The best time to sell your phone

The answer is almost always sooner than you're planning to, and it's worth understanding why rather than taking our word for it.

The shape of the curve

Phone depreciation isn't linear. It's a series of steps, and the steps are triggered by events you can predict:

• A new generation launches. September for iPhone, typically January–February for Samsung's flagships. The previous generation drops noticeably within weeks.
• The phone falls out of the current lineup. When Apple stops selling a model new, the used market reprices it.
• Software support ends. A slower, later drop, but a real one.

Between these events values drift down gently. Across them, they fall in jumps.

What waiting actually costs

A phone sitting in a drawer isn't holding value — it's quietly losing it while providing you nothing. The typical flagship loses a meaningful share of its value in the first year and continues down from there. If you already have a replacement, the old handset has stopped being a phone and started being a depreciating asset you're storing for free.

Does it matter what month it is?

Less than people think. There's a modest bump in demand for used phones around the holidays and back-to-school, and a modest dip immediately after a flagship launch floods the market with trade-ins. Neither effect is large enough to justify holding a phone you're not using for another quarter.

The practical answer

Sell it when you stop using it. Not when you remember it exists, not when you next tidy the drawer — the day it's replaced. That's the highest price it will ever fetch again.

Notice the gap between adjacent generations — that's roughly the cost of one year of waiting.