The Job That Sees It: The Auction Specialist

Part 14 of 14 in the series The Job That Sees It. See every installment →

The Million Dollar Question: In February 2001 a US federal court accepted a guilty plea from one of the world’s two great auction houses. What it had conspired to fix was not the price of any painting but the commission it charged the people consigning them. The fine the court imposed that day was how much?

1. A $4.5 million
2. B $12 million
3. C $45 million
4. D $256 million

Read on for the answer.

Begin with the number a reader came for, and then with the reason it is a weak number.

Search for auctioneer salary and the results will offer you an average. The federal government will not. In the US occupational classification there is no such job. The closest the data gets is a residual bucket — SOC 41-9099, Sales and Related Workers, All Other — whose median wage for 2025 is $23.21 an hour, $48,280 a year, across 115,300 people whose only shared characteristic is that the survey could not place them anywhere else. At the top of that same page ONET prints a notice: “ONET data is not available for this type of title.”**

So the honest answer to what does an auctioneer make is that it depends almost entirely on which of three unrelated jobs you mean — the licensed bid-caller, the equipment-auction salesperson, or the art-house specialist — and that none of the three has an individual pay figure disclosed anywhere a member of the public can check. Only one has even its pay structure on the record. The number that is well documented is not a salary at all. It is the commission, and the commission is where this trade’s entire history of trouble lives.

Auctioneer salary: what the federal data actually contains

Five federal and federally-derived sources, read on 13 November 2026. None of them has an occupation called auctioneer.

That is a specific kind of invisibility, and it is worth being precise about it. The $48,280 is a real federal median, and some auctioneers are presumably inside it. But it is the median of a bucket, not of a job, and nothing in the survey separates the person on the rostrum from the other hundred thousand people in that code. Treat any “average auctioneer salary” built on it as an average of something else.

A limit on this piece’s own claim, stated rather than hidden: the BLS 2018 SOC definitions and direct match title file were each read only through the 25-xxxx codes before retrieval cut off, so the 41-xxxx portions of those two documents were not read. Whether an “Auctioneer” lay title is formally direct-matched to 41-9099 in a BLS crosswalk is therefore not something this piece verified; ONET’s search behaviour suggests it, which is not the same as reading it. What is established is that no occupation anywhere in the SOC structure is titled auctioneer, and that neither the Handbook index nor ONET’s occupation list contains one.

The answer is C: $45 million, and what was fixed was the commission

On 2 February 2001 the court accepted the plea and imposed the fine on the same day. In its annual report for 2002, filed with the SEC on 17 March 2003, Sotheby’s Holdings described the matter in its own words: the company “has pled guilty to a violation of the U.S. antitrust laws in connection with a conspiracy to fix auction commission rates charged to sellers in the U.S. and elsewhere,” and the court “imposed on the Company a fine of $45 million payable without interest over a period of five years.”

Read that object of the conspiracy again. Not hammer prices. Not estimates. The seller’s commission — the percentage the house keeps from the person handing over the painting. Of everything in an auction, that was the number the two houses were found to have agreed on, which is a useful indication of where the business actually sits.

The guilty plea is the only admission in the episode. Everything else in the same filings was settled without one, and the amounts are large enough to be worth laying side by side. All figures below are as the company stated them in its 2001 and 2002 10-K filings.

Two arithmetic notes, both this piece’s rather than the filings’. Of the $206 million cash in the US class settlement, $156 million came from Taubman, which leaves the company’s own cash share at $50 million — slightly more than its criminal fine, and about a quarter of the headline. And the figures above should not be added into a single “cost of the conspiracy”: they span 2001 to 2003, two of them were funded by an individual rather than the company, one is a court’s estimate of a voucher’s worth rather than cash, and several were conditional on approvals the filings do not resolve.

Three limits on how this story is usually told. The European Commission’s decision records a finding against both houses, but the fine reported in the filing falls only on Sotheby’s; the filings do not say why, and nothing here should be read as explaining it. The same filings name the former chairman repeatedly and describe mutual releases and an indemnity running to him for non-US antitrust civil claims; they do not mention the former chief executive at all in their legal-proceedings sections, and the contingency notes where such detail might sit were not retrieved. This piece therefore says nothing about any individual criminal outcome.

The licence is for the voice, not for the eye

If the federal statisticians have no auctioneer, the states emphatically do, and what they choose to examine is revealing.

