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14-day lock
Offer holds when description matches.
48-hr processing
Two business days from arrival to confirmed offer.
Free shipping
Prepaid USPS label in your inbox.
BBB 4.69
Ten years. Same Phoenix team.
SELL YOUR GALAXY NOTE 20 5G
A Galaxy Note 20 5G is worth $17 to $106. Two things move it, the storage inside and the state of the phone, and the whole grid is in the table below.
Most people call it a trade-in. We call it a Buyback, and here's why the price is different. A carrier reads the model off your account and turns it into credit spread over two or three years. We take the phone, check it by hand, tell you what we found, and pay you once.
Before you tape the box: the S Pen goes back in its slot along the bottom edge. It came with the phone and it belongs with the phone. A Note 20 5G that arrives here without its pen is quoted lower than one that has it, so it is worth a proper look behind the sofa cushions first.
Now the thing that gets this phone graded wrong more than anything else. The back of a Note 20 5G is plastic. Samsung sold a flagship Note in 2020 with a polycarbonate back panel, kept the glass for the Ultra, and got a year of complaints for it. Your phone is not a fake and nobody has swapped the back panel on you. It left the factory that way.
That matters when you pick a grade, because plastic wears differently from glass. It picks up fine scuffs and dull patches instead of hairline cracks, and it goes shiny where your fingers sit. None of that is damage. Wear is wear, and it lands you somewhere in the middle of our grades rather than at the bottom. What still sends the phone to Faulty is a crack or a chip, and plastic does chip when a corner meets concrete. Look at the four corners in good light, then run a fingernail along each edge. A chip catches. A scuff does not.
The screen is a different story, because that is glass and it is OLED. Sell my Galaxy Note 20 5G, sell it broken, sell it for cash: all of those are the same page here. We buy cracked ones, we say so in the table, and we pay for them.
LIVE PRICES
The used resale value of a Galaxy Note 20 5G sits between $17 and $106, depending on the size of the phone and the state it is in.
These are live numbers out of our own price feed rather than a list somebody typed in last year. They are the unlocked prices.
| Comparison row | 128GB | 256GB |
|---|---|---|
Brand New | $97 | $106 |
Flawless | $97 | $106 |
Good | $85 | $88 |
Average | $76 | $78 |
Fair | $51 | $53 |
Faulty | $17 | $18 |
HOW IT WORKS
Choose 128GB or 256GB, choose your carrier, and choose the grade. Check the corners of the back panel before you decide, since a chip and a scuff land in very different places. Whatever price you accept is yours for 14 days.
A prepaid USPS label arrives by email. Remove your Google account, run the factory reset, pop the SIM out and keep it. Slide the S Pen home, then the phone goes in the box on its own. No charger, no case.
We check your Note 20 5G within 48 hours of it landing. Matches what you told us, and payment leaves the same day, by gift card, PayPal, bank transfer or check. Bought or recycled, every phone gets a Department of Defense grade wipe.
SPEC SHEET
The model number lives in Settings, About phone. If it starts SM-N981 you are on the right page.
| Samsung's name for it | Galaxy Note20 5G |
|---|---|
| Year | 2020, announced August 5 |
| US model numbers | SM-N981U and SM-N981U1 |
| Screen | 6.7 inch Super AMOLED Plus, 2400 by 1080, flat, 60Hz |
| Front glass | Gorilla Glass 5 |
| Back panel | Polycarbonate, not glass. Samsung's own choice, not a repair. |
| Chip | Snapdragon 865 Plus in the US, Exynos 990 elsewhere |
| Memory | 8GB RAM |
| Storage we buy | 128GB and 256GB |
| Memory card | None. There is no microSD slot on a Note 20 5G. |
| Rear cameras | 12MP wide, 64MP telephoto, 12MP ultra wide |
| Front camera | 10MP |
| Battery | 4300 mAh, 25W wired, wireless charging supported |
| Colors | Mystic Green, Mystic Bronze and Mystic Gray all pay the same |
| S Pen | Included, stored in the bottom edge, 26ms latency |
| Headphone jack | None |
| Fingerprint reader | Ultrasonic, under the screen |
GALAXY NOTE 20 5G BUYBACK QUESTIONS
Most phones this age land in Average, which is wear you can see close up but cannot feel with a fingernail. A 256GB in Average is $78 and a 128GB is $76. Tidier phones go up from there and cracked ones still carry a price. The quote box at the top gives you the exact figure for your phone.
