Americans bought more guitars in 2024 than in 2023, and they spent less doing it. That sounds like a slump. It isn't! 

Fretted products and effects grew 38.1% over the ten years to 2024 (NAMM, Nov 2025), and the lockdown rush made 2021 the industry's biggest year on record (NAMM, Nov 2025). The guitar didn't fade after that peak. Instead, players started buying in the used market, into pedalboards and into the higher-end instruments older players keep buying.

So what does that mean for you? Whether you're buying your first good guitar, selling the one that's been sitting in its case since the lockdown, or trying to decide if the one on your stand is worth a setup, the numbers below answer it section by section.

Each one is traced to the organization that produced it, whether that's a federal agency, a public company's SEC filing, a trade association or the marketplace reporting its own sales, and each carries a date and a link.

The page is refreshed as new data comes out. Check the date at the top.

Key Takeaways

• US guitar shipments rose 3.0% to 2.41 million units in 2024, while retail value fell 5.9% to $1.67 billion (NAMM, Nov 2025).
• Electric guitars ($840 million) edged past acoustics ($835 million) in 2024 retail value, the first year electrics led in NAMM's 2015 to 2024 table (NAMM, Nov 2025).
• Prices for musical instruments and accessories rose 2.9% in the year to August 2026, slower than the 3.4% rise in overall consumer prices (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• 11% of US adults played a musical instrument in the year before July 2022 (National Endowment for the Arts, Sep 2024).
• About 16 million Americans ages 13 to 64, roughly 7% of that age group, started learning guitar in the two years to 2021, according to Fender (Fender, Oct 2021).
• Warranty registrations suggest buyers 55 and older are the main purchasers of high-end instruments (NAMM, Nov 2025).
• Nearly 80% of Reverb's gross merchandise sales come from used musical instruments (Etsy Form 10-K, Feb 2025).
• Used Gibson and Fender prices have stabilized about 20% above their 2019 levels (Reverb, Jun 2025).
• Of the guitar brands Reverb charts, PRS has shown the least used-price volatility over six years (Reverb, Jun 2025).
• US effects pedal shipments neared 1.5 million units in 2024, worth $199.8 million at retail (NAMM, Nov 2025).
• Guitar amp shipments fell 8.8% to 520,000 units in 2024, and retail value fell 10.2% to $169.0 million (NAMM, Nov 2025).
• Only 5,380 people were employed as musical instrument repairers and tuners in the US in May 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025).
• The US had 3,617 musical instrument stores in 2025, 73 fewer (2.0%) than a year earlier, employing 32,798 people (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• Border agents seized more than 3,000 counterfeit Gibson guitars worth $18,742,820 at genuine retail prices, the largest counterfeit instrument seizure on record (ICE HSI and CBP, Dec 2024).

The US guitar market: more guitars sold, fewer dollars spent

The guitar boom didn't bust. It reset. After the lockdown years pulled a huge wave of new players into the market and the years right after it cooled off, units have started growing again, and what shrank instead is the price people pay per guitar.

How many guitars are sold in the US each year?

A few million a year, and the count went up in 2024 even as the dollars went down. That split is the story of the whole market right now.

Zoom out and the wider music products business is shrinking. Retail shipments across every category came to an estimated $8.27 billion in 2024, down 2.1% and the third straight annual decline (NAMM, Nov 2025). Guitar units didn't.

Makers see it too. Yamaha reported double-digit guitar revenue growth for its fiscal year ended March 2026, crediting market-share gains in North America and emerging markets (Yamaha Corporation, May 2026). That's Yamaha's own worldwide guitar figure, not a US-only number, but it points the same way.

Do acoustic or electric guitars sell more?

It's a tie now. Units and dollars are within a hair of each other, and electrics took the lead on value in 2024.

Electrics bounced. Their value climbed from $803 million the year before (NAMM, Nov 2025), while acoustics kept sliding from their 2021 high. On units, NAMM counted 1.21 million acoustics against 1.20 million electrics in 2024, and acoustic units had peaked at 1.85 million in 2021 (NAMM, Nov 2025). Measured as a share of all fretted-product sales, electrics came to 34.3% and acoustics 34.1% (NAMM, Nov 2025).

