Our LEGO collection is worth US$0.9 billion

Nice dinar picture :)

584 sets, 822 minifigs and about 280,000 pieces. In reality, although the number of sets will be accurate, the number of minifigs and parts that I have is at least double what's recorded on here.

Oh my! I'm well above average in terms of sets and parts owned. I don't dare to look / think about where I am in terms of money spent :) I'm surely lagging behind in terms of minifigs, but I don't mind (I don't mind minifigs, but I never buy a set because of the figs ;).

It really feels like I only have added about 9 sets since Christmas (but now I checked, and of course it's more than double that number...)

So we have average numbers, "mean values," but it would be interesting to find out what median values are for value, number of sets, etc. For instance, I am in about the top half of number of sets, about 60% from the top (bottom half) in parts collection, yet my total value is under a grand. Some of the "my haul" pics I see could be worth more than my entire collection, and the pricey super-models could easily skew the average up.

I'll be boosting those numbers soon. XD

I'm well above average. 57 2021 sets (so far!), plus around a dozen 2020 sets bought this year- two yesterday, 71720 and 71704 . And I might buy more today...

666 sets
789 Minifigs
290690 pieces
I dread to think about the value.

Fascinating stuff though!

i am above average with my collection i own over 400 sets and with an est worth of over 18000 us dollars. i will for sure be adding to it. i am a life long fan of lego. as i was reading a review else where on this site i would love to see lego add more farm sets to the city please.

Well played with the 500M dinar picture, but we have make a push to make it to our absolutely largest banknote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_dinar/media/File:500000000000_dinars.jpg

(which incidentally could probably purchase a very small LEGO set on the morning when it was printed and by the evening couldn't even get you a handful of used bricks)

Yeah, I had about 200ish sets before re emerging from my dark ages slumber, then the year following as well as during the pandemic I've raised that number to about 500! If/when I get the space to have a Lego room, I'll most certainly have quite a bit of building to do :)

Can you even imagine how much LEGO you can buy with this money?... Never mind don't answer that.

When I recently joined I went year by year through the database to see what I had in my collection. In that exercise over 1500 sets triggered a purchase memory. I usually don't get them complete since I the majority of my sets come from bulk purchases, but my joy is in finishing them and so far I have a sizeable proportion done. I suppose if I were to go and actually look through my as-yet unprocessed bins and take inventory of what I do have, I would get a higher set count.

I was relieved to see that I was nowhere near the highest ranked, but was surprised to see I managed to break into the top 1000. I might be a local maximum in our circle here, but I am not a global maximum.

Oh wait, did I log the CMFs and polybags? Hmm.

I need to update my collection. I’m quite a few purchases behind.

I am guilty of increasing the numbers. About 10 years ago I decided not to buy any more LEGO sets. I realized that I no longer liked buying and collecting LEGO sets (esp. used LEGO sets), not just becasue it was expensive and time consuming but also counter-productive when I wanted to focus more on building MOCs for LEGO events. So I decided that I will only buy certain sets I collect (Star Wars mini sets and CM figures). As for used sets, I would only buy ones from the 70s and 80s, when they look very nice and they come with BI and box. This helped to slow down the growth of my collection - until last year. Last year I started incorporating the kids' LEGO sets, which had been kept in bins for years. I also purchased a small collection from an old classmate who is very sick and needed money. Then I decided to add some sets I had in disarray, i.e. missing some parts, recyled into MOCs, etc. With all these recent additions, my collection's size suddenly exploded, it is 1900+ sets, 1600+ unique sets. I am going to add a few dozen more sets, plus this years CM sets, so 2000 sets by the end of 2021 is a likely to happen. I think I still have more LEGO parts in MOCs and as spare/lose parts, than in my set collection. I have a singe MOC that is probably over 100k pieces, and my sets hold about 130k pieces. I am sure I have more than 30k pieces in other MOCs and lose parts.

^ This could be legitimate. I've bought sets before the official release dates.

I’m well above average, with 1724 sets, 1759 minifigures and 166762 pieces, over 30000 of them being constraction figure parts.

I visited Yugoslavia in the summer of 1988. Inflation was so bad that every 3 days when I cached a traveller's cheque (remember those?) I got more dinars than the last one. There was a story about some guy being kicked out of the country for 'misuse of state property' after lighting a cigar with a 1000 dinar note, worth about about €0.30. No idea if it's true.
1000 Italian lira was about €0.60 in those days.
Zimbabwe probably holds the record with their one hundred trillion Zimbabwe Dollar bill. That's a 1 with 14 zeros...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/zeroes-after-zeroes-the-worlds-highest-currencies

The value of my collection seems to be massively inflated due to Brickset thinking all the sets owned are New. Try as I might can't seem to find any way to change that?
I most certainly don't own 5 MISB Galaxy Explorers.