Tennessee’s rule on approved auction schools, Tenn. Comp. R. & Regs. 0160-01-.10, made under T.C.A. §§ 62-19-106(b) and 62-19-111 and last amended effective 12 July 2020, requires a school to “conduct a minimum of fifty (50) hours of classroom or online instruction, including sixteen (16) hours in basic fundamentals, and at least twenty-five (25) hours under the supervision of a licensed auctioneer with at least three (3) years of experience.” The curriculum it mandates is specified item by item: “public speaking, bid calling, sales management, advertisements, contracts, closing statements, license law, the Uniform Commercial Code, bulk sales and firearms.” A separate, shorter track for automobile auctioneers requires only fifteen hours.

Read that list for what is missing. Nothing in it concerns attribution, condition, provenance, authentication, comparable sales or valuation. The mandated curriculum covers running a sale lawfully and calling bids. Nothing in it concerns what the thing is worth.

North Carolina takes the same shape from the other direction. Its licensing board’s application guidance states that an “Applicant must complete an NC Approved Auctioneering School or complete the two-year apprenticeship program prior to applying for an auctioneer licensee and being allowed to take the North Carolina Auctioneer State Examination,” and directs the reader to “N.C.G.S. 85B-4 and 21 NCAC 04B.” School or apprenticeship, then an exam — again on law and practice, not on connoisseurship. (The board voted on 14 September 2026 that all of its rules in 21 NCAC 04B “remain NECESSARY,” with a comment period running to 30 November 2026.) The dollar fees are in application PDFs this piece did not open and are not stated here.

Which is the first real answer to the salary question: in both states examined here, the licensed auctioneer and the person who decides a picture is by the master rather than the workshop are not the same regulated person at all. The series calls this post The Auction Specialist for that reason. The specialist is the one who sees it. The auctioneer is the one who sells it. Whatever qualifies the eye is not administered by either board examined here.

The auctioneers whose pay structure is on the record sell bulldozers

The largest auctioneer this piece examined whose compensation practices are described in filings a member of the public can read does not sell art at all. RB Global, Inc., formerly Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers Incorporated, describes its Ritchie Bros. brand in its annual report for 2025, filed 25 February 2026, as “the world’s largest auctioneer of commercial assets and vehicles offering online bidding.”

The scale dwarfs the art houses. Its fourth-quarter 2025 results, filed 17 February 2026, report Gross Transaction Value of $16,201.9 million for the year against $15,904.8 million in 2024, and a “Service revenue take rate” of 21.6%, up from 21.1%. That is roughly three times Sotheby’s last published aggregate auction total, though the two metrics are defined differently and the comparison is of order, not of like with like. Service revenue — commissions and fees — was $3,502.2 million of $4,590.7 million in total revenue, the balance being inventory the company bought and resold.

The employment picture is where the salary question gets its texture. The 10-K’s human capital section states: “We employ approximately 8,000 full-time employees and approximately 700 part-time employees worldwide at December 31, 2025,” of whom “approximately 1,400 full-time employees are focused on sales and solutions for our customers” and about 5,300 work at auction and branch sites. Fourteen hundred salespeople; several thousand people moving and inspecting machines; and, somewhere inside that, the handful who actually call the bids.

On compensation structure the filing offers one load-bearing sentence, in its risk factors: “In recent years, a majority of our annual business has been conducted on a straight commission basis.” The alternative it names is the underwritten deal, where the company will “guarantee a minimum level of sale proceeds” or buy the equipment outright, and it flags the obvious: “If our exposure to underwritten contracts increases, this risk would be compounded.” Selling, general and administrative expense was $905.2 million in 2025, including $76.7 million of share-based payments and $53.7 million of executive transition costs; the filing publishes no salaries-and-wages line, and the CEO pay ratio disclosure — which would give the median employee’s actual annual compensation, the single most useful figure here — sits in a section of the 2026 proxy statement that could not be retrieved for this piece. It is not stated here.

What the art house earns, and what it pays

Sotheby’s is private now, bought in 2019, and files nothing. Its last annual report, for 2018 and filed 28 February 2019, is the most detailed public account of art-auction economics this piece could find.

Start with what the client pays. Because the rate schedule is a material pricing change, Sotheby’s announced it in an 8-K dated 26 January 2015: “Effective February 1, 2015, Sotheby’s (the ‘Company’) will enact a new buyer’s premium rate structure,” being “25% on the first $200,000 of hammer (sale) price,” “20% on the portion of hammer (sale) price above $200,000 up to and including $3 million,” “and 12% on any remaining amount above $3 million,” with thresholds in other currencies “adjusted in a commensurate manner.” The same filing records the structure it replaced, in force since 15 March 2013: 25% to $100,000, 20% to $2 million, 12% above.