One note on categories. NAMM's electric figures include basses, and its acoustic figures include banjos, dobros and mandolins. If you love a Taylor acoustic or a Gibson Les Paul, you're in good company either way.

Are guitars getting more expensive?

Not as fast as everything else. Instrument prices have trailed overall inflation for years.

Since August 2019 the consumer price index for musical instruments and accessories is up 27.9%, while prices across all items rose 30.6% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026). Measured against everything else you buy, instruments have actually gotten a little cheaper since before the pandemic.

Where do imported guitars come from?

Most guitars sold here are made abroad, so import data is a useful check. These are customs values, not store prices, so don't compare them with the retail figures above.

• The US imported 1.60 million electric guitars and other electric fretted instruments worth $277.7 million in full-year 2025 (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2025).
• That's down from $284.6 million on 1.67 million units in 2024, a 2.4% drop in value and 4.1% in units (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2024).
• Indonesia was the top source of electrics at $100.7 million, 36% of the total, on 600,441 units (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2025).
• China came second on value at $73.2 million (26%) but shipped the most units, 703,932, and Mexico was third at $53.5 million, or 19% (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2025).
• Non-electric guitars valued over $100 each came in at $80.3 million on 293,727 units in 2025 (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2025).
• In 2024 those were $86.7 million on 290,636 units, so value fell 7.4% while units rose 1.1% (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2024).
• Mexico supplied $51.6 million (64%) of the over-$100 guitars, and China was second at $11.5 million, or 14% (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2025).
• Guitars valued at $100 or less totaled 974,040 units worth $34.2 million in 2025 (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2025).
• That's down from 1,180,287 units ($42.5 million) in 2024, so budget guitar imports fell 17.5% by units (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2024).

The import codes don't say whose guitars these are, and they don't explain the drop. They just show fewer cheap guitars crossing the border.

Who plays guitar, and who buys the expensive ones?

The pandemic brought in a young, diverse wave of beginners. The people buying the best instruments, though, are the same players who've been buying them for decades.

How many Americans play guitar or another instrument?

Roughly one adult in ten plays something. No federal survey counts guitar players on their own, so the national numbers cover every instrument.

Before the pandemic, nearly 10% of adults, or 23.7 million people, played an instrument in the year ending February 2020 (National Endowment for the Arts, Dec 2022). Playing an instrument was also one of the few art forms that grew from 2017 to 2022, up half a percentage point (National Endowment for the Arts, Aug 2025).

Fender's own survey with YouGov is the closest thing to a guitar-only count, and it's a pandemic snapshot.

Then there are the pros. Musicians and singers held about 170,400 US jobs in 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026), and 48% of them are self-employed (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).

Who are the newest guitar players?

Young, and more diverse than the guitarists who came before them. The lockdown pushed a lot of them to pick one up.

• 72% of new players were ages 13 to 34, Fender found (Fender, Oct 2021).
• 38% of those new players identify as Latine (Fender, Oct 2021).
• 62% of beginners said the COVID-19 pandemic was an important reason they started (Fender, Oct 2021).
• 58% of beginners use TikTok weekly or more (Fender, Oct 2021).

There's a gender gap, too. Before the pandemic, nearly 12% of men played an instrument against just under 8% of women (National Endowment for the Arts, Dec 2022). Geography matters too. Utah (24%), Washington (23%) and Montana (21%) had the highest shares of adults playing an instrument in 2022 (National Endowment for the Arts, Sep 2024).

Who buys high-end guitars?

Mostly longtime players. NAMM hedges its wording here, so this is a strong pointer rather than a hard count.

NAMM also calls the baby-boom generation, the one that made the guitar what it is, the instrument's most ardent supporters (NAMM, Nov 2025). Serious players trade up, too. In 2024, 56% of Reverb's active sellers were also buyers, and that group spent 2.5 times more than people who only bought (Etsy Form 10-K, Feb 2025).

That's the buyer who'll spend an afternoon comparing three boutique electric guitars side by side. Sound familiar? If that's you, Danville Music is a PRS Signature Dealer and a Taylor Premier Dealer. Browse PRS Private Stock guitars and Taylor guitars.

