Sell your Galaxy S26 Ultra for cash

Storage, wear and carrier decide it. A 512GB unlocked in Good condition is $640. Drop the same phone to Average and it is $602. A 256GB with a cracked screen is $120. Put yours through the quote box at the top of this page for the exact figure.

You can sell it, but read this before you quote it, because it is the most expensive mistake available on this phone.

A Galaxy S26 Ultra with no S Pen grades Faulty. It does not slip one grade, it goes to the bottom row. A 1TB in Good condition is $670 and the same phone without the pen is $134. At 256GB the fall is $602 down to $120.

Samsung sells a replacement, part EJ-PS948B, for $54.99. Buying one costs a fraction of the gap, so if the original is really gone, replace it and send the phone with a pen in the slot. Either way, tell the truth in the quote box. A phone that arrives without the S Pen is regraded here whatever was selected, and nobody enjoys that phone call.

Two tests, five seconds each. Look at the bottom edge: the Ultra has a small slot for the S Pen next to the charging port and the Plus has nothing there. Then count the camera lenses on the back: four on the Ultra, three on the Plus. The Ultra is also the only one of the three sold with a 1TB option, so a 1TB Galaxy S26 cannot be anything else. If yours turns out to be the smaller one, our sell your Galaxy S26 Plus page carries its own prices, and there is a Galaxy S26 page too.

Open Settings, tap About phone, and look at Model number. SM-S948U is the version sold through the carriers. SM-S948U1 is the unlocked one Samsung sells directly. Both are a US Galaxy S26 Ultra, both quote on this page, and the number itself does not change your price. What changes your price is whether the phone is still locked to a network, which is a separate thing and is worth checking in Settings under Connections.

Yes. Any crack or chip, front glass, back glass or a camera lens cover, grades Faulty even if the phone works perfectly. That is a price and not a refusal: $120 at 256GB, $128 at 512GB, $134 at 1TB, unlocked.

Pick Faulty at the quote step and nothing changes when we open the box. Do not have it repaired first hoping to move up a grade, because the sums almost never work on this phone and a replacement screen carries its own problems.

Faulty, and so is anything else on the phone that has stopped doing its job. This is the one Samsung rule worth learning properly, because it is broader than people expect and it is not a checklist to hunt through.

If something on the phone does not work, the phone is Faulty. A dead speaker, a mic nobody can hear you on, a button that no longer clicks, a camera that will not focus, a fingerprint reader that has given up, a charging port that needs the cable held at an angle, a wobbly frame. Any one of those, on its own, is Faulty pricing regardless of how clean the glass is.

So test it before you choose. Make a call, record a voice memo and play it back, press every button, open the camera and try each lens, plug the charger in and let go of it. Two minutes of that will tell you your real grade, and picking the right one up front is the difference between being paid what you were quoted and being renegotiated after the fact.

It does. Screen burn-in grades Faulty. Every Galaxy S phone has an OLED panel, and OLED pixels wear at different rates, so a keyboard outline or a ghost of the clock can sit permanently in the glass on a phone that is otherwise flawless. It is not dirt and it will not clean off.

To check yours, turn the brightness up, open a plain white full screen image in a dim room, and look across the panel at an angle rather than straight on. Any shadow of the status bar, the navigation buttons or the keyboard is burn-in. The full walkthrough sits on our Galaxy S26 Plus page, and the test is identical on this phone.

No, and this is where iPhone sellers trip up. There is no percentage to hit and no battery figure we grade against on a Samsung. Do not go looking for one and do not talk yourself into a lower grade because a screen somewhere gave you a number you did not like. A battery that has faded with normal use is normal use, and it does not move your grade at all. The only way the battery touches your price is the ordinary way anything else does: if it genuinely does not work, if the phone dies at 40 percent or will not hold a charge for an afternoon, then the phone is Faulty like anything that has stopped working. And if it will not power on at all, see the next answer.

That one we cannot buy, and the reason is practical rather than fussy. With no power we cannot test what we are paying for, and you cannot get your photos and messages off it, so putting a number on it would help nobody. Try a different cable and a wall socket first, and give it half an hour on the charger before you decide, because a dead cable looks exactly like a dead phone. If it really is gone, send it on the same free label and we recycle it at no cost, wiped to DoD standards on the way. Or say the word and we mail it straight back to you, also free.

Not while money is still owed on it. A phone on a carrier installment plan or a lease is a phone under a financial obligation, and we do not purchase devices under financial obligations. This catches a lot of Galaxy S26 Ultras because the phone is barely months old and most of them are still being paid for. Settle the balance, own it outright, and then it quotes like any other.

No to all three, and they are three separate checks.

A Google account lock, which you may see called FRP, has to be off. If the phone still has your Google account signed into it, whoever opens the box next cannot get past the setup screen and the phone is worth nothing to anybody. Remove the account first, then reset. Same rule as Activation Lock on an iPhone and just as final.

The IMEI has to be clean. Reported lost, reported stolen, blacklisted or blocked by a carrier all fail here and we have to send the phone back. Dial star hash zero six hash to read your IMEI, or find it in Settings, About phone.

And the Knox counter has to be intact. If the phone has been rooted or had custom firmware flashed onto it, Knox trips permanently and there is no undoing it, not by reflashing stock software and not by factory reset. A tripped Knox counter means we cannot buy the phone at any grade.

Yes, more than most people expect. Unlocked pays the most at every size and every grade on this phone. Take a Good 1TB: $670 unlocked, $518 on AT&T, $509 on Verizon, $480 on T-Mobile. Anything outside those three falls further again.

The table on this page is unlocked, so pick your real network in the quote box instead of assuming. If the phone is paid off, your carrier is obliged to release the lock and it usually takes a day, which on this model is worth well over a hundred dollars.

No. A carrier trade-in hands you bill credit, drip fed back to you over 24 or 36 months, and it only exists if you sign for another phone at the same time. Samsung's own trade-in is store credit against a new Samsung. A Buyback is us buying the phone on its own: real money, no new contract, spend it wherever you like, and the price held for 14 days while it travels to us.

Color makes no difference to any of it, by the way. Cobalt Violet, Sky Blue, Black, White, Silver Shadow and Pink Gold all quote at the same number, so pick your storage and your grade and ignore the finish.

Do it in this order, because the order is what matters.

First take the Google account off: Settings, then Accounts and backup, then Manage accounts, tap Google, then Remove account. Do the same for your Samsung account. Only then run the reset: Settings, then General management, then Reset, then Factory data reset. Resetting while the Google account is still on the phone is what leaves it FRP locked, and that is the single most common reason a phone gets mailed back unpaid. There is a step by step walkthrough on our erase your device page.

We wipe every phone again to DoD standards when it arrives here. Your photos, messages and saved passwords are erased and they cannot be recovered. Yours has to come off first though.

Four ways, and you choose at checkout. A gift card lands in your inbox and works out around 3 percent better than the rest, because the brands add a bonus on top. PayPal is instant, less the 2.99 percent fee PayPal takes. A bank transfer is 2 to 4 days and a mailed check is 3 to 5. All four go out the same day your phone clears inspection, which is within 48 hours of it arriving. The one exception: a sealed Brand New Galaxy S26 Ultra is paid by PayPal only.

One row-picking note belongs with that. Brand New and Flawless pay exactly the same figure at all three sizes on this model, and Brand New is the grade tied to PayPal. So a Galaxy S26 Ultra that has been opened but is still unmarked belongs in the Flawless row: the money is identical and all four of the options above stay open to you.