The shape of that schedule is the point. Those are marginal rates, and they fall steeply. A lot hammering at $50,000 pays 25% — $12,500. A lot hammering at $10 million pays $50,000 plus $560,000 plus $840,000, which is $1.45 million, or an effective 14.5%. (That arithmetic is this piece’s, on the 2015 tiers.) The headline 25% is the rate paid in full only by the small buyer; the trophy buyer pays a little over half of it. When Sotheby’s announced the 2013 increase on 28 February 2013, it put the consequence gently: “For over 98% of lots sold, this change will represent an increase of 2% or less in the final purchase price and for all lots, a maximum 3.6% increase in the final purchase price.” It called it “its first pricing change in almost five years.”

Then there is the other side, which the house keeps vaguer. The 10-K says the company “earn[s] a commission from both the buyer (‘buyer’s premium’) and, to a lesser extent, the seller (‘seller’s commission’),” both “calculated as a percentage of the hammer price.” No seller’s rate appears in any filing read for this piece — and the reason is stated outright: “In certain situations, in order to secure a high-value consignment, we may not charge a seller’s commission and/or may share a portion of our buyer’s premium with the seller.” The consignor of a great picture may not pay to sell it at all, and may be paid a share of the buyer’s money instead.

That competitive pressure shows up as a single falling percentage. Sotheby’s reported an Auction Commission Margin — auction commission revenues, net of fees paid under guarantee risk-sharing and to consignor introducers, over Net Auction Sales — of 16.1% in 2018, against 17.2% in 2017 and 17.1% in 2016. Its risk factors name the pressure rather than explaining that particular year: “The level of competition is intense and can adversely impact our ability to obtain valuable consignments for sale,” along with “the commission margins achieved on such consignments.”

And now the pay. The 2018 filing reports 1,713 employees at year end (1,515 in the Agency segment, 12 in Finance, 186 in All Other), against 1,662 a year earlier. Its income statement carries one line for them: salaries and related costs of $342,687 thousand, up from $318,555 thousand. Divide one by the other and the whole company’s fully-loaded cost per head — salary, bonus, stock, payroll taxes, benefits, and every assistant, registrar, shipper and lawyer along with every specialist — comes to about $200,000 a year. Against that, agency commissions and fees of $891,774 thousand works out to roughly $520,600 of commission revenue per employee. Both divisions are this piece’s arithmetic, and neither is anybody’s salary: the first is an average across a workforce whose top and bottom are nothing like each other, and the filing publishes no breakdown of it.

For comparison of denominator only: RB Global’s 21.6% take rate is measured against total Gross Transaction Value, which includes buyer’s premium, while Sotheby’s 16.1% margin is measured against Net Auction Sales. The two percentages are not the same measurement and should not be read as one house out-earning the other.

Price as a function of who else is bidding

The series description for this post promises a job “valuing objects whose price is a function of who else is bidding.” The filings make that literal, and it is the most interesting disclosure in them.

An auction guarantee, as the 10-K describes it, is a promise “to the consignor that their consigned artwork will achieve a specified minimum sale price at auction.” If the lot sells below the number, the house “must perform under the auction guarantee by funding the shortfall.” If it does not sell at all, the house “must pay the amount of the auction guarantee to the consignor and then take ownership of the unsold property.” Which amounts to the house acquiring a painting at a price it set while competing for the consignment.

So it lays the risk off, mostly onto a bidder. “Such auction guarantee risk sharing arrangements include irrevocable bid arrangements and, from time-to-time, partner sharing arrangements.” The counterparty commits in advance to bid at least the guaranteed level; it “may receive a fee for providing the irrevocable bid” and is “generally entitled to receive a share of our auction commission” if the property sells.

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Read that structure and the sale looks different. One bidder is contractually committed to bid, may have been paid a fee for committing, and is generally entitled to a share of the house’s commission if somebody outbids them. Nothing about it is hidden — it is in a public filing — but it is the mechanism by which a hammer price is partly a function of an arrangement made before the sale began.

