NASBLA Public Library

Registration & Titling Statistics
By: Jack Ellis, InfoLink

2022 was another great year for boat sales! During the first nine months of this year, which represents about 90% of full calendar year sales, over 1.1 million mechanically propelled boats were purchased in the U.S. More than 252,000 of these were new boats and another 890,000 were pre-owned. This is on par with pre-pandemic sales, which had already experienced several years of uninterrupted growth. 

What does this mean for those of us in NASBLA? Since boat builders have been adding new boats to the fleet at roughly the same rate older boats were being scrapped, the total number of boats in use has remained relatively static over the past several years and this will likely continue for at least a few more years. Meanwhile, over one million people per year are buying boats that are new to them and almost one-third of these are first-time boat owners. So, in short, our job is not going to get any easier.