PSA pauses its value tiers with the grading backlog near 10 million cards

PSA stopped accepting new submissions across all four of its sub-$80 service levels — Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus, and Value Max — effective June 2 at 3:00 p.m. PT, citing an active backlog of roughly 10 million cards. The cheapest open tier is now Regular, at $79.99 per card. The company says it is targeting a backlog of 5 million within about four months and has begun publishing a monthly backlog tracker so submitters can watch the queue drain — or not.

The pause is the third act of a compressed spring. On May 14, PSA parent Collectors announced a $200 million capacity expansion — doubling its grading footprint across New Jersey, Tokyo, Florida, Texas, and Southern California, plus roughly a thousand hires and a first full-scale European facility in Frankfurt this summer. The same day, it extended turnaround estimates, raised Super Express from $299 to $349, and doubled the bulk minimum from 20 cards to 50. Submitters read the expansion as a starting gun: volume jumped about 20% (~1.6 million additional cards) in the two weeks that followed, per Sports Illustrated's reporting, and the queue PSA had hoped to manage became the queue it had to close.

Pricing had already moved once this year. PSA raised its five cheapest tiers on February 10 and folded the standalone TCG Bulk service into a members-only Value Bulk, which took the entry price for Pokémon bulk from $18.99 to $24.99 — a 32% step. PSA Grading president Ryan Hoge said at the time that demand had “outpaced our ability to scale up grading capacity.”

The whole industry is at capacity

This is not a one-grader story. TAG closed its Basic ($22), Standard ($39), and Express ($59) tiers “at capacity” on May 28 — the same day PSA announced its pause — leaving only its $149 and $299 services open, and CGC extended turnarounds on its Bulk and Economy tiers, per SI's industry roundup. The volume data explains why. GemRate counted 2.97 million cards graded industry-wide in March (+~50% y/y), a record 3.10 million in April, and 2.95 million in May (−5% m/m, +20% y/y). Trading-card games have held roughly 70% of all grading volume, and nine of PSA's ten most-graded TCG cards each month are Pokémon.

One door stayed cheap: the GameStop counter. The retailer's PSA partnership still lists $15.99 per TCG card plus $9.99 flat shipping, and on June 1 GameStop tripled its per-card declared-value cap from $500 to $1,500. A $79.99 front door and a $15.99 side door is a spread the hobby has noticed.

What a jammed queue does to the pop report

Population reports — the count of how many copies of a card each grader has slabbed at each grade, the hobby's only direct supply data — are the downstream casualty. When intake pauses, pop growth stalls with it. For scale: unlimited Base Set Charizard stood at roughly 488 PSA 10s out of ~93,000 graded copies in early-2026 pop data (a ~1% gem rate), per pop-report compilations. In September 2020 those figures were 430 PSA 10s out of 13,291. Total submissions grew roughly sevenfold in five and a half years; the PSA 10 count grew about 14% (window: 2020-09 → 2026-Q1). That asymmetry — floods of submissions, a trickle of top grades — is the cleanest record of what the grading boom has and hasn't changed.

Figures per PSA/Collectors announcements, GemRate monthly recaps as reported by Sports Illustrated, and the cited pop-report compilations. Windows noted inline; service pricing as of 2026-06-10.