Smaller Sale, Stronger Prices: What the 2026 NSBA Yearling Sale Tells Us About the Market

The 2026 NSBA Markel Insurance Breeders Championship Futurity Yearling Sale may have been considerably smaller than its 2025 counterpart, but the prices observed in the sale ring tell a very different story about the strength of the market.

Based on StallionCompare’s analysis of recorded prices from the 2025 and 2026 sales, the average observed price increased by nearly 52% year over year. Even more notably, the median jumped nearly 82%, from $11,000 in 2025 to $20,000 in 2026.

That distinction matters. While a handful of exceptional yearlings can push an average upward, the median tells us what was happening much closer to the middle of the market. And in 2026, that middle moved substantially higher.

There is, however, an important caveat to everything that follows.

A Note About the Numbers

At the time of publication, complete final sale results identifying no-sales and owner buybacks have not yet been released by NSBA. For that reason, StallionCompare’s year-over-year analysis is based primarily on observed ring prices, not confirmed completed transactions.

The 2025 dataset contains 107 recorded prices, while StallionCompare recorded prices for 54 yearlings during the 2026 sale. An observed price does not necessarily mean that a horse changed hands. Some may ultimately be identified as no-sales or buybacks once complete official results become available.

For that reason, we have intentionally kept our observed-price analysis separate from completed-sale figures reported by NSBA. The comparisons below are intended to examine how the yearlings were valued in the ring, rather than to represent final sale accounting.

2025 vs. 2026: By the Numbers

The most obvious difference between the two years was size. The number of yearlings for which prices were recorded dropped from 107 in 2025 to 54 in 2026, a decrease of nearly 50%. Yet observed gross value declined by only 23.4%.

In other words, the 2026 dataset contained roughly half as many yearlings but still generated more than three-quarters of the observed dollar value recorded in 2025. That happened because prices were stronger throughout much of the sale.

The Number That Stands Out: +81.8%

The $87,000 sale-topping price in 2026 certainly catches the eye, particularly compared with the $75,000 high seller recorded in 2025. But it may not be the most important number in this comparison.

That distinction belongs to the median.

The median observed price increased from $11,000 in 2025 to $20,000 in 2026, an increase of 81.8%. Put simply, the horse sitting at the midpoint of the 2026 observed results brought approximately $9,000 more than the horse sitting at the midpoint one year earlier.

And the same pattern appears when we look beyond the median. The 25th-percentile price increased from $6,500 to approximately $11,900, while the 75th percentile rose from $21,000 to $35,000. Those numbers suggest that 2026's improvement wasn't confined to the sale toppers. The distribution itself shifted upward.

Twice the Share Reached $20,000

Perhaps the most remarkable comparison can be found at the $20,000 mark. Both years produced exactly 28 observed prices of $20,000 or more. The difference? There were 107 recorded yearlings in the 2025 dataset and only 54 in 2026. That means $20,000+ prices represented 26.2% of the observed 2025 results, compared with 51.9% in 2026.

The differences appear almost everywhere in the distribution. More than 83% of the 2026 yearlings reached an observed price of at least $10,000, compared with 55.1% in 2025. Two-thirds reached $15,000, compared with just over one-third the previous year. At $30,000, the difference was 29.6% versus 15.9%. Even at $50,000+, 2026 produced seven observed results compared with six in 2025, despite the much smaller group of horses.

What Happened at the Top?

Interestingly, the very top of the market did not experience gains nearly as dramatic as the middle. The five highest observed prices averaged $71,000 in 2026, up 19.1% from $59,600 in 2025. Expand the comparison to the Top 10 and the increase falls to 7.2%. Across the Top 20, the average increased by just 4.9%.

This may be the most interesting part of the entire analysis. The Top 20 average improved by less than 5%, while the overall median increased by nearly 82%.

In other words, 2026's biggest year-over-year movement wasn't necessarily among the most expensive horses. It happened underneath them. The market appears to have become substantially stronger through the middle of the observed price distribution.

A Broader Distribution of Value

There is another way of testing that idea. Approximately the top 10% of the 2025 dataset accounted for 32.4% of total observed value. In 2026, that figure declined to approximately 29.5%.

The Gini coefficient, a statistical measure of how concentrated values are within a distribution, tells a similar story. It declined from approximately 0.430 in 2025 to 0.388 in 2026.

In simple terms: 2026's observed sale value was distributed somewhat more evenly among the horses. That supports what we're seeing in the median, quartiles and price thresholds. Stronger prices were not simply the product of several blockbuster yearlings at the top.

Is the Difference Statistically Meaningful?

The difference between the two years is large enough that we also tested whether it could reasonably be attributed to ordinary variation between two groups of yearlings.

Three different statistical comparisons produced results below the commonly used 0.05 significance threshold: the Mann-Whitney U test produced approximately p = 0.00030, Welch's t-test approximately p = 0.0045, and a comparison using log-transformed prices approximately p = 0.00034.

For readers who don't spend their evenings thinking about p-values, the takeaway is considerably simpler: the difference we observed between 2025 and 2026 is unlikely to be explained by random variation alone. The 2026 observed price distribution was materially stronger.

What About Actual Completed Sales?

This is where we need to exercise some caution.

NSBA reported 74 completed sales in 2025 for a total of $1,230,550, producing an average of $16,629.05.

For 2026, the figures currently available state 36 horses sold at an average of $24,236.11. Those two numbers mathematically imply gross completed sales of $872,500. However, a published gross figure of $827,500 does not reconcile with the stated number sold and average.

*The 2026 gross shown above is mathematically inferred from the published figure of 36 horses sold at an average of $24,236.11. Until NSBA publishes complete final results identifying completed sales, no-sales and buybacks, this figure should not be considered final.

Interestingly, the implied sell-through rate is relatively close between the two years: approximately 69.2% in 2025 compared with 66.7% in 2026.

That context matters. The number of completed transactions may have fallen by more than half, but the number of yearlings presented in our observed dataset also fell by nearly half. Based on the currently available figures, there isn't evidence here of an equivalent collapse in the proportion of horses finding buyers. Instead, much of the decline in total transactions appears to reflect a substantially smaller sale.

Smaller Sale, Stronger Market?

There is an obvious temptation to reduce the 2026 NSBA Markel Yearling Sale to its $87,000 high seller or its $25,400 observed average.

The broader numbers tell a more interesting story.

Yes, the 2026 sale was considerably smaller. But among the yearlings represented in StallionCompare's observed results, prices were substantially stronger than in 2025.

The average increased 51.9%. The median increased 81.8%. The lower quartile increased more than 83%. More than half of the observed yearlings reached $20,000, compared with approximately one-quarter in 2025.

And despite having almost exactly half as many recorded horses, 2026 produced the same number of $20,000+ results as 2025: 28.

Perhaps most importantly, the greatest improvement was not found among the handful of most expensive horses. It occurred deeper in the sale, where substantially more yearlings were reaching price points that only a year earlier belonged to a much smaller portion of the catalogue.

That makes the 2026 sale interesting for more than its headline numbers. It suggests that, at least among the horses represented in these observed results, buyers were willing to spend more money further down the catalogue.

The 2026 NSBA Yearling Sale was smaller. The market represented within it was stronger.