Do guitars hold their value? The used and vintage market

A good guitar is one of the few hobby purchases that keeps most of its value. That's rare. Reverb, the online music-gear marketplace, backs that up with its own sales data, from vintage pieces to guitars still in production.

How big is the used guitar market?

Big, and it kept growing while new gear sales struggled. Reverb's numbers cover all music gear, not only guitars.

• Reverb brought in about $917.9 million in gross merchandise sales in 2024 (Etsy Form 10-K, Feb 2025).
• It had 785,000 active buyers and 221,000 active sellers at the end of 2024 (Etsy Form 10-K, Feb 2025).
• 86% of those 2024 sales came from US buyers (Etsy Form 10-K, Feb 2025).
• Used music gear sales kept growing even while overall gear sales stayed weak (Etsy Form 10-K, Feb 2025).
• On any given day, about 150,000 guitars are listed for sale on eBay and Reverb combined (NAMM, Nov 2025).

Those Reverb figures come from Etsy's filing for fiscal 2024. They describe that year and nothing later.

Are used guitar prices going up or down?

Down from the peak, but still well above where they started. The market has settled rather than crashed.

At the pandemic high, used electric guitars cost 32% more than in 2019 (Reverb, Jun 2025). By early 2025 they'd settled about 10% below that peak (Reverb, Jun 2025). Timing matters a little. Seasonal swings run about 2% to 4% across the market (Reverb, Jun 2025).

Here's one model as a worked example. A 1991 to 2012 Gibson SG Standard averaged $962 used in 2019 and $1,096 in 2025 (Reverb, Jun 2025). If you're weighing a cheap guitar against a good one, our guitar value breakdown runs the numbers from a player's side.

Which guitars hold their value best?

Vintage pieces and discontinued favorites, going by Reverb's data. Among the brands Reverb tracks, PRS has been the steadiest.

• Vintage guitars sold for 42% more in 2022 than in 2019 (Reverb, Jun 2025).
• Fender's Road Worn '50s Telecaster, discontinued in 2019, has gained 80% in used value since (Reverb, Jun 2025).
• The Squier Hello Kitty Stratocaster still trades 175% above its 2019 price, even after slumping 27% in the last year (Reverb, Jun 2025).

Reverb charts four lines: Gibson, Fender, PRS and everything else. So "steadiest" means steadiest of those, not of every brand ever made. Still. Fans of the PRS Silver Sky won't be surprised.

Looking to buy used, or to trade one in? See Danville Music's used and consignment guitars, used acoustics and PRS guitars.

Pedals are up, amps are down

The pedalboard has become the busiest part of the rig. It isn't hard to see why: a pedal is a small purchase you can make again and again, it fits in a gig bag, and it changes your sound far more than its size suggests, while the big amp loses ground to modelers and small home units.

Are effects pedals still growing?

Yes. Pedals kept climbing through years when the rest of the gear market cooled.

Total effects retail value, pedals plus multi-effects units, more than doubled from $136 million in 2015 to $292 million in 2024 (NAMM, Nov 2025). New designs keep coming, too. Reverb has seen about 3,000 brand-new, unique pedal products listed and sold on its marketplace since 2019 (Reverb, Mar 2025).

That churn is why building your own pedalboard is half the fun now.

Do used pedals hold their value?

Mostly, yes. Prices cooled after 2022 but haven't fallen below where they started.

• Used pedal prices fell steadily after the 2022 peak and now sit just above 2019 levels (Reverb, Mar 2025).
• Among the major brands, Electro-Harmonix holds its used value best (Reverb, Mar 2025).
• When Strymon released the El Capistan V2, resale values of the V1 fell 20% (Reverb, Mar 2025).
• Buyers of 2025's bestselling pedals saved 24% to 49% by buying used instead of new (Reverb, Dec 2025).

A new version of a pedal can turn the old one into a bargain overnight, which is great news if you don't need the newest features and would rather spend the difference on a second pedal. Watch the release calendar. Bass players aren't left out, as our look at overdrive pedals for bass shows. Browse used effects, Strymon pedals and Electro-Harmonix pedals at Danville Music.

What's happening to guitar amps?

Fewer are being sold. NAMM puts that down to amp modeling and plug-ins, which is its explanation rather than a measured cause.

