How Old Is My Piano? Finding the Serial Number and Reading the Year

You opened the lid, found a number cast into the iron, and did the math. Put it down. What you're looking at is probably the company's founding year or a patent date, which is what In Tune Piano Supply tells its readers, and it can sit on the plate of a piano built a century later.

Bill Kibby-Johnson has spent decades documenting this at pianohistory.info, and he gives you a physical test that takes two seconds. A real serial number would be painted onto the iron frame. If your number is raised, cast into the metal as part of the casting itself, it came with the frame, and frames were ordered in bulk. Kibby-Johnson has found cases where five or six years passed between a frame being cast and the finished piano leaving the factory.

The number you want is somewhere else on the instrument, and it runs four to seven digits. Here's how to find it and how much to trust it once you do.

Four to seven digits, and three numbers that look like it

On most uprights, lift the top lid and look down at the gold-colored plate near the tuning pinsTuning PinThe steel pin, about 2 1/4 inches long, that each string's coil winds onto. Its lower end is driven into the pinblock, and a tuning lever turns it.The Savvy Take: Only an inch of pin shows above the plate. Turn it and the top twists before the bottom moves, and relieving that twist — not muscle — is what separates a tuning that holds from one that drifts by Friday. Technicians call 80 to 120 inch-pounds a healthy pin.View in glossary →, toward the treble end. On most grands it's stamped into the plate or printed beside the maker's name, again near the tuning pins. If it's not there, piano.wiki's location guide covers the restRestA symbol indicating silence for a specified duration.The Savvy Take: Music is painted on a canvas of silence. The rests are as important as the notes. Don’t rush through them! A sudden silence (Grand Pause) is often the loudest moment in the piece.View in glossary →: the back of the case, the keybed where it's often written in pencil, and the soundboardSoundboardThe large spruce panel under the strings (grand) or behind them (upright) that amplifies string vibration — effectively the piano's speaker.The Savvy Take: Hairline soundboard cracks look scary and are usually cosmetic; what matters is whether the ribs are tight and nothing buzzes. Its real enemy is humidity swing — which is why technicians never stop talking about it.View in glossary → edge where European grands frequently carry it.

I should say plainly that piano.wiki is mine. I built it because I got tired of chasing serial data across a dozen half-broken pages. It's free, there's no signup, and it currently holds 151 manufacturers.

You're looking for four to seven digits, occasionally with a letter or two in front. Three other numbers get mistaken for it constantly. Model numbers are short and describe the size or style of the instrument: U1, M, B, 126, 248A. Piano Buyer warns about the three- and four-digit numbers stamped on case parts, which are manufacturing-process numbers. And pianos carry stamps from the firms that supplied the action and keys, which run on a completely separate clock.

That last one catches people. F. Langer & Co. of Berlin sometimes advanced 20,000 numbers in a single year, because one action factory served many piano firms. If you find "Herrburger Brooks" on your action, the name tells you the part dates from 1920 or later, when Herrburger-Schwander of Paris merged with Brooks of London, and Kibby-Johnson reports that no useful numbers have been found on those actions at all.

The year is a range, and the charts fight about it

Look your number up. Piano.wiki's serial lookup takes a manufacturer and a number. For Yamaha and Kawai, go straight to the factory tables linked below, because the manufacturer knows.

Then hold the answer loosely. Kibby-Johnson's summary of the whole practice is that dating pianos by serial number is notoriously unreliable, partly because so much misleading information has been published. That's the state of the literature, from the man who has read more of it than anyone.

Here's what it looks like in practice. Wells Pianos of Saint Paul, Minnesota publishes a Steinway chart putting serial 105000 in 1902. A serial-number compilation hosted on the Piano Technicians Guild's member site puts 1905 at 105000. Same maker, same number, three years apart.

The famous instruments make it worse. Both Wells and the Boston-area dealer M. Steinert & Sons date Steinway serial 300000 to 1940, while the White House Historical Association records that the 300,000th Steinway was presented to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at a ceremony on December 10, 1938. The same gap shows up at serial 100000, which those charts put in 1901 and the White House records as given in 1903.

M. Steinert & Sons hedges its own chart right on the page, which I respect: the numbers are approximate beginnings of a production year, and early production may span more than one year. Kawai says the same about its own data, that the listed numbers are the approximate first number produced for the year shown and that different models weren't numbered in step with each other.

Sometimes a manufacturer's chart contradicts itself in public. Yamaha's US serial page shows its Thomaston, Georgia plant running up to T504050 in June 1986 and then restarting at T100001 that same month, with the second sequenceSequenceThe repetition of a melodic or harmonic pattern at a different pitch level.The Savvy Take: Sequences are the “copy-paste” of classical music. They build tension. If a pattern repeats higher and higher, get louder and louder. If it steps down, get softer. Follow the direction of the sequence.View in glossary → climbing to T294877 by 2004.

