How your phone's resale value is actually calculated

It starts with a ceiling, not an average

The first number in any quote is the ceiling for your exact variant. Not "iPhone 14" but "iPhone 14, 256GB" — because the storage tier moves the number by thousands, and a price book that ignores it is guessing on every second phone.

That ceiling is what a flawless, boxed, unlocked example is worth to the buyer today. Nobody is paid the ceiling in practice, which is why treating it as the expected price is the fastest route to disappointment.

Ceilings move weekly. They fall hardest around a new launch in the same family, which is the single strongest argument for selling before the next launch, not after.

Condition questions are percentages, not opinions

Each condition question maps to a deduction expressed as a percentage of the ceiling. A cracked screen is not "₹4,000 off" — it is a percentage that happens to be ₹4,000 on your phone and ₹900 on a cheaper one.

The caps matter more than any single answer. Within a section the deductions are summed and then clamped, so the third fault in the same section costs less than the first. A phone with five broken things is not worthless — it is capped.

The screening questions are the cliff edge

Three questions sit outside the ordinary condition ladders, and they behave differently: can the phone make and receive calls, does the touchscreen work properly, and is the display original.

Answer "no" to the first two and the deduction is effectively the whole phone — a handset that cannot be used is priced as parts. Answer "no" to the third and the deduction is severe but survivable, typically 25–80% depending on the model.

This is why a locally replaced screen is such an expensive repair to have had done. We go through the arithmetic in is a screen replacement worth it before selling.

Faults are capped, accessories are earned back

Functional faults — a dead speaker, a camera that will not focus, a swollen battery — each carry their own percentage, and together they are capped at around half the ceiling on most tables. Ticking every box on the fault list does not take the price to zero.

Accessories run the other way. The price book assumes you have nothing, applies the full accessory penalty, and then gives part of it back for each item you still have: the charger, the box with a matching IMEI, the bill with a matching IMEI. That is why selling without the box costs less than people fear.

Age, and the floor under everything

The last adjustment is age. Under a year, with a valid bill, the phone sits in the top band. Between one and three years the deduction climbs steadily. Past three years it flattens, because by then the phone is priced as a used device rather than a nearly-new one.

Finally, every price book carries a floor — a minimum the phone cannot price below, no matter how many boxes you tick. That floor exists because a broken flagship still contains a screen, a frame and a board worth recovering. It is the reason a shattered phone is worth collecting rather than binning.

Ceiling minus condition, capped by section, adjusted for age, floored at parts value. That is the whole formula.