Above average on all accounts. Good or bad? I just want more!!!

@janl said:
"It looks like my technic collection (317 of 322 sets) is a bit above average
For my own target I'm 37 sets away from owning all the technic sets created including the ones yet to be released this year.
I've excluded re released sets and the whole 'slizer' group of sets that have been named technic in early releases.
It will probably take some time and money to find the last sets to complete my collection and to keep up with the new sets coming out every year."

Nice collection!

My collection is well above average and I still consider it to be a very pedestrian collection because I don’t have much stuff that’s older. I carry that mindset with me from collectible toys and don’t know why I do but probably always will. Value is value, shouldn’t matter.

Whoa! Just looked at those figures and wondered why when my sets collection is many times higher than the average, my piece count wasn’t also that high. Just looked at the My Sets page and my piece count has doubled since I last looked.

Please don’t tell my wife!

Out of interest, are there any users out there with smaller than average collections?

@1265 said:
" @Kynareth said:
"Out of interest, are there any users out there with smaller than average collections?"

Who would admit that?"

But there must be a huge majority of users who have felt the need to create and catalogue their collections that are ‘below average’- I know I flicked through the sets database long before I ever clicked on the homepage, and even longer before I signed up and catalogued my collection. Surely some of those users must read and comment?

I'm at 464 and 1224 minifigs, the part that scares me is this little titbit from the my sets stats -

We have retail prices for 286 of your sets. Their retail value is £10244.

That's not even all of them, although I must admit I rarely buy at full retail, may need to dial back a little but as I've now collected most of the older sets I've wanted should be easy enough.....oh wait new ninjago wave incoming SMH.

@Block_n_Roll said:
"With 316 sets, nearly 140,000 parts, over 800 minifigs and over $13,000 value I'm way above the averages - and yet I'm not even in the top 25,000 members for sets owned, nor in the top 14,000 for parts, and outside the top 19,000 for minifigs. That means there must be some members with truly vast collections (and quite likely some with very *small* collections!) It'd be interesting to see a bell-curve breakdown - number of sets owned vs number of members who own that many sets. Any chance, @Huw ? Should be an easy one to pull out of the database!"

With NZ being such a small country/LEGO community Id also love to know where I rank within it. Even if a DM telling me is more appropriate that’d be great @Huw

my collection is just average with a 150sets and 289 minifigures. what id like to know is: who is number one? who has the most sets and bricks recorded on brickset? people who fake their collections are just stupid. why would you lie to yourself? in the end its just a toy anyways, we should not forget that.

My collection consists of 379 sets (but I don’t count CMF packs or ‘sets’ that are baseplates, track or road plates) and the piece count is around 216000. However, interestingly my same set list imported into the Rebrickable Website (which counts set spare pieces) reports around 223000 pieces. That’s a cool 7000 extra spare parts provided by Lego!

Don’t worry Huw ... Brickset is still my favourite site :)

At this moment 314 sets. So that's still above average. I think this time last year, it was less than 200. So i've must have added more than 100 sets since then. If everyone did so, i believe our site numbers have increased a lot indeed!

I joined this year, only got a small collection

Who is number 1 though? Just reveal the total sets, value & number of bricks ;)

@krysto2002 said:
"The value of my collection seems to be massively inflated due to Brickset thinking all the sets owned are New. Try as I might can't seem to find any way to change that?
I most certainly don't own 5 MISB Galaxy Explorers."

If the person you buy the set from is also on Brickset and keeps recording themselves as having it, then there will be double counting. But if not, even if you buy it second hand, the value when new will be right which is what Huw is getting at.

@B_Space_Man said:
"These stats are amazing. I’m sure there are others like me who are lagging behind and have 70%-90% of their collection recorded here. Oh, and I really hope my wife stays away from this site. Math doesn’t lie…"

Maths doesn’t lie but statistics do. For all sorts of reasons, the database will be inaccurate. Four of the many distortions are:

- Huw tries to weed out obvious overclaimers, but there are going to be more subtle ones, some innocently. For example, if you have across multiple sets the parts necessary to re-create a set, do you count yourself as having that set? Some people probably do.

- There is the not so trivial matter of inflation which has probably not been taken into account.

- There are Bricksetters such as myself who don’t record their sets because it would be practically impossible.

- Bricksetters probably buy large amounts of LEGO on the secondary/supplemental market that aren’t counting towards sets. If, for example, you spend heavily on assorted parts from Bricks and Pieces as spares, that expenditure isn’t counting towards the total spent.