The exposure is quantified, and it moves violently with the calendar. At 31 December 2018, Sotheby’s disclosed outstanding guarantee maximum exposure of $98.3 million, of which $45.6 million was covered by irrevocable bids, leaving net financial exposure of $52.7 million; the estimated fair value of its obligation to perform was $2.9 million, against $0.9 million a year earlier. By 26 February 2019 — a subsequent-event note, two months later, with the spring sales ahead — maximum exposure was $244.5 million, irrevocable bids $133.3 million, and net exposure $111.2 million. The December figure appears to be a trough between seasons rather than a steady state, which is a good reason to distrust any single year-end number from this industry.

What people get wrong

That “auctioneer salary” has a federal answer. It does not. The SOC 2018 structure contains no auctioneer occupation, the Occupational Outlook Handbook has no profile, and ONET’s 1,016 occupations include none. The $48,280 median that search results will route you toward is the 2025 figure for Sales and Related Workers, All Other — a residual code of 115,300 people, on a page where ONET itself prints “O*NET data is not available for this type of title.”

That the auctioneer and the specialist are one job. In the two states examined here they are plainly not. Tennessee’s auction-school rule mandates fifty hours covering bid calling, licence law, the Uniform Commercial Code and firearms, and says nothing about attribution, condition or valuation. The licence qualifies the voice. Whatever qualifies the eye is not administered by either board.

That the buyer’s premium is 25%. Twenty-five per cent is the top marginal rate of a declining schedule. On Sotheby’s 2015 tiers a $50,000 lot pays an effective 25% and a $10 million lot pays about 14.5%. The rate the auction business quotes is the rate borne in full by its least valuable lots.

That the consignor of a masterpiece pays a commission. Often the reverse. The 10-K states that to win a high-value consignment the house “may not charge a seller’s commission and/or may share a portion of our buyer’s premium with the seller.” The seller’s commission is the variable that competition has been eating, which is visible in the Auction Commission Margin falling from 17.2% to 16.1% in a single year — and which is precisely the variable the two houses were found to have agreed on.

That a guaranteed lot is an ordinary lot. When a house guarantees a minimum price and then sells the risk to an irrevocable bidder who may collect a fee and is generally entitled to a share of the commission, there is a bidder who is committed in advance and paid to be committed. That is disclosed, not secret. It is still not what a first-time observer thinks they are watching.

That the equipment auctioneers are the small end of the business. RB Global moved $16.2 billion of gross transaction value in 2025 with about 8,000 full-time staff. Sotheby’s, in its last public year, moved $5.25 billion of aggregate auction sales and $6.35 billion of consolidated sales with 1,713. The metrics are defined differently, so the multiple is approximate — but the direction is not in doubt. The art houses are the famous end, not the large one.

Bottom line

An auctioneer salary is not something the federal occupational classification measures, and the figure that fills the gap — $48,280 in 2025 — is the median of an administrative leftover. What is measured, in filings and in state regulations, is everything around the job: fifty hours of mandated instruction that never mentions valuation; a marginal buyer’s-premium rate that falls from 25% to 12% as the lot gets better; a seller’s commission so contested that the house will waive it and pay the seller a cut of the buyer’s money instead; a commission margin sliding a full point in a year; guarantee exposure swinging from $98 million to $245 million in eight weeks; and, when the pressure on that commission became unbearable, a $45 million criminal fine for agreeing with its closest competitor to stop competing on it.

The pattern is the same one this series keeps finding. The further a job sits from the money, the more precisely the government counts it. Housekeepers, private chefs and security guards have occupation codes of their own, and this series has published federal medians for them. The person standing at the rostrum of a billion-dollar market has none — but their employer, if it ever had public shareholders, has to tell you what it charges, what it guarantees, what it pays its people in aggregate, and what it was fined for. Disclosure does not follow importance. It follows the capital structure.

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Methods and sources.