Yamaha's factory letter, and who really built your Kohler & Campbell

Yamaha. The first letter of the serial identifies the factory: T is Thomaston, Georgia; U is South Haven, Michigan; H is Hangzhou, China; YT is Taoyuan, Taiwan; J is Jakarta, Indonesia. For a used Yamaha that letter matters more than the year. Yamaha defines gray market pianos as instruments bought in bulk in Japan, containerized, and shipped to the US for resale, and says most used Yamahas currently coming into North America were built for the Japanese market. It states there's no factory warranty coverage whatsoever on them, says it lacks service information on Japan-market-only models, and strongly discourages buying one used. Faust Harrison Pianos adds that Yamaha will only sell genuine parts when the serial indicates a US-market piano. Run the number through Yamaha's own lookup before money changes hands.

Kawai. Japan production starts at 4200 in 1927, US production at A6904 in 1988, Indonesian production at F000200 in 2003. Kawai's guidance is that starting letters other than A or F should be disregarded, and its lookup is free.

Stencil pianos. Brad Fant Piano Service defines one as a piano not built in the factory whose logo is on it, and the current examples aren't obscure. Boston is designed by Steinway and built by Kawai in Japan. Essex is designed by Steinway and built by Pearl River in China. Kohler & Campbell was made in America until 1985 and is now built by Samick in Indonesia. South Jersey Piano Service documented one with "Brahms" on the front and Winter & Company stamped on the plate, and their line on it is the right one: these aren't necessarily inferior pianos, it depends on the company that manufactured it.

The older the name, the worse this gets. Larry Fine's Piano Buyer explains that during the Depression, bankrupt makers' names were bought up by the survivors, and in many cases only the name carried over. Fine limits that to pianos made before about 1930, which is exactly the era whose serial charts people trust most. If the badge on yours is a name you half-recognize, our rundown of 50 piano brands is a starting point for who owned it when.

When there's no number: pencil marks on the bottom key

Some pianos never had one. The Bluebook of Pianos records that certain instruments were built with no serial number because they were house brands for large retailers, and the Pierce Piano Atlas' own site concedes that some pianos can't be dated exactly for that reason. Four things still work, roughly in order of how much I trust them.

1. Pencil dates. Pianohistory.info is the only resource I know that teaches this properly, and it's what I reach for at the bench. The date is often written on the side of the bottom key. The site's own warning travels with it: handwritten information may not be reliable, and years with only two digits are always a little worrying.
2. Keytops. Ivory gives you a date range before anything else does. Most American manufacturers moved to plastic in the mid-1950s, so pre-1950s keys have a high chance of being ivory, and the 1989 CITES ban settles everything after that. The full ivory test takes about a minute.
3. Cabinet style. Victorian scrollwork and candle holders point to the late 1800s, and Art Deco features ran through the 1930s and 1940s. This is the roughest method on the list, and it's rougher still on a piano that's been refinished.
4. A technician. Somebody who has had a few hundred actions apart can usually bracket an undated piano from its hardware. The Piano Technicians Guild's find-a-technician tool searches by zip code out to 200 miles.

What the year is worth: $349 to make one disappear

Every other page on this topic stops at the year, so here is what comes after it. A pre-1940 American upright is close to worthless as an object, and the market says so loudly. In March 2024 the Star Tribune in Minneapolis reported that Teresa Dyar paid the recycler Pianocycle $349 to haul away a Kawai console her family had bought for around $6,000 about 25 years earlier. Keys 4/4 Kids, a Twin Cities nonprofit, charges roughly $280 just to collect a donated piano, and executive director Grant Dawson said about 70 percent of what it takes in goes to recycling or landfill. Piano Movers Extraordinaire of Braham, Minnesota disposed of 276 pianos in one summer, and owner Melissa Aszmann said those calls come in about six times a week.

The reason is arithmetic. US acoustic piano sales fell from nearly 350,000 in 1923 to 34,000 in 2022, over a stretch when the country's population roughly tripled. Everything built during the boom is still out there. Dennis Chupp of Chupp's Piano Service in New Paris, Indiana wrote in 2017 that over 300 US makers were operating at once in the 1920s, and that even a full rebuild costing north of $10,000 would leave one of those uprights no better than average.

