What does the John Deere 6030 market look like today?

John Deere 6030 listings on Tractor Zoom

The 6030, which I’ve written about before, is one of my favorite tractors and it always will be. It was broad-shouldered and built for heavy fieldwork, and I love that about it. However, it was more than just a big machine. Save for a few later-models that used a 9.0L, it was the last time Deere ever relied on cubic inches to get the job done in a 2WD tractor. There were lots of other tractors that came after the 6030 that were theoretically better, but very few could claim bigger.

Yep, the 6030 was Deere’s big dumb horsepower entry at its finest, and I think that’s one of the reasons that it’s a favorite for a lot of people.

So, let’s take a look at the current state of the collector market for 6030s as well as one that’s coming up for auction in The Buckeye State this weekend.

Don’s 1974 John Deere 6030

I caught up with Darby Walton, who’s helping his dad on this auction, about the 6030. This one is clean and really well-kept. Don Courtad’s brother bought it years ago, and the two farmed a few hundred acres in Hardin County together. When he passed, the tractor was left to Don. It was likely their big horse, the meter only shows 4,500 hours — and Darby believes they’re original.

It’s a fairly standard 6030 row crop, but with a few nice extras. I think most left Waterloo as open stations, but this one’s got a factory cab with heat and A/C — a premium option back then. The cab’s clean, the interior is intact (just needs a headliner), and the tractor’s been repainted. There’s a run here or there if you look pretty close, but it shows well.

This tractor is built for tillage, from what I can tell. Out back, it’s running big, dualed-up Firestone 20.8s with wheel weights. Up front, 14L-16.1 three-ribs with another 500 pounds hanging on the nose. Together, that setup would have no problem muscling any of the tillage tools sitting in Don’s machine shed. And if you needed to double up gravity wagons to the elevator during harvest, this would be the one to do it. With four wagons listed on the sale bill, I’d guess it probably made that run more than once.

So what’s one of these bad boys worth, anyway? Well, let’s dig in to the data and see what we can find.

Sizing the market: John Deere 6030 values

Though there are probably some 6030s out there earning their keep on the farm and plenty on the pulling track, generally speaking, these tractors typically fall into the collector tractor category. Lots of Deere fans consider these to be the ultimate green muscle tractor, and as the collector market continues to shift towards that era, the demand is increasing — especially for clean examples. The data shows that at minimum, you’ll need at least $40-45K to get your hands on one in 2025.

As of right now, we’ve got 79 John Deere auction sales recorded in our Tractor Zoom Pro database spanning close to 25 years. Overall, the average for all of ’em is just under $29,000. That said, if we toss the high and the low, that drops the average to about $27,700. So what does it look like right now? Let’s get a little more granular and see if we can’t get a better picture of the current status of the market.

Getting granular

If we narrow down our results to just the tractors sold at auction in the past three years, I think it provides a much better picture. We’ve recorded 34 completed auction sales through our partner auctioneers, with an average of just over $40,000. Still, that includes a tractor or two that skews the data just a bit. So, let’s cherry pick and find the tractors that are most like this one selling in Ohio this weekend.

So in 2022, most of the cleaner 6030s sold for somewhere in the $33-37,000 range, plus a nice restored example that skewed the results a little. Still, it’s a baseline to start from.

2023 was an anomaly year, because of that tractor in the top right corner. That is a naturally aspirated 6030, one of just 45 built, and it’s probably the nicest surviving example. It’s completely original, and at nearly $151,000, it set a record that will probably stand for quite a while. It also skewed the average by over twenty grand!

I included that tractor for this very reason, to show that in the collector tractor market, one year doesn’t necessarily create a trend that you can rely on. If you’re looking for an accurate value, you’ve got to consider all of the factors. If we toss the unicorn, it drops the average to about $50,000.

2024 was another strange year, and one that wouldn’t help create a very accurate picture of the market. I believe this is the only year in our database where we didn’t see any open stations cross the auction block. Normally it’s skewed the other direction. Furthermore, with only five tractors selling, and only one or maybe two tractors being anywhere close to the one selling this weekend, this year’s data probably doesn’t help much.

Overall, we’ve seen more clean 6030s changing hands this year than ever before, and we’ve still got three more months of auctions coming! This leads me to believe that when it’s all said and done, we’ll see another noticeable jump in the auction average.

Make it make sense…

Some of you are probably thinking, “Great…a whole bunch of data I can’t use.” Well…yes and no. Averaging the fifteen tractors I found from 2022 onward gives $49,626, which is a decent baseline. However, there’s a catch there, too. Most muscle tractor collectors love the nostalgia and “cool factor” of open stations—and they’ll pay more for one. My list leaned toward open stations, so maybe $49K’s a little generous. Still, with bidding already over $25K and three days left, $45–50K feels realistic.

Still, there are a few unknowns that you can’t account for. For instance, there’s a million different ways to slice and dice auction data. If I zigged when I should’ve zagged, my estimate could be completely off. If two bidders whip themselves into a frenzy at a Saturday auction—as they often do—all bets are off!

Either way, Don Courtad’s 6030 is a beauty, and I’m curious to see where it lands. If you end up with it, let me know—I’d love to hear from you.

Here’s that link one more time.

John Deere 6030 listings on Tractor Zoom