Federal occupational data. All sources read 13 November 2026. The claim that no US federal occupation called auctioneer exists rests on four documents read directly. The BLS 2018 SOC structure was searched in full: no occupation anywhere in that document is titled “Auctioneer” or “Auctioneers.” Its 41-9000 “Other Sales and Related Workers” group comprises five broad groups and eight detailed occupations — 41-9010 Models, Demonstrators, and Product Promoters (41-9011, 41-9012); 41-9020 Real Estate Brokers and Sales Agents (41-9021, 41-9022); 41-9030 Sales Engineers (41-9031); 41-9040 Telemarketers (41-9041); and 41-9090 Miscellaneous Sales and Related Workers (41-9091 Door-to-Door Sales Workers, News and Street Vendors, and Related Workers; 41-9099 Sales and Related Workers, All Other). The BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook A–Z index was read through “Auditor” with no entry at the alphabetical position where “Auctioneer” would fall, between “ATV Technician” and “Audio-Visual Collections Coordinator.” O*NET’s full occupation list prints “1016 of 1,016 occupations shown” and contains no Auctioneers entry between “Atmospheric, Earth, Marine, and Space Sciences Teachers, Postsecondary” and “Audio and Video Technicians.” O*NET’s keyword search for “auctioneer” returns “9 occupations shown,” none titled Auctioneers, the first being 41-9099.00. Figures for 41-9099.00 are that page’s: “Median wages (2025)” of “$23.21 hourly, $48,280 annual”; “Employment (2025)” of “115,300 employees”; projected growth 2025–2035 of “Slower than average (1% to 2%)” with 13,100 projected openings; the definition “All sales and related workers not listed separately”; and the notice “ONET data is not available for this type of title,” which appears in the introductory block at the top of that page. The page cites BLS 2025 wage data and 2025–2035 projections and prints “Site updated October 6, 2026.” Stated limits. The BLS 2018 SOC definitions PDF and 2018 SOC direct match title file were each read only through the 25-xxxx range before retrieval cut off; the 41-xxxx portions of both were not read, so this piece does not claim that the word “auctioneer” is absent from every BLS document, and in particular does not claim to have verified whether “Auctioneer” is a direct-match lay title for 41-9099. The static OEWS pages bls.gov/oes/current/oes419099.htm and bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm both now serve the generic OEWS tables index rather than occupation data and were not usable; no mean wage, employment relative standard error or percentile table for 41-9099 was obtained, and none is stated here.* The commercial salary aggregators that dominate search results for this phrase — ZipRecruiter’s auctioneer pages among them — refused automated retrieval, so no aggregator figure is quoted, compared or rebutted above; the criticism made in the text is of the federal residual code, not of any specific commercial estimate. The Bottom line’s statement that housekeepers, private chefs and security guards have their own occupation codes and published medians rests on this series’ earlier posts on housekeeper, private chef and close-protection pay, each of which cites the relevant per-occupation federal data; those occupations’ pages were not re-retrieved for this piece.

Auctioneer licensing. Tennessee: Tenn. Comp. R. & Regs. 0160-01-.10, “Auction Schools,” read in full on Cornell’s Legal Information Institute. Authority is cited on the rule as “T.C.A. §§ 62-19-106(b) and 62-19-111”; the filing history ends “Amendments filed April 13, 2020; effective 7/12/2020.” The fifty-hour minimum, the sixteen hours in basic fundamentals, the twenty-five hours supervised by a licensed auctioneer with at least three years’ experience, the quoted curriculum list and the fifteen-hour automobile-auctioneer track are verbatim from subsections (1)(c), (1)(e) and (2)(c). The rule governs approval of schools, not the content of the licence examination; the licence requirements themselves are in T.C.A. § 62-19-111, which was not retrieved, so the text above describes what the mandated curriculum covers rather than what any exam tests. The observation that the curriculum omits attribution, condition, provenance and valuation is a reading of that list, not a quotation. North Carolina: the NC Auctioneer Licensing Board’s application process page states that an “Applicant must complete an NC Approved Auctioneering School or complete the two-year apprenticeship program prior to applying for an auctioneer licensee and being allowed to take the North Carolina Auctioneer State Examination. Please see N.C.G.S. 85B-4 and 21 NCAC 04B.” That sentence is quoted above exactly as printed, including “licensee” where “licence” is evidently meant. The board’s September 2026 necessity vote and the comment period to 30 November 2026 are from the board’s homepage. Not obtained: North Carolina’s required school hours, fees, bond or recovery-fund provisions, which sit in application PDFs and in the 21 NCAC 04B rules document, both of which refused automated retrieval; no dollar fee for any state licence is stated anywhere above. No count of how many US states license auctioneers was obtained from an authoritative source, and none is given — every generalisation about licensing in the text is scoped to these two states.

