Everything Beatles is collectible.

The Beatles were musical, cultural, fan phenomenon like no other. Their name sold everything from bed clothes to bathwater to strands of hair while they were around.

And now they’re a similarly unique collecting phenomenon.

John Lennon’s car? $2.3 million.

A George Harrison leather jacket? £110,000.

A nice leather jacket, but George Harrison wore it on stage as an early rocking Beatle, so it's worth over £110,000.

The drum from the cover of Sergeant Pepper? $1.1 million…

And it goes on and on.

And there’s no sign of it ending.

Here's a brief survey of some of the most valuable items from The Beatles collecting world.

Most valuable Beatles autograph

Sets of signatures are always worth more, put them on this iconic album and you have a record breaker.

Beatle autographs are better in sets. And they’re best on LP records.

And the best of all are the iconic pair of gatefold albums from 1967 and 1968 that defined the Beatles journey from a unified group producing uplifting psychedelia to a much rootsier band each more-or-less ploughing their own furrow.

A copy of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band was auctioned for $290,500 in 2013 in the US, bought by an unnamed midwesterner tempted in by a $30,000 pre-sale estimate.

The White Album came out in November 1968. The Beatles first double album, its plain monotone sleeve gave it its name, and makes a great ground for signatures. With a fantastic full set of the band’s names on it, one copy sold for $223,822 in 2013.

Most valuable Beatles instrument

The Beatles are personalities, icons, stars… and also musicians.

The tools of their trade meant a great deal to them. You only have to do a bit of reading to understand how much the Fabs loved guitars in particular.

John Lennon played this guitar on several Beatle records, giving it a unique place in history. Image courtesy of Julien's Auctions.

And, as the sound of the most ageless music made for centuries, they have real value.

A lot of Beatle instruments remain in the bands’ family collections.

Those that do make it to auction invariably make headlines and huge prices.

A used Ringo Starr kit, made by Ludwig, realised $2.1 million in 2015. Ringo had bashed it on around 200 of the most famous recordings in music history.

Just a drumhead that he played on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 sold for $2.19 million.

This drum is what produced the boom with which the Beatles hit the American music in 1964. Now it's in the collection of Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colt.

A Lennon guitar, with a great story, brought in $2.4 million in 2015. It was lifted from a charity concert in 1963, and bought - innocently enough - by a learned player in the late 60s. To acknowledge its chequered history, half of the money from the sale went to Yoko Ono’s charity foundation.

But the most valuable thus far is a 12-string Hootenanny guitar by German makers Framus that sold for $2.9 million in May 2024. The guitar’s value is massively boosted by its undoubted provenance, it can be seen on film, in Lennon’s hands in Help!, and was used extensively on Beatle records in their mid period. It too vanished though. Lennon gave it away, it was then given away again, and was rediscovered in an attic and turned into gold.

Most valuable Beatles record

Without signatures, Beatles records can still be craved by collectors.

However, the simple fact is that the enormous popularity of the band and their music means that their discs were in almost every household. Standard issue items, even in the best condition, aren’t rare.

Some records are, though.

The very earliest recordings, including the legendary single-disc made by The Quarrymen in a Liverpool terraced house, are insanely valuable. In Spite of All the Danger was valued at £100,000 in 2004. Paul McCartney bought the disc from fellow Quarryman John Lowe in 1981 as Lowe prepared to auction it. The copes Macca ran off are valued at at least £10,000.

This photograph was deemed too much by Capitol Records and US record stores and a rush replacement operation made it a rarity. Image courtesy of Omega Auctions.

Although mass-produced, mass-consumer products there are special editions, rarities, oddies and errors in the Beatles’ recorded catalogue.

Records were produced in a hurry (particularly in the early days of US success) and the odd mistake slipped through. Completist collectors love to get everything, like the 19 variants of Meet The Beatles, the US version of their second UK album.

Early copies of Sgt Pepper had a sheet of inserts, copies with those can be worth hundreds of pounds. The first White Album albums were numbered like a fine art print, and low numbers are desirable.

The grail for most collectors though is the Butcher Sleeve issue. In 1966, Capitol Records planned a compilation release called Yesterday and Today. The Beatles did a photoshoot that was rather odd, showing them apparently dismembering dolls, wearing butchers’ white coats, draped in raw meat. Production started, but when the records were sent to retailers they immediately reacted with revulsion. A quick reverse was needed, and a new, less offensive sleeve was pasted over the Butcher Sleeve and a special rarity was born.

There are several variants of the disc, the most valuable of which have gone for over $120,000.

A copy signed by John Lennon made £180,000 ($234,400) in 2019.

It doesn't look like much, does it? But this almost invisible number makes this record the most precious Beatles album of all time. Image courtesy of Julien's Auctions.

Which brings us to the most valuable of all, Ringo Starr’s personal copy of the White Album, with the No.0000001 number that made $790,000 in 2015.

Most valuable Beatles song lyrics

In the end, it’s all about the songs. And the people who wrote them. There isn’t really a much more personal connection to the band than hand-written song lyrics.

And the best songs, the most-loved command the most money.

So familiar. These words mean so much to millions that they're worth nearly a million. Image courtesy of Julien's Auctions.

Hey Jude, written by Paul McCartney, made $910,000 in 2020 auction. And that wasn’t even the full lyrics of the song - widely regarded as among McCartney’s best and most meaningful - but for notes to aid in performing it in the studio.

A Day in the Life is most often named as the Beatles best song, and the lyrics for that, John Lennon’s handwritten version with corrections, made $1.2 million in 2010, more than double its estimated value.

In 2005, the words to All You Need is Love made $1 million. A 2003 sale garnered $455,500 for the lyrics for Nowhere Man. The auction house had listed them for $100,000.

Most valuable Beatles art

The Beatles were the soundtrack to a cultural explosion.

John Lennon was an art school drop out, and his drawings were published in two books during the Beatles career.

Originals are valuable. In 2014, a sale of much of the manuscript for Lennon’s books were auctioned for a total of nearly $3 million, with The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield, an illustrated Sherlock Holmes parody made $209,000.

Other sketches commonly make 10s of thousands.

Is this a good piece of art? That's debatable, but the artists - all four Beatles - and the legendary circumstances of its creation make it worth over $1 million. Image courtesy of Christie's.

The most valuable Beatles work is one of the few that all four Fabs worked on, a legendary psychedelic painting put together while the band was marooned in a Tokyo hotel in 1966. It made $1.7 million in 2024.

Another avenue for Beatles collectors is to buy the work of Stuart Sutcliffe, John Lennon’s great friend and by most accounts a better painter than musician. A portrait by Sutcliffe of Lennon made £19,500 in 2025.