1.8% Drop in Spare Parts in the Past 5 Years
Every LEGO builder knows the ritual: open the last bag, finish the build, and find a small pile of leftovers — cheese slopes, 1×1 round plates, the occasional Technic pin. Those extras are spare pieces: parts LEGO packs with a set on purpose, beyond what the instructions require.
The question we hear often is whether that parts bag has gotten fatter. We averaged spare counts by release year for sets in our BVI data. The short answer: you are getting more spare pieces than you used to — but sets got bigger, too.
What the numbers show
In the early 2000s, a typical set in our catalog shipped with about five spare pieces. By 2010 that average sat near ten. Mid-decade it climbed into the mid-teens. In 2025, the average is about 29 spare pieces per set — roughly five times the early-2000s level.
hat rise is steady enough to see by eye on the chart above (solid line). It is not a one-year blip.
| Year | Avg spare pieces | Avg spare share of set |
|---|---|---|
| 2000 | 4.9 | 3.6% |
| 2010 | 9.5 | 4.3% |
| 2015 | 14.0 | 6.1% |
| 2020 | 18.0 | 6.7% |
| 2025 | 29.0 | 5.1% |
Bigger bags, bigger sets
Absolute spares are only half the story. Average total parts in those same sets grew from roughly 260 pieces around 2000 to roughly 740 in 2025. When the whole box gets larger, a larger spare pile is partly expected.
So we also tracked spare share: spare quantity as a percentage of the set’s total parts (dashed line on the chart). That share floated around 3–5% in the 2000s, rose toward 6–7% in the mid-to-late 2010s (with a spike near 7.3% in 2018), and has settled closer to about 5% in recent years — even while absolute spare counts kept climbing.
In other words: LEGO is putting more spare pieces in the box, but those extras are not claiming a larger slice of the parts list than they did a decade ago. Much of the “fatter bag” feeling is the set growing underneath it.
How to read the chart
A few caveats keep the story honest.
Outliers exist. Mosaic-style products and other special cases can pack hundreds of “spare” tiles in many colors. Those inflate a year’s maximum far more than its average, but they remind us that not every spare row is a lonely cheese slope for emergency repairs.
2026 is unfinished. We left the current year off the chart. Early averages can swing as more sets land in the catalog.
Why this matters on Bricks by Numbers
We include spare pieces in our part counts and value math. They ship with the set, so we treat them as part of what you paid for — imperfect, but better than pretending the yellow bag does not exist. When average spares drift from five pieces to nearly thirty, that choice affects totals more than it used to, even if the spare rate is still a small single-digit percentage of the set.
Verdict
Has LEGO gotten more generous with spares? In raw pieces, yes. A modern set in our catalog typically leaves you with a noticeably larger leftover pile than a set from 2000 or even 2010.
As a share of the set, the picture is flatter. Spare percentage peaked in the late 2010s and has not marched upward with absolute counts. The spare bag got thicker; the set got thicker faster.
So when you sweep those extra 1×1 round plates into a cup after a 2025 build, you are not imagining it — there really are more of them than there used to be. Just remember that the cup sits next to a much bigger box than it did twenty-five years ago.