When your nonprofit hosts a live auction, it’s usually to accomplish two main purposes. While your primary goal is to bring in substantial revenue for your mission, live auctions are also great opportunities to engage supporters with a competitive atmosphere and the exciting prizes up for grabs.

Choosing the right starting bid amount for each of your items helps you accomplish both of these goals, since it sets the tone for bidding and determines how much money you can raise from that prize. In this guide, we’ll help you do just that by answering some common questions about live auction starting bids, including:

Let’s get started by defining exactly what we mean by “starting bid.”

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What is a starting bid?


A starting bid is the price at which bidding begins for a live auction item. Starting bids are usually predetermined by your event team, although if your auctioneer is experienced and skilled at reading the room, they might adjust it slightly based on your participants’ energy during the auction.

What is the difference between a starting bid and a minimum bid?

Also known as a reserve price, a minimum bid is the lowest amount you’re willing to let an auction item go for. This should be lower than the starting bid amount so that if no one raises their bid card for the starting bid, the auctioneer can backtrack to the minimum bid.

Minimum bids are often confused with the term “minimum bid increase,” which is the amount the auctioneer will raise the price by after someone bids. For example, let’s say you set the starting bid amount for two front-row tickets to a popular artist’s concert at $1,000. If your minimum bid increase is $100, once someone bids $1,000, the auctioneer would increase the bid to $1,100, then to $1,200, and so on. However, they can increase by more if participants seem excited about an item, which is why this is called the minimum bid increase.

What is the baseline for auction starting bid values?

Before you can set any bid amount for a live auction item, you first need to determine its fair market value (FMV), or the price you’d pay for the item if you purchased it on the open market. However, because some auction items are unique or bundled, and you’ll often procure prizes via in-kind donations or nonprofit discounts to reduce upfront event costs, figuring out FMV can be easier said than done.

If you can’t find an auction item’s FMV by looking up its full retail price (e.g., if someone donated a brand-new MacBook Pro to your auction, its listing on Apple’s website would be the FMV) or adding together the retail prices of each item in a bundle, here are a few ideas to try:

A mind map of four resources to determine FMV, which are discussed below.

  • Research comparable items online. For example, if you receive a donation of a painting by a local artist, you could check if that artist has a website or Etsy shop where they’re selling their other artwork, or else look up what similar paintings by other artists are selling for.
  • Leverage your network. Consider contacting other nonprofits in your vertical or geographic area to ask if they’ve ever received a similar auction item to the one you’re having trouble pricing and, if so, how they valued it.
  • Ask the item’s provider. While auction item donors can sometimes give you a good idea of what their item is worth, it’s usually best to take their estimates with a grain of salt because owners of unique goods like signed memorabilia or antique furniture tend to overvalue them.
  • Contact potential auction participants. It doesn’t hurt to reach out to a few loyal supporters to ask what they’d be willing to pay for some of the unique items and experiences in your catalogue. Plus, letting these donors know in advance that you’re auctioning off these prizes makes them more likely to attend and bid on them!


Knowing your auction items’ FMV is not only important for pricing, but also for tax purposes. You’ll need to report the total value of your nonprofit’s in-kind donations on your Form 990 tax return, and you may need to fill out additional forms if you receive prizes worth more than $25,000, vehicle donations, or items of historical significance. Also, auction participants can only claim charitable contribution deductions on their taxes for any amount they pay over an item’s FMV, so make sure you have an accurate record of this number.

How should I determine the starting bid for a live auction item?

In general, a good starting bid amount is 30-50% of the item’s FMV. Starting bids for unique or high-value prizes should be on the upper end of that range, while commonplace or lower-value items should fall toward the lower end.

To round out your live auction pricing strategy, an effective range for a minimum bid or reserve price is 15-25% of the item’s FMV, again putting higher-value prizes on the upper end of that range and lower-value items on the lower end. A prize’s minimum bid increase should be about 10% of its starting bid.  A flowchart of the four major numbers involved in live auction pricing as described above.

Returning to the earlier concert ticket example, if the starting bid is $1,000, the two tickets’ combined FMV might be around $2,500 since 1,000 is 40% of 2,500. The minimum bid increase of $100 is 10% of the starting bid, and you might set the minimum bid at $600—24% of the tickets’ FMV.

The one exception to this pricing rule is consignment items like Winspire’s charity auction travel packages. When you buy a prize on consignment, all of the revenue you earn above the list price goes to your nonprofit’s mission. So, you’ll want to use the list price as the minimum bid and set the starting bid amount at 110-120% of the list price to increase your chances of generating revenue from those items.

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How do live auction and silent auction pricing differ?

If you’re still deciding whether you want your next auction to be live or silent, or if you’re considering including both formats in the same event, you’re probably wondering how their item pricing strategies compare. Generally speaking, silent auction pricing is less dynamic than live auction pricing for a few reasons:

A table comparing live and silent auction pricing, which is discussed below.

  1. Because silent auctions rely on premade bid sheets rather than an auctioneer who can adjust bid amounts based on the energy of the room, bids tend to increase more steadily.
  2. While the best starting bid amount for most silent auction items is also 30-50% of their FMV, there are no reserve prices. Don’t let a silent auction prize go for less than its starting bid amount—since silent auctions typically feature many more items than live auctions (100 or more vs. 12-15), you can afford to not sell a few prizes and recycle them for a future auction or raffle.
  3. For your highest-value silent auction items, you can provide a “Buy Now” option so a supporter who really wants that prize can automatically win it by paying 150-200% of the item’s FMV. Since these options bring the excitement of competitive bidding to a halt, you shouldn’t offer them for every item, but they can help you maximize revenue on sought-after items like the aforementioned travel packages and concert tickets.

Despite these pricing strategy differences, both live and silent auctions can bring in significant funding as long as you follow the tips in this guide. So, which one is the best choice for your nonprofit will depend on your supporters’ preferences and the number and value of the items you can procure.

Wrapping Up: Additional Resources on Live Auction Planning

By strategically setting starting bids and developing solid pricing models for your live auction items, you can maximize revenue and help donors walk away satisfied with their event experience and prizes. Make sure to choose a skilled auctioneer who can adapt their approach to make the event exciting and build a strong foundation by procuring items that bidders will be excited about from the start.

For more information on planning live auctions, check out these resources:

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