Cheapest used bass guitars on eBay, live right now.

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How to buy a used bass guitar

Scale length decides whether the instrument suits you, and it is the thing least often mentioned in a listing. Standard is 34 inches. Short scale is 30 to 32 and it plays much easier for small hands or anyone coming across from six strings, which is most of why the Mustang, the Jaguar and the Hofner keep their following. The tone differs too: shorter strings are slacker and warmer, longer ones tighter and more defined. If a listing does not say, ask, because it changes the instrument more than the colour does.

Work out whether the electronics are passive or active, then check the battery box. Active basses need a 9 volt inside and go quiet or distort when it dies, and sellers who do not play bass often list a perfectly good instrument as faulty for exactly that reason. That is a bargain if you know it and a nuisance if you do not. A StingRay, a Sire and most Ibanez SR models are active; a Precision is not.

Sight down the neck and ask about the truss rod. Bass strings pull far harder than guitar strings, so necks move more, and a neck with a hump where it joins the body or a truss rod already wound tight is a repair rather than a setup. Relief you can adjust is normal and expected. A rod at the end of its travel is the one fault that makes a cheap bass not worth buying.

Ask what it weighs. Ash-bodied basses from the seventies onwards can pass ten pounds, and players sell them for that reason alone rather than any fault. It is the most common cause of a good instrument going cheap, and the least visible in photographs.

Shipping is the real risk on a long-necked instrument. Headstocks break in transit when the strings are left at full tension and the neck is not supported inside the box. Ask for the strings to be slackened and for packing under the headstock, and favour a seller who says how they will pack it.

Value. American Fenders, Music Man and Rickenbacker hold their money for years and are bought as much for that as for the sound. Entry level instruments do not: a Squier Affinity or an Ibanez GSR loses most of its value the moment it leaves the shop, which is exactly why buying one secondhand is such good sense. The steepest discount against new is almost always on the cheapest instruments, not the famous ones.

Common questions

Cheapest by model, at a glance

A daily snapshot of the lowest genuine eBay price for every model we track, and how good that price is right now versus its usual level, updated automatically. Prices last refreshed 12 October 2026. Tap a price to see that model's cheapest listings on eBay, or tap a model name for the full live list here.

These are second hand prices, listed by sellers as used or pre-owned, taken from live eBay US listings in US dollars. In collectible categories a sealed or unworn item is sometimes the cheapest genuine listing, and it is included. The same number works both ways: it is what a buyer pays today and the resale value a seller can realistically ask. Every model also carries a price history, the daily record kept since tracking began, which is the part to read before you buy or resell. On a day when a model has no listing that passes these filters, its row keeps the last price we recorded rather than inventing one, and drops off this table if that goes on for more than a few days.

Under each model is the actual listing that price came from, so you can see whether it is the thing you want or a bundle, a variant, or an accessory that happens to share the name.

Over the period we have tracked, this category is down 4.8%, while the used market as a whole is down 0.3%. See the Used Price Index, which is built from these prices and published as a free CSV.

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