Amp units fell from 720,000 in 2015 to 520,000 in 2024, about 28% down (NAMM, Nov 2025). Modelers didn't fill the gap. Shipments of multi-effects processors, the boxes that model amps, fell 6.4% to 160,000 units, worth $92.0 million (NAMM, Nov 2025).

Play mostly at home? Our guides to the best guitar amps for home use and amps under $1,000 cover that side.

Setups, repair and the local music store

The people who can set up and fix a guitar are getting scarcer, and most of them work inside music stores. That's why the local shop still matters in an online-first market, where a guitar can arrive at your door in two days but nobody in the delivery truck is going to lower the action, straighten the neck or tell you why the high E buzzes at the twelfth fret.

How many people repair guitars for a living?

Very few. Employed instrument repairers numbered only in the low thousands nationwide, and the count is falling.

It's skilled work. Their mean annual wage was $49,960 in May 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025). Two years earlier there were 6,170 of them, earning a mean $46,250 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2023), so the count fell about 13% (our calculation). California employed 520 in May 2025, more than any other state (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025). And about two in three, 4,090 of 6,170, worked at sporting goods, hobby and musical instrument retailers (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2023).

These counts cover wage-earning repairers only, so self-employed luthiers aren't in them. Strings tell a related story. US string sales rose 0.8% to $242.0 million in 2024, and all of that came from price increases (NAMM, Nov 2025).

If your guitar's action feels off, or you've lost track of how many strings it takes, Danville Music's in-house luthiers handle setups and repairs, with free lifetime adjustments on instruments bought at the store.

How many music stores are left in the US?

Fewer than in 2019, and many are small shops. Two federal programs count them, each in its own way, so the figures below stay separate.

• In 2019 there were 3,723 stores, so the count is down about 2.8% since then (our calculation), even as store employment rose from 31,306 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2020).
• The Census Bureau's 2022 Economic Census counted 2,713 firms running 3,656 stores, with $7.08 billion in sales and 31,690 employees (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2024).
• 48% of music stores, 1,561 of 3,230, had fewer than five employees in 2023, according to County Business Patterns (U.S. Census Bureau, Jun 2025).
• California's 404 music stores sold $747.2 million in 2022, about 10.6% of US sales (our calculation) (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2024).
• Contra Costa County had 13 music stores employing 110 people in 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Aug 2026).
• In the 2022 Economic Census, Contra Costa County's 15 music stores sold $26.6 million (U.S. Census Bureau, Dec 2024).

The two Contra Costa counts differ because they come from different years and different programs. Neither is wrong.

Where do Americans buy guitars now?

Online, mostly, and from a handful of giant sellers. Wherever you buy, counterfeits are worth watching for.

Online retail now accounts for more than 50% of total music products sales (NAMM, Nov 2025). Three decades ago the top three retailers had less than 15% of industry sales, and today they take over 60% (NAMM, Nov 2025).

After the record Gibson seizure at the Los Angeles and Long Beach seaport, Gibson confirmed the guitars were fakes and noted that authentic Gibsons are made only in the USA (ICE HSI and CBP, Dec 2024). The story of the fake Gibson seizure and our guide to the best places to buy guitars go deeper.

The simplest protection is an authorized dealer you can visit. Contact Danville Music or read about the store.

School band and orchestra instruments

School music is durable. The federal relief money that propped up school instrument buying is gone, though.

How big is the school band and orchestra instrument market?

About $800 million a year at retail, with fewer instruments shipped than before COVID.

The combined retail value of brass, woodwind and bowed string instruments rose 1.7% to $788.3 million in 2024 (NAMM, Nov 2025). Units tell a different story. Shipments of 785,000 in 2024 sat 20% below the 2019 level of 947,000 (NAMM, Nov 2025).

Why the gap between rising dollars and falling units, when you'd expect a market that ships fewer instruments to take in less money too? As federal ESSER relief money ran out in 2024, manufacturers reported big drops in school orders, especially for large brass instruments (NAMM, Nov 2025).

How many students play music in school?

Most students can, though not all do. Access and participation are two different numbers.

