What the collection is worth picks the route
Where to sell a stamp collection is settled by one figure, and it is not the catalogue total. It is what a specialist thinks the material will make at hammer.
Under a few hundred pounds, a dealer’s offer nets about what an auction nets and arrives three to six months sooner. Between a few hundred and about £1,000, a general saleroom will take it as one or two lots. Above that, with early Great Britain, strong single countries or postal history in it, a specialist philatelic auction with the good material lotted on its own is where the collectors bid against each other.
An executor has a further constraint. The figure that goes on the inheritance tax return is the open market value at the date of death, and a collection is listed in its own right in box 3 of the form, as the IHT407 guide sets out. Get that figure before anything is sold, because the sale cannot supply it retrospectively for a collection that has been broken up.
How each buyer sets the price
The four routes differ in how the number is arrived at, which is what decides whether haggling changes anything.
| Buyer | How the price is set | When you are paid |
|---|---|---|
| Stamp dealer | An offer for the whole holding, against what they can retail it for and how long it will sit on the shelf | On the day, in cleared funds |
| Specialist philatelic auction | Hammer, less commission, VAT and the per-lot charges | Four to six weeks after a sale that is two to five months away |
| General saleroom | Hammer on a box lot, in front of local buyers and the trade | Four to six weeks after the sale |
| Online, listing it yourself | Whatever a bidder pays, less the platform’s fees, less your time | As each item sells |
A dealer’s offer is one number and it is negotiable, because they are pricing their own risk. A hammer price is not negotiable and nobody knows it in advance, which is the trade the seller makes: the dealer removes the uncertainty and charges for it.
The houses that hold philatelic sales in Britain
Three names run regular philatelic auctions: Spink and Grosvenor Philatelic Auctions in London, and Warwick and Warwick in Warwick. Stanley Gibbons buys and sells as a dealer, and its catalogue numbers are the language all of them price in.
Read the prices realised from their recent sales before choosing between them. A house that sold three collections resembling yours in the past year is the house whose bidders want the next one, and its results are published for exactly this purpose.
Ask for an opinion from photographs before anything leaves the house. Send the album spines, the first pages of each album and close-ups of anything early, which is the set of photographs the collection guide describes. Ask how they want it sent, and whether they will collect. A collection worth four figures should not go into the post uninsured.
What the charges do to a £520 collection
Take the six-album Great Britain collection in the price records, entered as one lot and sold in July 2026 against an estimate of £400 to £600 for £520 at hammer. The row is illustrative rather than a particular sale. Put it through the rates in the auctions guide: commission at 15 percent, VAT on the commission, a £5 lotting fee and insurance at 1.5 percent. That guide carries a fifth charge, photography and cataloguing, which the table below leaves out because one album lot is photographed once rather than forty times.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Hammer, one lot | £520 |
| Seller’s commission at 15 percent | −£78 |
| VAT on the commission | −£15.60 |
| Lotting fee | −£5 |
| Insurance at 1.5 percent | −£7.80 |
| Received by the seller | £413.60 |
A dealer offering £400 in cash on the day is within £14 of that, with the money in the bank three to six months earlier and no risk that the lot is bought in. This is the arithmetic behind the advice to take a dealer’s offer on a modest collection, and it reverses the moment one album in six holds something a collector wants, because a specialist sale is the only place that album is seen by the people who would pay for it.
What to lot separately, and what to keep together
A philatelic house splits a consignment at the lotting stage. The Penny Blacks, the early Penny Reds, the high values and the unmounted mint sets are catalogued as single lots. The rest goes in as albums and boxes. That is one consignment described accurately, and it is not the same thing as breaking a collection up.
Three holdings lose money when they are split between buyers. A written-up postal history collection sells on its narrative, and the pages are part of the lot. Exhibition awards travel with the whole collection and with nothing less than it. Hardest of the three to replace is a run of plate numbers or a country worked to completion, because the next owner would have to spend years reassembling what took an afternoon to break up.
There is a tax reason to keep track of who buys what. Capital gains tax reaches a gain on a personal possession disposed of for £6,000 or more, and HMRC’s guidance on possessions that are part of a set applies that figure to all or part of a set sold to the same person together rather than piece by piece. Stamps and coins are named on the same guidance as possessions the tax applies to. Most albums are nowhere near £6,000. A collection with one strong country in it can be.
Selling it yourself, and what it costs in time
Listing individually is the only route that beats a dealer on common material, and the reason most people abandon it is the arithmetic of the work rather than the fees. Two hundred stamps at 30p each is a week of photographing, describing and packing for £60 before postage.
It works on two kinds of material. The first is a stamp whose catalogue number you can state with confidence, because the buyer is paying for the identification and a wrong one comes back. The second is a run of the same modern issue that sells as a lot of fifty. Anything that needs plating, a watermark check or a perforation gauge belongs with someone who owns the instruments, because the catalogue number, the watermark and the perforation gauge are what separate a £2 stamp from a £200 one.
The order to do it in
Leave the albums alone. Photograph them as they are, send the photographs to two houses that hold philatelic sales, and ask each for a hammer estimate and a note of what they would lot separately. Compare the two, then ask a dealer what they would pay for the whole thing in cash.
Three numbers in hand, the decision makes itself, and the only one that needs care is the estimate for a collection nobody has opened yet. Put a figure on what you hold first: the collection guide sets out what a specialist looks for as the pages turn, and what percentage of catalogue each kind of material realises.
