Used RV Prices Are Up 17%. New Shipments Are Down 14%

National Powersport Auctions released its pre-owned RV market report for July 2026 in early September, and the headline figure is the kind that makes dealers look twice: average wholesale prices for RVs and campers came in 17% above year-ago levels, which NPA called one of the strongest year-over-year gains across every vehicle category it tracks.

That is a striking number in a year when almost every other RV metric is pointing down. Wholesale shipments through July are off nearly 14%. New retail registrations have declined for nine straight months. The industry’s own forecast for 2026 has been revised downward twice. And yet the used side of the business is posting its strongest year-over-year price gains in several years.

Both things are true at once, and understanding why matters more than the headline itself — particularly if you are pricing a trade-in, planning fall acquisitions, or shopping for a rig this autumn.

What the NPA July Report Actually Said

The Poway, California-based auction house frames July as the start of the normal seasonal transition. The market has moved out of the peak summer selling window and into the traditional fall cooldown, and wholesale prices are behaving accordingly: down month over month, up sharply year over year.

Four points from the report are worth holding onto:

Prices are easing month to month but remain elevated annually. NPA expects average wholesale prices to keep retreating through the winter, which is the standard seasonal pattern rather than a signal of collapse.

Inventory is plentiful across every category — motorhomes, travel trailers, fifth wheels and campers — giving dealers unusually broad selection at auction.

Condition is doing more work than ever. Clean, well-maintained, retail-ready units continue to command a premium, and NPA noted that the gap between clean product and everything else has widened in recent months.

Auction values are running below guidebook thresholds in most categories. This is the single most actionable warning in the report, and I’ll come back to it.

NPA’s September lineup included 15 sales across Atlanta, San Diego, Cincinnati, Lakeland, Sacramento, Dallas, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Portland and Denver.

The 17% Didn’t Appear Overnight

What makes the July figure more interesting is the trajectory behind it.

RVDA president Phil Ingrassia, writing in RV Executive Today in July, cited NPA data showing average pre-owned RV prices up 10.6% year over year. NPA’s June report put the gain at 11%. July came in at 17%.

So this is not a one-month spike. It is a steadily widening spread that has accelerated through the summer. NPA’s earlier 2026 reporting also showed RV wholesale prices climbing faster than the marine, side-by-side, motocross and ATV categories the company tracks alongside them — RVs outpaced all of them over the February-to-April window.

Why Used Is Outrunning New: The Supply Side

The simplest explanation for firm used values is that there are fewer new units flowing into the market.

The RV Industry Association’s July survey of manufacturers recorded 19,948 total shipments, down 11.9% from the 22,633 units shipped in July 2025. Through seven months, shipments totalled 183,592 units versus 213,338 at the same point last year — a 13.9% decline.

The segment split is stark. Towables finished July down 9.8% at 17,754 units. Motorhomes fell 25.6% to just 2,194 units. Park model RVs were the lone bright spot, up 29.7% for the month and 24.5% year to date.

The forecast has moved with it. RVIA’s Spring 2026 RoadSigns report, prepared by ITR Economics, projected a median of roughly 349,000 wholesale shipments for the year — a third straight year of growth. By the Summer edition, that projection had been cut to a median of 314,000 units, an 8.2% decline from 2025’s 342,200. That is a meaningful downgrade in a single quarter.

Fewer new units on dealer lots means fewer trade-ins entering the pipeline over time, and it pushes value-seeking retail buyers toward pre-owned inventory. Both effects support wholesale pricing.

Why Used Is Outrunning New: The Demand Side

The demand picture is less about enthusiasm and more about arithmetic.

RVIA’s quarterly travel intentions survey, conducted by Cairn Consulting with 1,612 respondents in July, found 23 million Americans planning an RV trip this fall, with more than 11 million expecting to travel by RV over Labor Day weekend and 9.4 million non-owners planning to rent or borrow a unit. More than half of respondents named affordability as their primary reason for choosing RV travel.

That word — affordability — is the whole story. It is not a market of buyers reaching for the top of the range. It is a market of buyers doing the math on a payment, and a five-year-old travel trailer answers that math better than a new one.

Worth noting for balance: RV News observed that the 23 million figure is down 14.8% from 2024, the last year RVIA published the comparable total. Fall travel intent is solid, not booming.

There is one genuinely bullish signal in the same survey. Among respondents who described themselves as likely or very likely to buy an RV, 35% expected to purchase within three months. Two years ago that figure was 18%. The intender pool may be smaller, but the people in it are closer to the transaction.

Read the Average Carefully

Here is where a well-informed dealer should slow down.