No. Samsung built it that way. The Note 20 5G has a polycarbonate back panel and the Note 20 Ultra has glass, and that was one of the loudest arguments about this phone when it launched in 2020. Your back panel is original, it is meant to feel like that, and it does not push your grade down by itself.
No. Scuffs, dull patches and shiny spots where your fingers rest are wear on a plastic panel, and wear puts you somewhere in Good, Average or Fair depending on how much of it there is. Faulty is for cracks and chips. If you are running a fingernail over the back and nothing catches, you are not in Faulty territory, whatever it looks like.
Yes, and it is a normal quote rather than a favor. Any crack or chip, on the screen or on the back, grades the phone Faulty. A 128GB in that state is $17 and a 256GB is $18. Choose Faulty when you quote, send it, and the number does not move when we open the box.
Three quick tells. The Note 20 5G has a flat screen and the Ultra's curves over both edges. The Note 20 5G has no memory card slot, so if there is a microSD card in your SIM tray you are holding an Ultra. And the back: plastic here, glass there. The model number settles it, SM-N981 for this phone and SM-N986 for the Ultra. Ultra owners want our Galaxy Note 20 Ultra 5G page, where the prices run a lot higher.
Say so at the quote step and send the phone anyway. The pen is not a spare accessory on a Note, it has its own slot machined into the body, and a Note 20 5G that turns up without one is quoted lower than the same phone with the pen sitting in the slot. Have a proper look for it first. It is usually still in the phone.
It matters, because burn-in makes a phone Faulty and the Note 20 5G screen is OLED like every other Note. Test it before you quote: brightness right up, a plain white screen, lights low, and look for a shadow of the status bar along the top or the navigation buttons along the bottom. Our Galaxy S23 Plus page runs the long version of this test, including the mid gray pass and the two things people mistake for burn-in.
You do not. Samsung phones have no battery percentage rule here, so there is no figure to hunt for and no screen to photograph. Do not go looking for a battery health readout, because we are not asking for one. A battery that has actually failed is a different matter, and it is covered by the same rule as any other part that has stopped working.
Yes, at the Faulty price. The Samsung rule is a principle rather than a list: anything on the phone that does not work properly makes it Faulty, however good it looks. A rattling speaker counts, so does a dead button, a port that needs the cable held at an angle, a camera stuck on blurry, or a fingerprint reader that fails half the time. Spend two minutes: video with sound, every button, all three cameras, plug it in and move the cable around.
Not as it stands. If the phone is still tied to a Google account, factory reset protection stops anyone else setting it up, so we cannot buy it at any price. Take the account off in Settings, Accounts and backup, then factory reset. Same answer for a tripped Knox counter, and for anything reported lost or stolen, blacklisted, or blocked by a carrier. Those are not fixable at our end.
Not until it is yours. Anything sitting on an installment plan or a lease counts as being under a financial obligation, and we do not purchase devices under financial obligations. Pay it off with the carrier first. The phone then quotes like any other.
Then we cannot buy it. A dead phone cannot be tested and your data cannot be cleared off it, and putting a price on something we can neither check nor wipe would not be honest. We will still take it off your hands for nothing: free label, Department of Defense grade wipe, proper recycling. Prefer it back? We post it back free.
Save anything you want, then take your Google account off the phone in Settings, Accounts and backup, Manage accounts. Then Settings, General management, Reset, Factory data reset. Your photos, messages and saved passwords are erased and they cannot be recovered. Take the SIM out too. The step by step is on our erase your device page. We wipe every phone again when it reaches us, but yours should come off first.
Look at what actually reaches your pocket. Carriers pay in monthly bill credits on a two or three year hitch, and if you leave early the rest of the credits vanish. We pay once, in cash or a gift card, the day after your phone clears inspection, and it is yours. The advertised numbers are not comparing the same thing.
You pick from four at checkout. Gift card comes by email and runs about 3 percent above the others because the brands add a bonus. PayPal is instant and PayPal takes 2.99 percent. Bank transfer is 2 to 4 days, a check in the mail is 3 to 5. All of them go out the same day your phone passes inspection. Sealed and never activated phones quoted as Brand New are the one exception, and they are paid through PayPal only.
Storage, carrier, grade. About a minute of your time, and the price holds for 14 days.
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