Many people have a shoebox, a drawer, or an old cigar box that’s filled with old ticket stubs. Maybe they’re from games with your parents from decades ago, or concerts where you made memories with your college buddies. Ticket stubs are usually the kind of thing that feel sentimental rather than valuable.
You may be surprised to learn that some of those stubs are worth money and that someone may want to buy them. While that may sound a little like a stranger offering good money for a drawer of old socks you were about to throw out, there are plenty of ticket stub collectors who are willing to pay a fair price for them.
How Do I Research a Ticket Stub?
Before assigning a value to any ticket, we need to confirm at least two of these three details:
- The date
- The team or artist
- The venue
Those three points can help us cross-reference a stub against recorded history.
Sometimes that history is famous on its own, like a recorded concert or a no-hitter. Sometimes the event might be a bit stranger, for example, a regular-season Yankees-Orioles game from the 1990s might look completely ordinary until you learn it is the exact game where a famous Seinfeld episode was filmed.
The same logic applies to debuts. A ticket from an artist’s very first tour stop, back before anyone knew their name, can be worth far more than a stub from that same artist’s sold-out arena show decades later. Because this history-checking part of the process can take some time, we maintain a database of more than 300,000 logged stubs dating back to roughly 1909, built specifically to check a ticket against decades of sports and music history.
Does Scarcity Help Build Value?
A common assumption is that championship tickets carry the most value. A World Series game or a Super Bowl may feel like you’ve hit the jackpot. Not necessarily. The value of a vintage ticket stub usually stems from a specific piece of history tied to an exact date, something that happened at that particular game or show.
Between 60,000 and 80,000 people attend each Super Bowl, and nearly every one of them knows it might be historic. Because of this, many of them keep their tickets. That means thousands of identical stubs survive from a single game, which keeps any one of them from being especially rare.
Compare that to a random Tuesday night in October 1987, when Guns N’ Roses played the Ritz in New York as one stop on a long tour. Nobody in the crowd knew that particular show was the one being recorded for a live album. Almost nobody thought to save the ticket. A stub from that night is worth well over $800 today. One seller was offered only $20 for their ticket by another buyer before learning what it was actually worth.
Another example is Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged taping in 1993. It had a studio audience of only 283 people, and getting in required a connection to Sony Music or MTV. A crowd that small, at an event that specific, produces a far tighter supply of stubs than a stadium ever will.
Scarcity, not size, is often what drives value here. A regular-season game nobody expected to matter can end up being rarer than a championship that 80,000 people saved in their scrapbooks.
What About Torn, Faded, or Written-On Ticket Stubs?
You might assume that a torn or damaged stub is not worth mentioning, or that unused, uncut tickets are more valuable. These assumptions are usually untrue. Used stubs generally sell for more than tickets that were never torn at the gate, because a used stub proves someone was actually there. Even though unused tickets are rarer and often in better shape, that scarcity may not translate to higher demand the way it does elsewhere in collecting.
Handwriting may also help rather than hurt. A note scrawled on the back, something like “Sandy Koufax’s first no-hitter” or “My first game with Jimmy,” adds a layer of personal history that collectors often respond to. That is the opposite of how writing is treated on a baseball card, where it usually destroys value.
While there is still a chance that a collector will want a ticket in optimum condition, that chance can be smaller than in most collectible categories. A stub with a crease, a coffee stain, or a hole from being hung on a corkboard is still very much worth a look because you just never know.
Is This a Waste of Time?
Researching a batch of 300 tickets can take about 80 hours to determine which are worth selling and at what price. Assuming each ticket was worth something, it would take about 600 photos to cover both sides of every ticket for online posting.
You may be tempted to use AI tools as shortcuts, but the results can be highly inaccurate. One seller ran a ticket through an AI valuation tool and was told it was worth $250. It was actually worth closer to $10,000. AI can read a date and a team name, but it currently cannot connect a stub to a historical event that nobody wrote down.
So, are old ticket stubs worth anything, or are they a waste of time and space in your closet? A box of old stubs that has been sitting around for years might deserve one more look before it goes to the landfill.
At Dave Buys Ticket Stubs, we check every submission against a database built from decades of sports and music history. We typically send back a no-obligation cash offer in as little as 10 minutes, and all you have to do is send us a few pictures. Check out our website for more information and to read reviews from past sellers. We can’t wait to work with you.
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