$ — the total column below is what you would owe.

Premium only. Sales tax, shipping and any payment-method surcharge sit on top of this and vary by house and by where you live.

Auction houses

Buyer’s premium on the hammer price. Listed alphabetically — never by fee.
WhereBuyer’s premiumWhat you pay in totalVerified
Clean Sweep Auctions+5% after 2:00 AM ET, +10% after 2:30 AM ET22%2026-08-12
Fanatics CollectApplies to Premier and Weekly auctions alike. Buy Now marketplace items carry no buyer fee. A further 2.9% may apply depending on payment method and destination.20%2026-08-22
GoldinSame across Marketplace, Weekly and Elite22%2026-08-12
Heritage Auctions+5% for bids via third-party platforms22%2026-08-12
Huggins & ScottFlat. No credit cards, PayPal or digital wallets accepted — check, wire, money order or Zelle only, so no payment-method surcharge tier exists.20%2026-08-22
LelandsTerms revision-dated March 15, 202622%2026-08-12
Love of the Game Auctions+5% if paying by PayPal20%2026-08-12
Memory LaneNone on 'I Own It Now' marketplace items20%2026-08-12
Mile High Card CompanyFlat, plus shipping, handling and sales tax where applicable.20%2026-08-22
Robert Edward AuctionsNot published by the house. This figure is our own, worked out from realized lots and put to the house without objection — see below.23% *2026-09-04
SCP Auctions20%2026-08-31
Sotheby'sNew York rate, and tiered rather than flat: 28% on hammer up to $2m, 22% from $2m to $8m, 15% above $8m. Effectively 28% for anything card-sized. London, Paris, Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland each run their own thresholds in local currency. Excludes local taxes and any artist resale right.28%2026-08-27
Wheatland Auction ServicesFlat. All bidders must have a major credit card on file. Pennsylvania sales tax where applicable.18%2026-08-22

Fixed-price marketplaces

A different transaction, and worth saying so: you are buying a card somebody has already priced, with no catalog, no cataloguer and no auction behind it. The fee is lower because the service is smaller.

Buyer-side fees on a fixed-price purchase.
WhereBuyer’s premiumWhat you pay in totalVerified
eBayNo buyer's premium and no buyer fee on eBay.com. Selling fees fall on the seller. A Buyer Protection fee exists on eBay's UK, Australian, Italian and French sites only.None2026-08-22
MySlabsA 1% buyer/usage fee rather than an auction premium. PayPal goods-and-services fees may apply on top.1%2026-08-22

The column nobody publishes

Every premium above is published. Turn the page over and it stops: at 12 of these 15, what the seller pays is not published anywhere, because it is negotiated per consignment. Heritage’s own answer is the plainest — “not published; negotiated per consignment.”

That asymmetry is worth more than any single number here. If you are selling, the rate is a conversation, not a price list — and someone who does not know that accepts the first figure they are quoted. The sell-side guide sets out what each house charges, when it pays, and who answers the phone →

Where these numbers come from

Fourteen of the fifteen are read from the house’s own published terms, and each carries the date we last checked it. Fees change; where a figure is tiered or conditional, the note under the name says so rather than flattening it into one percentage.

One is marked with an asterisk. Robert Edward Auctions does not publish its buyer’s premium anywhere we can find. The 23% is our own figure, worked out by arithmetic across realized lots and then put to the house directly, which did not object to it. That is a weaker kind of fact than a published rate and it is labeled as one.

If you find any of these out of date, tell us and we will correct it — support@theheirloomindex.com.

We do not buy, sell, broker or appraise cards, and no house pays to appear here or to appear higher. There are no affiliate links on this page.