PSA's Backlog Is Finally Falling. Value Tiers Are Still Five to Six Months Away.
PSA's backlog tracker showed about 11.85 million units on August 11, down from a late July peak near 12.4 million. The company wants it near 5 million before reopening the Value tiers it paused on June 2, and its own projection for that is five to six months.
PSA's backlog has finally started going the right direction, and the number is still enormous.
The company's own backlog tracker put it at roughly 11.85 million units on August 11, down from a peak near 12.4 million in late July. PSA has said it wants that figure closer to 5 million before it reopens the Value tiers it paused on June 2. At current run rates, PSA's own projection for that journey is five to six months.
What You Can Actually Order Today
- Value tiers (the four cheapest): still paused, no reopening date announced
- Regular at $79.99 per card: the lowest directly orderable tier, with estimated turnaround in the 40 to 50 business day range
- Everything above Regular: unaffected and moving normally
If you have been waiting for Value to come back so you can send in a shoebox of $40 cards, the math says you are waiting into winter. That is the practical takeaway.
How A $200 Million Investment Made The Line Longer
This is the part worth understanding, because it is genuinely counterintuitive. PSA committed to a $200 million investment to expand capacity, including a new European facility in Frankfurt. The announcement worked - collectors heard "faster service coming" and submitted more, immediately. Submissions surged past even PSA's record throughput, and the expansion meant to relieve the backlog helped accelerate it.
The volume numbers are not small. The industry graded a record 3.5 million cards in June, with PSA alone accounting for about 2.5 million of that while its cheapest tiers were closed. A single recent day came in at over 107,000 cards graded across the major graders. Year over year, 2025 to 2026 grading volume is up around 39 percent.
PSA graded 2 million cards in 2020. It graded more than 19 million last year. No operations team on earth scales cleanly through that.
What To Do With Cards You Wanted To Grade Cheap
- Raise your grading floor. At $79.99 plus shipping and insurance, the card needs to be worth roughly $250 or more graded for the submission to make sense. Below that, you are buying a slab, not making a return.
- Look sideways, not just at PSA. CGC, SGC, TAG, and BGS all have different queue conditions and different price-to-turnaround tradeoffs right now. The right grader depends on what you are grading and why.
- Sell raw where the premium is thin. For modern cards with heavy graded supply, the PSA 10 premium often does not cover the wait plus the risk of a 9.
- Batch and wait if you can. If your cards are not time-sensitive, holding them until Value reopens is a real strategy, as long as you are honest that "reopens" may mean 2027.
The Shop Option
Plenty of local shops are authorized dealers for one or more graders and can submit on your behalf, sometimes at group rates that beat what you can get individually. It also removes the shipping and insurance headache from your side of the table. Find a card shop near you and ask what grading submissions they run and how often.