The Most Expensive Trading Cards Ever Sold

The most anyone has paid for a trading card is $16,492,000, for a Pikachu Illustrator graded PSA 10 at Goldin in February 2026. The most paid for a sports card is $12,932,000, for a Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant dual autograph at Heritage in August 2025. Below are the twenty largest card sales we can trace to a named source as of October 8, 2026, across sports and Pokémon, each marked as a public auction or a private sale, since only one of those has a result anyone could watch happen.

The twenty biggest card sales on record

Prices are as each source reports them. Where the source says so, an auction price here has the buyer's premium already in it: 24% on the PSA 10 Illustrator (a $13.3 million hammer, per Goldin's lot record), 25% on the PSA 9 Illustrator (a $4 million hammer), 22% on the PSA 1 Wagner (a $4.2 million hammer, per Goldin's lot record), 20% on the Heritage Mantle and the Alt Kobe and LeBron, and an unstated rate on the Jordan and Kobe and on the Flagg. Our sources for the two Robert Edward Auctions results (the SGC 3 Wagner and the Baltimore News Ruth) and the Heritage Piedmont Wagner don't say either way. Private prices have no premium to add; they are simply the amount the parties reported.

Why the table says how each card sold

Ten of the twenty are public auctions: the bidding was open, and the auction house published the result. Nine are private sales, where the number is whatever the buyer, seller or broker chose to announce. The Curry was reported as a purchase by Alt, an investment platform, without saying whether it was bought privately or at auction.

Private figures vary in how well they are supported. The $10 million Jordan and LeBron card is about as strong as a private price gets: Card Ladder said it confirmed the sale by reviewing the wire transfer. The Ohtani at $11 million sits at the other end. The buyer told ESPN what he paid, for a redemption card that had not been graded. ESPN itself ranks that $11 million third among sports cards, behind the Jordan and Kobe and the Mantle, which is how the table treats it too.

So when a headline says a card "sold for" a figure, two questions are worth asking: was it an auction, and does the price include the premium? The answers can move a card several places up or down a list like this one.

The same card, sold twice

Records are sale prices, not valuations, and two cards on the list show how far apart the sales of a single card can be.

The Pikachu Illustrator went up. Logan Paul bought the PSA 10 privately for $5,275,000 in 2021 and sold it at auction for $16,492,000 in February 2026 (Guinness World Records). Guinness calls it the only known copy graded PSA 10.

The Baltimore News Ruth went down. The same SGC 3 copy that brought $7.2 million at Robert Edward Auctions in December 2023 sold for a little more than $4 million at Heritage in October 2025, a loss of roughly $3.2 million (cllct, December 2025).

A record tells you what one buyer paid on one day. It does not set a floor under the next sale of that card or any other copy of it.

What the top twenty have in common

One-of-ones dominate the modern cards. Nine of the twenty are serial-numbered 1/1s, and every one of them is from 2006 or later. Six of the nine carry a Logoman patch.

Grade matters less than you'd think at this level. An SGC 2 Wagner sold for about $2 million more than a PSA 9 Mantle, a PSA 1 Wagner came within $76,000 of that Mantle, and the record sports card is a PSA 6. When only a handful of copies exist, a buyer is competing for the card itself, and the grade moves the price less than it does for a card with thousands of graded copies.

The list is recent. Twelve of the twenty sales happened in 2025 or 2026, five in 2021, two in 2022 and one in 2023. Nothing from before 2021 makes it.

Honus Wagner appears four times. Four different T206 Wagners are on the list, from an SGC 3 down to a PSA 1 and an Authentic, the grade given to a card that is genuine but has no number grade.

The record in each category

Basketball: the Jordan and Kobe dual Logoman at $12,932,000 is the auction record for any sports card; it passed the Mantle's $12.6 million (Antiques and The Arts Weekly). Our most valuable NBA cards guide covers the cards below it.

Baseball: the 1952 Topps Mantle in SGC 9.5 at $12.6 million, a price that included a 20% premium, is still the most paid for a baseball card at public auction; the $11 million Ohtani is the highest reported private price. More in most valuable MLB cards.

Football: nothing has reached the table. The highest reported football price is $4.3 million, paid privately in July 2021 for a 2017 National Treasures Platinum Patrick Mahomes rookie patch autograph 1/1, graded BGS 8.5 (ESPN, July 28, 2021). The auction high is a Tom Brady 2000 Playoff Contenders Championship Ticket autograph, at $3.107 million at Lelands in June 2021 (ESPN), graded BGS 9 (Sports Collectors Digest). See most valuable NFL cards.

Hockey: a 1979-80 O-Pee-Chee Wayne Gretzky rookie graded PSA 10 sold for $3.75 million in May 2021, in a private sale brokered through Heritage (ESPN). ESPN reported only two O-Pee-Chee copies graded PSA 10 at the time.

Pokémon: the Illustrator holds the record for any trading card, sports included, and appears three times in the table. A PSA 9 copy brought $5 million at Heritage in September 2026 (Yahoo, September 21, 2026). The most paid for any other Pokémon card is $3,720,000, for a PSA 10 Art Academy Mudkip by Daisuke Ochiai at Fanatics Collect the same month. Our most valuable Pokémon cards guide lists them.

Magic: The Gathering: the top Magic sales are well below this list's $4.7 million cut-off; our most valuable MTG cards guide covers the top of that market.

How we built the list

A sale is in only if we could open a page that reports its price, and the date, grade and type of sale come from the same pages. That leaves out figures that circulate without a traceable source, and a few reported sales we found only in search snippets. Where two reports disagree, we use the one closest to the sale. If a card sells again or a record falls, the table will change; the date at the top says when it was last checked.

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