Sotheby’s, buyer’s premium. The schedule is verbatim from Sotheby’s 8-K Item 8.01 dated 26 January 2015: 25% on the first $200,000 of hammer price, 20% above $200,000 to and including $3 million, 12% above $3 million, effective 1 February 2015, with other currencies “adjusted in a commensurate manner.” The same filing states the prior structure, in effect since 15 March 2013: 25%/$100,000, 20%/$2 million, 12% above. The 2013 change and the quoted “over 98% of lots” and “first pricing change in almost five years” language are from the earnings press release exhibit dated 28 February 2013 (EDGAR filing date 4 March 2013). The schedules in force today were not verified. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips’ and Bonhams’ own fee pages all refused automated retrieval, and Sotheby’s has been privately held since 2019 and files nothing; nothing above should be read as a current rate card for any house. The worked example — a $50,000 hammer bearing an effective 25%, and a $10 million hammer paying $50,000 + $560,000 + $840,000 = $1,450,000, or 14.5% — is this piece’s arithmetic applied to the 2015 tiers, and ignores any overhead charge, artist’s resale right or sales tax. No seller’s commission rate is stated anywhere above, because none appeared in any filing read.

Sotheby’s, financials and guarantees. From the 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2018, accession 0000823094-19-000011, filed 28 February 2019 (CIK 0000823094) — confirmed as the company’s last annual report — and the earlier 10-Ks for 2016 and 2017. Figures as tabled, in thousands: agency commissions and fees 891,774 (2018) and 809,571 (2017); total revenues 1,035,740 and 1,057,380; salaries and related costs 342,687 and 318,555. Aggregate Auction Sales $5,250,503 thousand; Net Auction Sales $4,395,593 thousand; Private Sales $1,018,844 thousand; Consolidated Sales $6,350,155 thousand. Auction Commission Margin 16.1% (2018), 17.2% (2017), 17.1% (2016) — defined in the filing as auction commission revenues net of guarantee risk-sharing fees and consignor-introducer fees, divided by Net Auction Sales. Employees of 1,713 at 31 December 2018 (Agency 1,515; Finance 12; All Other 186) against 1,662 a year earlier, from Item 1. The quotations on seller’s commission waiver and buyer’s-premium sharing, on earning commission from both sides “calculated as a percentage of the hammer price,” on competition and commission margins, and the whole description of the guarantee and irrevocable-bid mechanism are verbatim from Items 1 and 1A; the competition language is a risk factor and is presented above as such, not as the company’s explanation of the 2018 margin decline. Guarantee figures are from the filing’s XBRL “Auction Guarantees (Details)” page: at 31 December 2018, maximum exposure $98,300,000, irrevocable bids $45,600,000, net financial exposure $52,700,000, estimated fair value of the obligation to perform $2,900,000 ($900,000 at 31 December 2017); as a subsequent event at 26 February 2019, maximum exposure $244,500,000, irrevocable bids $133,300,000, net financial exposure $111,200,000, with $7,600,000 of guarantee advances outstanding. Arithmetic. $342,687,000 ÷ 1,713 = $200,051, described above as “about $200,000”; $891,774,000 ÷ 1,713 = $520,592, described as “roughly $520,600.” Both are this piece’s, both are company-wide averages across a workforce that includes every non-specialist role, and neither is anyone’s salary; the filing publishes no component breakdown of the salaries line, and that breakdown sits in notes not retrieved for this piece. Not obtained: the component split of salaries and related costs, any specialist-level pay figure, partner-sharing amounts under guarantees, and the share of lots in any sale carrying a guarantee or irrevocable bid. The statement that the guarantee structure “is in a public filing” refers to the mechanism’s disclosure in the 10-K; no claim is made here about catalogue-level marking of guaranteed lots, which was not checked.

RB Global. CIK 0001046102, formerly Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers Incorporated. Employment, the “straight commission basis” sentence, the underwritten-transaction language and the compounding-risk caution are verbatim from the 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025, accession 0001628280-26-011682, filed 25 February 2026. The phrase “the world’s largest auctioneer of commercial assets and vehicles offering online bidding” describes Ritchie Bros., one of RB Global’s marketplace brands, and is attributed that way above; it is not a self-description of the parent. Revenue figures (total $4,590.7 million; service $3,502.2 million; inventory sales $1,088.5 million; SG&A $905.2 million, including $76.7 million share-based payments and $53.7 million executive transition costs) and the GTV and take-rate figures ($16,201.9 million and 21.6% for 2025; $15,904.8 million and 21.1% for 2024) are from the company’s financial statements and its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results exhibit dated 17 February 2026, which defines GTV as “total proceeds from all items sold on our auctions and online marketplaces, third-party online marketplaces, private brokerage services and other disposition channels” and cautions that it “is not a measure of financial performance, liquidity, or revenue,” and defines take rate as “Total service revenue divided by total GTV.” Not obtained: the CEO pay ratio and the median employee’s annual total compensation from the 2026 proxy statement, filed 19 March 2026 — the executive compensation section was beyond the retrievable portion of that document — and any salaries-and-wages expense line or per-employee pay figure for RB Global, none of which is stated above. Both scale comparisons between RB Global and Sotheby’s are flagged in the text as non-comparable, because GTV includes buyer’s premium and is defined more broadly than either Aggregate Auction Sales or Net Auction Sales. This piece does not claim RB Global is the only listed auctioneer with such disclosure; other US-listed auction companies file comparable reports and were not examined.

