Where to sell a broken iPhone in the UK: every option compared

A broken iPhone can be sold at least five different ways in the UK, and the right one depends on how much effort you want to spend for how much money. Here is the honest comparison, including the options that are not us.

Buyback sites, like this one, are the low effort route: instant price, free tracked postage, money in days. The catch across the industry is the revised offer game, where the headline price melts on arrival. Judge any buyback site, ours included, on whether it shows its grading rules up front and what its customers say about the price they were actually paid.

eBay and Facebook Marketplace usually fetch the most for working phones, because you are selling to the end buyer. For broken phones the maths changes: buyers bid cautiously on faults, returns and disputes are your problem, and fees plus postage eat 15 percent or so. Budget real hours for photos, listings and messages.

Repair shops and phone kiosks pay instantly in cash, which is their whole advantage. Offers are typically the lowest of any route, because a walk in customer is a captive one. Network trade-ins are convenient if you are upgrading anyway, but the value comes as credit, the grading is strict, and broken devices are often refused outright.

The drawer is the only truly bad option. Every month a phone sits there it loses value, whatever you eventually choose. Pick any route on this list and you are ahead of leaving it there.

Whichever route you choose, three checks save a lot of grief. First, turn off Find My and sign out of iCloud before the phone leaves you: an Activation Locked phone cannot be bought, wiped or used by anyone else, so every honest buyer will stop there. Second, be precise about the damage, because a price is only as good as the answers behind it. A cracked back, a cracked front and a screen showing lines are three different prices almost everywhere. Third, check what happens if the buyer disagrees with your description: a fair buyer makes a revised offer you can refuse, and sends the phone back free if you do.

If you want to sell a broken iPhone to us, the sell broken iPhone page has every model's damaged prices on one page. As long as it switches on we buy it, cracked screen and all, with a free tracked postage pack, the price locked for 10 days, and payment within 48 hours of arrival.