Type stamp appraisal near me into a search box and you get a wall of directories, dealers offering to look at your collection for free, and buyers promising top dollar. What none of those pages explain is the thing you actually need to know first: there are two completely different services hiding behind the word “appraisal,” one of them is usually free, and most people only ever need the free one.
Here is the short version. Most stamp owners do not need to pay for an appraisal. Dealers and auction houses will usually value a collection free of charge because they hope to buy it or sell it on commission, while a paid written appraisal, typically billed hourly or per item, is genuinely needed only for insurance, estates and probate, or charitable donation paperwork.
The rest of this guide unpacks that answer: what each service costs, what you get for the money, and the order to do things in so you never pay to be told your stamps are common.
Searching for a stamp appraisal near me? Know the two products first
The word “appraisal” gets used for two things that could not be more different.
A valuation (often advertised as a free appraisal) is an informed opinion of what your stamps would fetch, given verbally or in an email. Dealers and auction houses provide these at no charge because valuing your collection is how they win the chance to buy it or auction it. Warwick & Warwick, a UK auction house, is upfront about this model in its own appraisal guidance: the free look is the front door to a sale.
A formal written appraisal is a signed document from a professional who charges for their time. It states what the collection is, how it was examined, which valuation basis was used, and what it is worth on that basis. Insurers, courts, executors and tax authorities want this document. Casual sellers almost never need it.
Mixing these up is expensive in both directions. Pay for a written appraisal when you only wanted to sell, and you have spent real money on paperwork nobody will ever ask for. Treat a dealer’s free offer as a neutral appraisal, and you may anchor on a number that was always a buying price.
The free dealer valuation: fast, useful, and biased by design
A dealer’s number is a wholesale number. The American Philatelic Society’s estate guidance is blunt about the economics: catalogue value “is almost NEVER the appraisal valuation,” and collections generally change hands well below the figures printed in catalogues. A dealer has to resell your stamps at a profit, hold inventory, and absorb the risk of the slow-moving material, so the offer reflects all of that.
That does not make free valuations a trick. If your goal is to sell, a dealer offer is real, immediate information about what the market will pay today, and getting two or three of them is the fastest honest price check available. It only becomes a problem when a free offer is mistaken for an impartial statement of value. It is an opening bid from a motivated buyer, nothing more.
If you are weighing that route, our guide to where to sell old stamps compares dealers, auction consignment and selling it yourself, with the realistic percentages for each.
The paid written appraisal: what you are actually buying
Professional appraisers price their work in a few standard ways:
- Hourly. The most common model. The appraiser works through the collection at a stated rate and the bill reflects the time it genuinely took. As a sourced benchmark, the APS estate guide says a formal appraisal could cost $75 to $250 an hour.
- Per item or per album. Used when a collection is large but uniform, so the effort scales with volume rather than difficulty.
- Flat project fee. Quoted up front for a defined job, common for estates where the executor needs a predictable cost.
Rates vary widely by region, credentials and the complexity of the material, so treat that range as a benchmark rather than a quote. Get the fee basis in writing before anyone opens an album. And note one principle that separates professionals from opportunists: a reputable appraiser charges for time, never a percentage of the value they report. A percentage fee pays the appraiser more for writing bigger numbers, which is a conflict of interest dressed up as a pricing model.
What the money buys is the document itself: an itemised or summarised inventory, the valuation basis (replacement value for insurance, fair market value for estates and donations, and the two can differ substantially), the method of examination, and a signature someone is professionally accountable for.
When you genuinely need the written appraisal
Three situations justify paying:
- Insurance. An insurer scheduling a collection wants a documented replacement value. A verbal opinion from a dealer will not survive a claim.
- Estates and probate. Executors need defensible fair market values for the inventory, and heirs need a neutral number nobody profits from moving.
- Charitable donation. In the United States, donating a collection and claiming a deduction above $5,000 generally requires you to obtain a qualified appraisal and have the appraiser sign IRS Form 8283 (the appraisal document itself only has to be attached for very large deductions). The tax paperwork is the appraisal’s whole purpose here.
If you are not in one of those situations, stop and ask what the document would actually be for. “I want to know what my stamps are worth” is a valuation question, and valuations are free.
When a first pass is all you need
Here is the arithmetic that makes hourly appraisal a bad deal for typical albums. Most inherited collections are dominated by mass-printed material, the kind of stamp printed in the billions. The 1932 2¢ Washington Bicentennial, one of the most common stamps in American albums, retails for well under a dollar (about $0.40 on Mystic Stamp Company’s current listing). Paying a professional by the hour to confirm, stamp by stamp, that hundreds of items are each worth pocket change is money spent learning what a free first pass would have told you in an afternoon.
So run the first pass yourself, at no cost:
| Step | What it costs | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Photo identification first pass | Free, minutes per stamp | Country, year, catalogue number, honest value range |
| Dealer or auction house valuation | Free | A real offer or consignment estimate, biased toward a purchase |
| Formal written appraisal | Hourly, per item, or flat fee | A signed document for insurance, probate or the IRS |
Photograph the stamps that look promising and let identification software give you the honest range for each; our what is my stamp worth guide walks through the whole process. If you inherited the collection, do the five-step triage in our inherited stamp collection guide before showing it to anyone. Then, if the first pass surfaces material that genuinely matters, pay for expertise on that short list only. You have turned an open-ended hourly bill into a small, targeted one.
One conflict of interest to watch for
Be careful with anyone who offers to appraise your collection and buy it in the same conversation. The two roles pull in opposite directions: the appraiser is paid to state the true value, the buyer profits from paying less than it. Ethical professionals keep the roles separate, and the APS estate guidance repeatedly steers owners toward getting independent opinions before selling. Related red flags: unsolicited callers who want to visit your home, ads that price collections “by the pound,” and any fee calculated as a share of the appraised value.
None of this requires suspicion of the trade, most dealers are honest. It just requires knowing which service you are in the room for.
The right order of operations
Identify first, for free. Triage into the common pile and the check-further pile. Get free valuations if you want to sell. Pay for a written appraisal only when an insurer, a court or the IRS will ask to see it. Done in that order, most people discover the appraisal question answers itself, and the few who do need the document walk in knowing exactly which stamps justify the fee.