So price the work before you weigh the sentiment. In Nashville, Miller Piano Specialists on Trousdale Drive lists a standard tuning at $190 as of August 2026, and $285 for a pitchPitchThe perceived highness or lowness of a sound, determined by the frequency of vibration.The Savvy Take: Most people have “Relative Pitch” (recognizing intervals), not “Perfect Pitch.” And that’s fine! Relative pitch is actually more useful for understanding harmony and structure.View in glossary → correction plus tuning on an instrument that hasn't been tuned in two or more years. Good Time Moving & Storage put a local upright move at $250 to $400 in February 2026. Removal costs money too: Dropcurb publishes a flatFlatThe symbol (b) indicating that a pitch should be lowered by one semitone.The Savvy Take: Visually, flats look “heavy” (like a sagging belly). Musically, they often sound mellower or darker than sharps. When a piece modulates to the flat side, think of it as a relaxation or a darkening of the mood.View in glossary → $375 for curbside upright pickup, and LoadUp advertises in-home piano removal from $430. Those are the numbers your free piano has to beatBeatThe basic temporal unit of a composition. The regular pulse that organizes the rhythm.The Savvy Take: There is a difference between “keeping time” and “feeling the beat.” A metronome keeps time; a musician feels the pulse. Your job is to internalize that pulse so strongly that you can push against it (rubato) without losing it.View in glossary →.

Two shops publish an outright threshold, which is more than most will say where customers can read it. Bradfield Piano in Dallas puts a free piano of 80 years or older at less than a 20 percent chance of being worth taking. Riverton Piano Company wrote in 2023 that an upright taller than 52 inches or shorter than 40 inches has no resale value at all, because neither size is still made, replacement parts would have to be custom crafted, and restoring one costs more than a new upright.

Age cuts the other way at the top of the market. The Piano Technicians Guild's care FAQ says large, high-quality instruments can be rebuilt for one-half to two-thirds the cost of a comparable new piano. Cooper Piano of Atlanta's guide values an 1880 to 1900 grand at $1,500 to $3,500 as-is and $40,000 to $75,000 restored. Bradfield prices a complete Steinway restoration at $30,000 to $60,000, in a list bylined by Holt Deniger, who started at Steinway & Sons in 2006 and has rebuilt over 250 Steinways. A soundboard on its own runs $8,000 to $10,000 at Lindeblad in Dover, New Jersey.

The PTG refuses to give you an age rule, and it's right to. One piano may need rebuilding after just twenty years, while another may need only reconditioning after fifty. Age is a filter you apply early, and our breakdown of restoration costs covers what happens after it.

The dating industry wants $6.95

Know this before you pay anybody. The Pierce Piano Atlas is the trade's standard reference, covering over 12,500 manufacturer names, and its 2017 Anniversary edition sells for $35.00 hardcover or $28.00 softcover from the publisher in Albuquerque. That's a fair price for a real book, and technicians buy it.

The retail layer on top is what bothers me. Pierce sells a mail-in dating service at $6.95 for the year of manufacture alone and $18.95 for age plus manufacturer history. PianoAgeCalculator.com, run by Online Piano Atlas Ltd, lists a $9 one-time lookup delivered by email within 48 hours, or $12 a year. You're being charged to have somebody read you a row from a table, and that table disagrees with the next table over by three years.

Free ones exist. The Bluebook of Pianos publishes serial ranges for hundreds of brands with no paywall. Yamaha and Kawai publish their own. Piano.wiki is free. Pay a technician for judgment, which is worth real money, and don't pay anyone for a number.

So what do you do with 1926?

If the year came back inside the last thirty years, your piano has a maintenance history rather than a provenance question, and how often to tune it is the more useful page for you.

If it came back between 1900 and 1940 and it's an upright, measureMeasureA rhythmic grouping of beats, defined by a fixed number of beats indicated by the time signature. Also called a bar.The Savvy Take: The bar line is not a wall; it’s a window. Music flows through measures, not inside them. If you accent the downbeat of every single measure, you will sound like a metronome. Phrasing usually spans multiple measures.View in glossary → the height before you spend a dollar, then look up what removal costs in your city. If you already know it's leaving, there are ways to give it away and a donation process that will ask you for that serial number anyway.

If it's a grand from a name that meant something, get a technician in front of it before you decide anything at all. That's the case where the year you just found swingsSwingA rhythmic feel in which paired eighth notes are played unevenly — long-short, leaning toward a triplet subdivision — rather than straight.The Savvy Take: Don't do the math; do the listening. Swing is a feel with a dial, not a formula — lock your comping into a great ride-cymbal pattern (or a Basie record) and your hands will find the ratio your ears already know.View in glossary → tens of thousands of dollars in either direction, and where Cooper's $40,000 to $75,000 restored figure stops being trivia.

And if the number you found turnsTurnAn ornament consisting of four notes: the note above, the main note, the note below, and the main note again.The Savvy Take: A Turn is like drawing a circle around a note. It decorates the pitch. Don’t rush it so much that it sounds like a glitch; it should be a graceful curl.View in glossary → out to be raised and cast rather than painted on, you already know what it is. Go look for the painted one.