NPA’s average wholesale price is exactly that — an average of what physically crossed the block. It is sensitive to mix. If the units running through the lanes in July 2026 skewed newer, cleaner or larger than the units running in July 2025, the average rises even if identical rigs are selling for identical money. NPA itself attaches an asterisk to the year-over-year comparison and separately notes that clean product is pulling away from the broader average — which is another way of saying the composition of the sale matters enormously right now.

Cross-referencing helps. Black Book’s Q2 2026 commentary described wholesale RV values as continuing to normalize rather than climb. Motorhome values eased into Q1 2026, settling near the low-$60,000 range, with towables — particularly entry-level and older units — seeing more noticeable declines. Amber Powell, Black Book’s director of vehicle management and specialty markets, pointed to higher financing costs and more deliberate purchasing behaviour as the drivers.

JD Power’s valuation data, cited by Ingrassia, tells a third version: stability. Standard hitch travel trailer values held essentially flat year over year at $25,565 in Q1 2026, while folding camping trailers reached $11,628, above both 2025 and 2024 levels.

None of these sources is wrong. They are measuring different things — auction averages, guidebook valuations, and segment-level wholesale trends. The honest synthesis is that used RV values have stabilized at a normalized post-pandemic floor, quality units are appreciating against that floor, and tired units are not.

The Segment Picture Is Not Uniform

Black Book’s read on the motorized side is useful for anyone stocking coaches. Larger Class A units face the most pressure because of their price points. Class B has held up relatively well on the strength of versatility and lifestyle appeal. Class C has seen steady demand from first-time and value-oriented buyers.

Black Book also made a point that echoes NPA’s condition warning: auction outcomes are increasingly decided by unit-specific factors — condition, mileage, feature content — rather than by broad market direction. In a normalized market, the spread between a good example and a rough one widens.

The Used Market Is Resilient, Not Invincible

Statistical Surveys Inc. data provides the necessary counterweight.

New RV retail registrations have declined every month of 2026: down 14.5% in January, 24.12% in February, 21.87% in March, 16.87% in April and 19.04% in May. May marked the ninth consecutive monthly year-over-year decline and the 17th in 19 months dating back to October 2024.

Used registrations ran positive through the first four months — up 1.3% in January, 1.57% in February, 6.56% in March and 5.66% in April — and then turned negative in May, down 2.41%. Within that May figure, used fifth wheels fell 4.39%, used Type C units 6.10% and used Type A units 7.59%.

One negative month is not a trend. But it is a reminder that rising wholesale averages and rising retail unit velocity are not the same thing, and dealers buying aggressively on the strength of the price data should keep an eye on their own turn rates.

The Trade-In Trap

NPA’s most practical warning deserves its own heading: average wholesale prices in most categories remain well below guidebook thresholds.

That gap is where dealers lose money. Appraising a trade against a book value that the auction lanes will not support means buying inventory above its liquidation value — and in a market NPA expects to soften further through winter, the gap only widens with time on the lot.

The report’s prescription is straightforward and worth taking literally: appraise against recent auction comparables rather than book, take timely write-downs on aging owned inventory, and shorten liquidation timelines rather than hoping for a recovery that seasonality argues against.

What This Means If You’re Buying

For consumers, the picture is more favourable than the headline suggests.

Wholesale softening through fall and winter eventually reaches retail lots. Inventory is broad across every category. Dealers are motivated to clear aging units as 2027 model-year product arrives, which converts leftover 2026 stock into aging inventory overnight regardless of the fact that it is technically new.

Two cautions. Financing costs have not fallen the way many in the industry expected entering 2026, and the gap between new and used pricing has narrowed in some segments — meaning a discounted leftover new unit is occasionally the better value than a low-mileage used one. Run both numbers.

And given how sharply clean units are separating from the rest, a pre-purchase inspection is doing more financial work in this market than it did three years ago.

What to Watch Through Q4

Interest rates. The single largest lever on a six-figure discretionary purchase, and one that has not moved as anticipated.

Tariffs. Component costs remain a live variable for manufacturers, with roughly a third to half of RV component parts exposed to import pricing according to economists tracking the Elkhart cluster. Cost relief, if it comes, shows up in future production runs rather than on current lots.

The next RoadSigns revision. After a cut from a 349,000-unit median to 314,000 in one quarter, the autumn edition is the number to watch.

Used retail registrations. Whether May’s 2.41% decline was noise or the beginning of something is the most important open question in the pre-owned segment.

The Bottom Line

NPA’s 17% year-over-year gain is real, and it reflects something genuine: pre-owned RVs are where the demand is in 2026, because that is where the affordability is. But it is an average shaped by mix, measured against a soft 2025 comparison, and it sits alongside a used retail market that just posted its first monthly decline of the year.

The disciplined reading is the one NPA itself offers. Buy the fall softening, buy quality over quantity, appraise against the lanes rather than the book, and price for a market that is still drifting down before it turns.