Here’s How Much Your Vintage IKEA Furniture Could Be Worth

Before you sell your old IKEA furniture for a few bucks at a yard sale, you might want to check first if they’re better off at an auction house.

Classic pieces from the Swedish retailer are considered collectors’ items and can fetch prices up to thousands of dollars. For instance, The Guardian reports that IKEA’s JARPEN metal wire chairs from 1986, which sold for about $16 at the time, now retails for at least $453. A set of four HASSLO indoor and outdoor chairs, meanwhile, is sold at $919.

Those prices, though, pale in comparison to pieces from the 90s. A set of four VILBERT chairs, which had a small production run back in its heyday early in the decade, originally cost about $81. It’s now priced at $5,639.

According to Wava Carpenter, editor-in-chief of contemporary furniture site Pamono, the most popular pieces are from the 1980s and 1990s. “I think this is because IKEA in this era began to define itself as a brand aimed at a youthful, urban and contemporary audience… The silhouettes are fun, eye-catching and colourful, even while maintaining a rather minimalist quality.”

If you have mid-century modern IKEA pieces from the 60s and 70s, you might also want to auction them off. A 1972 IMPALA chair, for example, is currently on sale for $8,500.

Why are old IKEA furniture suddenly selling like classical artworks? “Some of IKEA’s earlier pieces are really quite good quality both when looking at the actual make as well as the design as being very up to date from the period it was designed in,” said Eva Seeman, head of modern works of art and design at auction house Bukowskis.

Your best chance at striking IKEA gold is by checking to see if your furniture was made under the small-edition 1992 PS (short for Post Scriptum) series, which is highly coveted by collectors. No luck with BILLY bookcases, though, as one is sold every 10 seconds.