What the house charges
Hermès publishes no price history, but Sotheby’s keeps one. Its table for the Birkin 25 in Togo leather runs from 2016 to 2026 and moves in one direction: $9,400 at the start of it, $13,500 now. Chanel’s own price for the Medium Classic Flap went from $4,900 in 2016 to $11,300 in 2025, by Sotheby’s record.
What buyers pay over it
The interesting number is the gap between what Hermès charges and what someone will pay to skip the wait. Sotheby’s says pristine Birkin 25 and Birkin 30 bags change hands around $28,000 to $30,000 on its own marketplace, 2.4 times the house’s price. On the same marketplace the average selling price of a Birkin 30 in Togo reached $22,300 in 2025, 6% more than the year before.
A premium is a ratio at a moment, not a promise. What it measures is how much people will pay to have one now instead of being offered one later, and that is the whole mechanism this trade runs on.
What holds its value
Rebag appraises resale prices for a living and publishes a report of them, The Clair Report. Its 2025 edition put Hermès at the top of luxury resale with an average value retention of 138%. Reading ten years of its own Birkin data, it found average resale values up 92% since 2015, against a 43% rise in the price Hermès itself charges over the same decade. Its 2024 edition put Chanel at 92% and Louis Vuitton at 88%.
The famous number we don’t print
There is a well-traveled study that sets a Birkin against shares and gold over thirty-five years, and it is on a hundred websites. We don’t print it. A bag is not a share, the study’s prices came from receipts that arrived with bags people chose to sell through one marketplace, there is no sample size and no condition adjustment, and its window opens four years before the Birkin existed. A comparison like that flatters whichever side you pick the dates for. The figures above are what the houses and the appraisers publish, and they are enough.
The part that has gone the other way
In December 2025 Fortune reported research from Bernstein finding that the premium Birkin and Kelly bags fetched at auction over the house’s price had fallen from 2.2 times in 2022 to 1.4 times in November 2025. Hermès raised its prices through that window, so a falling premium is not the same as falling prices, and auction is a narrower channel than the places most bags actually change hands. It is still a real move in the wrong direction, and a site that prints the 2.4 and hides the 1.4 is choosing its evidence.
Our own record is the one we’d rather be judged on. Every bag our members have sold is on the Track Record page, with what they paid, what it sold for, what they made and how long it took.
Sources
- Sotheby’s, “Hermès Raises the Birkin Bag Price: What You Need to Know”, 21 January 2026: the Birkin 25 price table and the secondary premium.
- Sotheby’s, “Complete Guide to Buying and Selling a Birkin”: the average selling price of a Birkin 30 in Togo in 2025.
- Sotheby’s, “Understanding the Latest 2025 Chanel Bag Price Hikes and the Resale Market”, 24 September 2025: Chanel’s prices for the Medium Classic Flap.
- Rebag, The Clair Report, sixth annual edition, December 2025: value retention, and the Birkin decade.
- Rebag, The Clair Report, fifth annual edition, December 2024: Chanel and Louis Vuitton value retention.
- Fortune, 17 December 2025, reporting Bernstein Research: the fall in the auction premium.