Grading Got Expensive. Good.

Every company gave the same reason: demand. PSA said accepting submissions “at this breakneck pace would put more pressure on our operations.” Its backlog peaked at 12.4 million cards on July 28 and was down to 7.2 million by October 20. SGC pointed to “rapidly increasing demand and continued expansion of estimated turnaround times.”

The major graders combined handled about 17 million cards in 2023, over 20 million in 2024 and roughly 26.7 million in 2025. PSA alone graded 19.26 million last year. In August and September of this year, grading volume ran 47% and 62% ahead of the same months in 2025.

More slabs wouldn’t matter if 10s were rare. They aren’t. Across all graders, cards printed in the 2020s came back a 10 nearly 59% of the time in the first half of 2025. When most submissions get the top grade, the top grade stops meaning much.

Two real cards show the difference:

Swipe for more →

Do the Wembanyama math. Pay $26 for a raw copy and about $70 to grade and ship it, and you’re in for about $96. With a 61% chance of a 10 at $115 and a 39% chance of a 9 at $28, the average result is worth about $81 before eBay takes its cut. One of the most popular rookies in the hobby now loses money on average when you grade it. At the old $20-something tiers that math came out ahead, which is how more than 21,000 of them ended up in PSA 10 slabs.

The headline volume numbers hide a split. In 2025, trading cards and non-sport cards, mostly Pokémon, were up 95% across the major graders. Sports cards went the other way and fell 12%. At PSA, sports grading was up just 2%.

So the boom isn’t sports collectors sending every Bowman prospect and mid-tier parallel they pull. It’s mostly Pokémon. Sports collectors were already pulling back before this year’s hikes, and the hikes make it easier to stick to.

Nobody has split 2026’s monthly totals by category yet, so I can’t tell you how much of this year’s surge is sports. The direction in 2025 is clear, though, and it’s the right one.

PSA owns the resale market. It took about 82% of the dollars spent on graded cards on eBay from January through November 2025, and it graded more than 92% of the 10,000 best-selling cards. PSA’s own marketing says its slabs outsell the others “9 times out of 10,” based on Card Ladder data, but it doesn’t publish the sample size or the price gap.

My take: the premium is real, and it has very little to do with grading quality.

1. Grading is inconsistent. Plenty of collectors have cracked a 9 out of its slab, sent it back in and gotten a 10. If the same card can come back a grade apart, part of the grade is luck.
2. The others grade just as well. SGC, CGC and Beckett all have experienced graders and published standards. The market just doesn’t pay for them.
3. It feeds itself. Buyers pay more for PSA because it’s easier to resell. Sellers send to PSA because buyers pay more. That loop holds whether or not PSA is the best grader in the room.

PSA’s parent company, Collectors, bought SGC in February 2024. In December 2025, it agreed to buy Beckett. Together, those brands handled about 79% of all grading in 2025. CGC is now the only independent among the big four.

Collectors said the Beckett deal wouldn’t change pricing. Then SGC’s entry price jumped to $50. A former FTC economist told Sports Collectors Digest that SGC’s market share fell from roughly 12 to 15% to about 2 to 3% after the PSA acquisition. New York Congressman Pat Ryan has asked the FTC to investigate, saying “Collectors has effectively dismantled market competition.” Three lawsuits against Collectors were filed this year. Those claims are unproven, and Collectors calls them without merit.

I want grading to cost more because fewer cards deserve a slab. I don’t want it to cost more because there’s nowhere else to go. Higher prices with real competition are a filter. Higher prices from a near monopoly are just a toll, and right now it’s hard to tell which one we’re paying.

Swipe for more →

My rule of thumb hasn’t changed: only grade a card when the graded version sells for at least three times your total cost, counting the fee and shipping both ways. At today’s prices that rules out almost anything worth less than $50 raw.

If you’re not going to sell it, you probably don’t need to grade it. A penny sleeve and a toploader protect a card just fine. Spend on the cards you’d actually keep, and save the slabs for the ones that earn them.