NoPSAMay Boycott Begins: Collectors Pause Submissions Over Fees, Delays, and the December 2025 Buyback Scandal

The biggest grading story of the spring is not a new slab launch or a turnaround time announcement. It is a hashtag. #NoPSAMay kicked off May 1, 2026, and the grassroots boycott against Professional Sports Authenticator is already moving the needle — submissions are softening, alternative grader volume is rising, and PSA 10 premiums on several key cards are visibly compressing on the live market.

What Is #NoPSAMay

The movement coalesced through April 2026 as a collective response to a stack of grievances that had been building for over a year. Collectors organized around a single, clear ask: pause PSA submissions for the entire month of May 2026. The goal is not to permanently leave PSA — it is to apply commercial pressure on the largest grader in the hobby and force a response on transparency and pricing.

The Three Core Grievances

The boycott is built around three issues that have been simmering for months:

• Turnaround times. PSA processed a record 2.2 million cards in April 2026, but service-level commitments have repeatedly slipped. Submitters are seeing posted turnarounds beat by weeks rather than days, with bulk tiers stretching past stated windows.
• Rising fees. PSA's Q1 2026 fee schedule revision pushed entry-level pricing higher, and the revamped membership structure tied access to volume thresholds that many small submitters cannot hit.
• The December 2025 buyback scandal. Allegations surfaced late last year that PSA had quietly upgraded grades on cards purchased back through internal buyback programs, then resold them at the new grade. The story has not gone away. It has become the structural concern collectors keep returning to.

The Community's Demands

What organizers want from PSA is not a price cut. It is structural transparency. The published demand list includes:

• Predictable pricing with flat-rate service tiers and no surprise upcharges based on declared value.
• Grader Notes for all service levels, not just premium tiers — so collectors can understand why a card hit a specific grade.
• Conflict-of-interest separation, preventing PSA or its parent company from owning and selling graded inventory the same firm grades.
• Real-time tracking and faster dispute resolution for lost, damaged, or downgraded items.

"This is not anti-PSA. It is anti-opacity. Collectors want to keep grading cards. They want a grader they can trust to grade the same way for everyone."

Where the Pressure Is Showing Up

Five days into the month, the early signs are real. Several of the largest sports card retailers have publicly paused PSA submissions through May 31. Alternative grader volume is up roughly 15 percent across SGC, CGC, and TAG, with SGC running visible promotional pricing through the boycott window. Card show floor data from this past weekend showed PSA-graded modern Pokemon and basketball cards trading slightly softer comps than CGC and SGC equivalents in the same grade — an unusual flip the market has not consistently seen before.

What This Means If You Submit

If you have a submission queued up for May, here is the practical lay of the land. Holding through May does not cost you anything but time, and turnaround pressure on PSA is likely to ease as the volume drops. SGC and CGC are running clean turnarounds on bulk tiers right now and are realistic substitutes for modern raw cards where the slab is interchangeable on the resale market. For vintage, PSA still carries a premium most collectors are not willing to walk away from — even boycott organizers acknowledge the vintage market is the hardest to fully migrate.

Will PSA Respond

That is the open question. PSA has not yet issued a public statement engaging the specific demands. The next move is theirs. If the company comes to the table on Grader Notes or the conflict-of-interest separation, the boycott resolves quickly. If May 2026 passes with no response, the movement has signaled that #NoPSAJune is on the table.