Mine is above average, whoops

My stats are:

- Owned sets (including duplicates) - 1317 (bare in mind I add CMFs as full sets when I complete a series and add any spares as individual figures)
- Owned sets (unique) - 1066
- Owned Minifigures (including duplicates) - 1770
- Owned Minifigures (unique) - 1363
- Owned Pieces - 114295

- Retail Value - £9891
- Set Rank in Brickset - 2212th
- Minifigures Rank in Brickset - 6036th
- Pieces Rank in Brickset - 17953rd

Pretty proud of my collection :D .

Feel free to browes my collection - https://brickset.com/sets/ownedby-Minifig290

I'm above average for number of sets and number of minifigs. I have no idea about the number of parts but I assume that would be above average too.

@krysto2002, I believe that what Huw is reporting is *not* the current value - either up because it is a set that has appreciated in value, or down because it has been built/is second hand - but the sales to the LEGO company from Bricksetters.

@Zander said:
" @krysto2002, I believe that what Huw is reporting is *not* the current value - either up because it is a set that has appreciated in value, or down because it has been built/is second hand - but the sales to the LEGO company from Bricksetters."

After doing some digging it seems the metric is in fact based on RRPs.
Which means then that the value posted is an underestimation given that it doesn't account for inflation and completely omits sets with RRPs that have been lost to time.

That being said, I do think the additional field should be on by default and sets logged as owned should default to used rather than new. Even if I'd had it on before logging my collection, it still would have required me to manually adjust the qty of every set I own from 1/0 to 0/1, which is a massive hassle.

So I guess take this as a suggestion for a QoL feature?

You should add a feature in Brickset so we can separate out the sets we wish we hadn’t bought. That could make for an interesting statistic on each set page in the database - the percentage of “we wish we hadn’t” purchases out of the total number of owned copies of a particular set.

@huw
I completely understand, I'm suggesting that the site should default to a set being used when added to a collection if the feature is enabled as that's going to be far more frequent than adding a new set. Otherwise every time a user adds a set to their collection they have to manually adjust the qty every time, and a user enabling the feature has to manually adjust every item in their collection.

Mostly just advocating for QoL here. If nearly 50% of the site owns ~100+ sets and most of them haven't enabled the feature, you'd be saving a ton of future hassle.

Although I am often highly critical of TLG, my collection is still growing. At the moment I own 1568 items, 1140 different.
But that's not entirely correct, as I have yet to catalog many sets I bought used via eBay over the years. I guess there's about 50 to 100 still missing. And let's not talk about the thousands of pieces I bought individually via Bricklink, LEGO Shop at Home, and eBay.

@BooTheMightyHamster said:
"666 sets
789 Minifigs
290690 pieces
I dread to think about the value.

Fascinating stuff though!"

Those numbers boggle my mind... How are your minifig counts so low.. I have 110 sets less then you and double the minifigs. Odd how collections end up so different. Your part count is massive as well, do you log part orders? I never log part orders, just use Brickset to track sets and CMF's. Even if I wanted to track loose brick orders far to late now to figure out what they would be as its all mixed together.

The article itself is interesting, but I truly enjoyed many of the comments from viewers and had a few laugh out loud and long moments as a result. Many thanks for such a gleeful read on a Sunday afternoon, Huw!

This article needs to be password protected and available to Brickset members only. Otherwise our collective number of divorces will also be rising. ??

Well above average here, 788 sets, 344,418 pcs.

I couldn’t tell you how many minifgs I have, because I apparently have zero. Even when I click on my sets, the box that you click to see the minifigs isn’t there. It’s definitely off though, I don’t record loose or BaM ones. It’s somewhere in the 2300 range officially.

Higher than avg which I expected but some of y’all got a lot of lego I feel so small now granted my whole collection is one theme (you can probably guess which one) but I guess I’ll through in my stats
741 sets including mini figure poly bags and such 741 different
1906 mini figs 1147 different
275357 parts
(Not going to include the value that’s for my eyes only)

@Legoguy29 said:
"Well above average here, 788 sets, 344,418 pcs.

I couldn’t tell you how many minifgs I have, because I apparently have zero. Even when I click on my sets, the box that you click to see the minifigs isn’t there. It’s definitely off though, I don’t record loose or BaM ones. It’s somewhere in the 2300 range officially. "

Better! I don’t even know how many official minifigs I have...it’s 2889.

316 sets (298 unique)
914 minifigures
92081 bricks, probably another year or two to break 100,000

The value is $9968, but I own a lot of Classic Space, and most of it the prices aren’t available for so I’m way over $10,000.

The big change for me in the last year however is that I’ve been buying lots of new sets. Prior to the pandemic I got mostly used sets at incredible bargains. For example I once scored 32 Star Wars sets from 99-06 for $100 (which included UCS and other sets that are worth well over $100 on their own).

But I’m not too worried about my wife finding out about this, this is chump change compared to the cost of owning a boat, and she gave me permission to buy that!