• 92% of US public school students have access to music education at school, and 3,609,698 don't (Arts Education Data Project, Sep 2022).
• That study covered 18 million students in 17 states, including California, or 36% of public school enrollment in the 2018/2019 school year (Arts Education Data Project, Sep 2022).
• 24% of the high school class of 2013 took at least one year of band, choir or orchestra (Journal of Research in Music Education, Oct 2019).
• Those music students were 60% female and 40% male (Journal of Research in Music Education, Oct 2019).

The 24% includes choir, so it isn't a count of instrument players. Families starting a student on an instrument can look at Danville Music's band and orchestra instrument rentals and the full band and orchestra department.

Glossary

• NAMM: National Association of Music Merchants, the music products trade association that publishes the annual Global Report.
• BLS: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• CPI: Consumer Price Index, the BLS measure of price change for consumer goods.
• QCEW: Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the BLS count of business establishments and jobs from unemployment insurance records.
• OEWS: Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, the BLS survey of jobs and pay by occupation.
• NAICS 459140: the industry code for musical instrument and supplies retailers (451140 before 2022).
• Economic Census: the Census Bureau's five-year count of US businesses, their sales and payroll.
• County Business Patterns: the Census Bureau's annual count of establishments by size (not U.S. Customs and Border Protection).
• GMS: gross merchandise sales, the total value of goods sold through a marketplace.
• Reverb Price Index: Reverb's index of used-gear sale prices on its marketplace.
• MSRP: manufacturer's suggested retail price.
• ESSER: Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, federal pandemic funding for schools.
• SPPA: Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the NEA's national arts survey.
• HSI: Homeland Security Investigations, the investigative arm of ICE.
• Multi-effects processor: one unit that combines many effects, often with amp modeling.
• Amp modeling: digital simulation of amplifier tone in hardware or software.
• Setup: adjusting a guitar's neck relief, action, intonation and pickup height so it plays properly.
• Luthier: a person who builds or repairs stringed instruments.

Methodology and Sources

Every figure on this page is traced to the organization that produced it: federal agencies, SEC filings, peer-reviewed research, the trade association that surveys its own industry, or the marketplace or manufacturer reporting its own data. Each is dated and linked to the original document, and pages that only repeat other people's numbers are never cited. Where a figure is our own arithmetic from a cited source, it says so. The page is refreshed monthly.

Sources

• NAMM, 2025 NAMM Global Report, Nov 2025 (2024 data)
• Yamaha Corporation, Analyst and Investor Briefing on FY2026.3 (speaker notes), May 2026
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U, Music instruments and accessories, Aug 2026, and CPI-U, All items, Aug 2026
• U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. general imports by HTS code, USA Trade Online, full-year 2024 and 2025 data
• National Endowment for the Arts, 50 States of Arts Participation: 2022, Sep 2024
• National Endowment for the Arts, The Demographics of Arts Participation in a Pre-Pandemic Year, Dec 2022
• National Endowment for the Arts, By All Means, the Arts: A Full Report of the 2022 SPPA, Aug 2025
• Fender Musical Instruments Corporation with YouGov, Fender's New Guitar Player Landscape Analysis, Oct 2021
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Musicians and Singers, Aug 2026
• Etsy, Inc., Form 10-K for fiscal 2024, Feb 2025
• Reverb.com, Used Guitar Prices Have Settled. Now What? (Electric Guitar Reverb Price Index), data through mid-2025
• Reverb.com, The Pedal Market's Wild Ride and Where It Stands in 2025, Q1 2025 data
• Reverb.com, 2025's Bestselling Music Gear, Dec 2025
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS, Musical Instrument Repairers and Tuners: May 2025 employment, May 2025 mean wage, May 2025 California, May 2023 profile
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages: 2025 annual averages, NAICS 459140, Aug 2026, and 2019 annual averages, NAICS 451140, Aug 2020
• U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Retail Trade Summary Statistics (EC2244BASIC), Dec 2024
• U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, Jun 2025
• U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (HSI Los Angeles) with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, HSI Los Angeles, CBP Seize More Than $18 Million in Fake Gibson Guitars, Dec 2024
• Arts Education Data Project, Millions of U.S. Students Denied Access to Music Education, Sep 2022
• Kenneth Elpus and Carlos R. Abril, Who Enrolls in High School Music? A National Profile of U.S. Students, 2009-2013, Journal of Research in Music Education, Oct 2019

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