The antitrust matter. Entirely from Sotheby’s Holdings’ own SEC filings: the 10-K405 for 2001, accession 0000950117-02-000492, filed 12 March 2002, and the 10-K for 2002, accession 0000950117-03-001004, filed 17 March 2003; Item 3, Legal Proceedings, was read in full in both. The guilty plea language, the $45 million fine “payable without interest over a period of five years,” the court’s acceptance of the plea and imposition of the fine on 2 February 2001, the $206 million cash and $62.5 million face-value certificate deposited into escrow, the court’s determination that the certificate “had a fair market value of not less than $50 million,” the $156 million funded by A. Alfred Taubman, the European Commission’s finding that the two houses agreed “to fix selling commissions and other trading terms” and its “fine of approximately $20.1 million on the Company, which was paid on February 5, 2003,” the 10 March 2003 agreement by which the company and Christie’s would “pay $20 million each” to settle the international litigation, the shareholder settlement of $30 million cash plus 2,204,708 Class A shares valued at $40 million at deposit, the $192,500 California settlement, and the “without any admission of liability” formula attached to the civil settlements are all verbatim or exact from those two filings. The $50 million figure for the company’s own share of the US class cash ($206 million less $156 million) is this piece’s subtraction. No plea date is stated above, because neither filing gives one; both record only that the plea had been entered and that the court accepted it and imposed the fine on 2 February 2001, which is the date the text and the Million Dollar Question use. The 2002 filing’s MD&A refers elsewhere to a “€/$21.35 million” European Commission fine against the Item 3 figure of “approximately $20.1 million”; the Item 3 figure is the one quoted above, and the discrepancy is noted here rather than resolved. Deliberate limits. The guilty plea is the only admission; every civil settlement above is expressly stated in the filings to carry no admission of liability, and the European Commission decision is a regulator’s finding, with the filings not stating the company’s position on it. The Commission’s decision concerned both houses while the fine reported in the filing falls only on Sotheby’s; the filings do not say why, and no explanation is offered or implied above. The Canadian class action (claiming “approximately $14 million plus costs”) and an Italian investigation into “certain allegations of improper conduct by current and former Company employees” are allegations on the record and are not asserted as facts. The filings’ legal-proceedings sections do not mention the former chief executive, and contain no statement about amnesty or leniency for Christie’s; the contingency notes to both filings — Note O for 2001 and Notes P and Q for 2002 — were not retrieved. Accordingly nothing above states or implies any individual criminal outcome, and the $512 million figure commonly cited for the US civil settlement is not used, because no primary document supporting it was read. The DOJ Antitrust Division’s own press releases from 2000–2002 refused automated retrieval and were not read; the entire account rests on the defendant company’s description of matters involving itself, which is a meaningful limitation and the reason the admitted/alleged distinction is marked at every point above.

Not verified. Any mean wage, percentile or employment standard error for SOC 41-9099. Whether “Auctioneer” appears as a direct-match lay title in the BLS SOC crosswalks. Any current buyer’s premium or seller’s commission rate at any auction house today. Any seller’s commission rate at any time. Any specialist-level or auctioneer-level individual pay figure at any auction house. RB Global’s median employee compensation. Whether other listed auction companies disclose more than RB Global does. North Carolina’s licence fees, required school hours, bond and recovery-fund amounts. How many US states license auctioneers. The content of any state licence examination. Sotheby’s IPO year or the length of its listing, which is referred to nowhere above. The DOJ’s own account of the price-fixing prosecution, the date the plea was entered, and the fate of any individual charged in it. What share of lots in any sale carry a guarantee or an irrevocable bid, which no public source consulted discloses, and whether such lots are marked in catalogues.

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