For years, PSA has occupied a unique position in the trading card hobby. For many collectors, dealers, auction houses, and investors, a PSA slab is more than a plastic holder with a number on it. It has become a kind of currency. A PSA 10 often commands a premium over the same card in another company’s slab. Population reports are built into pricing decisions. Auction results reinforce PSA’s position. Buyers recognize the red-and-white label instantly.
PSA earned much of that reputation.
But there is a growing problem. The company has become so important to the trading card ecosystem—and demand for its services has become so enormous—that collectors increasingly find themselves dealing with higher prices, extraordinary backlogs, long turnaround times, and limited practical alternatives if maximizing resale value is the goal.
PSA may not literally have a monopoly in the legal sense. Competitors including CGC, Beckett, TAG and others certainly exist. But in terms of market influence, PSA’s position is difficult to ignore and collectors are paying the price.
The Backlog Is No Longer a Minor Inconvenience
This isn’t simply collectors complaining because their cards took an extra week to come home. PSA itself currently publishes a Backlog Tracker. As of its August 11, 2026 update, PSA reported an active backlog of approximately 11.85 million items. Just two weeks earlier, that backlog had reached 12.4 million.
Think about that number for a moment. Nearly twelve million collectibles are waiting somewhere in PSA’s pipeline.
Earlier this summer, the situation became serious enough that PSA temporarily stopped accepting its four Value service levels: Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus and Value Max. PSA said a 20% surge in submissions had added approximately 1.6 million cards and pushed its backlog toward 10 million items. The company subsequently reported an even larger backlog.
PSA deserves some credit for publicly acknowledging the problem and publishing backlog figures. The company also says it is investing $200 million in infrastructure to expand its capacity. But none of that changes the collector’s immediate problem:
You send your property away, pay a significant amount of money, and potentially wait months to get it back. That is an enormous friction point in a hobby in which values can change dramatically during that period.
The Economics Are Becoming Difficult to Justify
Grading was originally an elegant solution to a basic collectibles problem. Two people might look at the same card and disagree about whether it was Near Mint, Mint or Gem Mint. A respected independent company could authenticate the card, assign a standardized grade and encapsulate it. The service added liquidity and confidence to the marketplace. But the economics look very different when grading an inexpensive card costs a substantial percentage of the card’s eventual value.
In February 2026, PSA increased several prices. Value Bulk moved from $31.99 to $34.99 per card, Value from $39.99 to $45.99, Value Plus from $63.99 to $69.99 and Value Max from $84.99 to $89.99. And those lower-priced Value services are currently paused. PSA’s currently available Regular service is listed at $79.99 per card, with an estimated 40–50 business-day turnaround. Express is $149, Super Express $349 and Walk-Through $599. Higher-value Premium services climb into the thousands of dollars per card.
That creates a fundamental problem for ordinary collectors. Suppose you have a beautiful vintage or modern card worth $50–$100 raw. Do you really want to spend another $35, $45, $80 or more grading it? Shipping has to be considered. Insurance has to be considered. The possibility of receiving a disappointing grade has to be considered. And perhaps most importantly, opportunity cost has to be considered. Your card isn’t available to display, sell or trade while it is sitting in a grading pipeline. For dealers processing hundreds or thousands of cards, the economics become even more significant.
PSA Doesn’t Have a Literal Monopoly—but It Sometimes Feels Like One
This distinction matters. Calling PSA a legal monopoly would be inaccurate. Collectors have alternatives. But market power isn’t binary. GemRate’s July 2026 grading report estimated that PSA graded approximately 2.49 million cards during July alone. CGC graded roughly 856,000, Beckett 161,000, TAG 57,000 and SGC 44,000. Based on those figures, PSA accounted for roughly 69% of the cards graded among those companies that month. That is extraordinary market concentration.
More importantly, PSA has something that cannot simply be duplicated by purchasing more grading machines or hiring additional graders: market acceptance. Collectors have spent decades building PSA’s network effect.
- Buyers recognize PSA.
- Dealers price PSA.
- Auction houses sell PSA.
- Population reports reference PSA.
- Collectors build PSA registry sets.
- Previous sales establish PSA comparables.
And because buyers frequently pay premiums for PSA-graded cards, sellers have an economic incentive to keep submitting cards to PSA. That creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Collectors submit to PSA because PSA cards command stronger prices. PSA cards command stronger prices because collectors overwhelmingly submit to PSA. And the cycle continues.
The “PSA Tax”
The result is what could reasonably be called the PSA tax. You aren’t necessarily paying only for authentication, encapsulation and someone’s professional opinion about the condition of your card. You’re paying for access to the PSA marketplace. That’s an important distinction.
If two competent grading companies examine the same card, authenticate it, encapsulate it securely and assign the same numerical grade, why should one slab sometimes sell for substantially more? The plastic isn’t inherently more valuable. The card isn’t different. What you’re purchasing is market confidence in the label. That brand equity is enormously valuable, and PSA deserves credit for building it.
But when one company’s label becomes disproportionately important in determining a collectible’s liquidity and resale price, collectors effectively become dependent upon that company and dependence reduces competitive pressure.
Pay More or Wait Longer
The structure of grading services can also create an uncomfortable dynamic. Collectors with inexpensive cards naturally gravitate toward inexpensive grading tiers. Those are precisely the services most vulnerable to enormous submission volume. When capacity becomes constrained, collectors essentially face two choices: wait longer or pay more.
PSA’s May announcement illustrates the problem perfectly. When the company paused the four Value tiers, higher-priced services remained available. That’s understandable from an operational standpoint. But look at it from the collector’s perspective.
The affordable lane is closed. The expensive lane remains open. For someone grading a $2,000 card, paying $149 may be reasonable. For someone building a collection of $30, $50 and $100 cards, it isn’t. That risks turning professional grading from a broadly accessible collector service into something increasingly reserved for cards valuable enough to justify the transaction cost.
There’s Another Problem: Grading Is Still an Opinion
Collectors sometimes talk about a slab grade as though it were a scientific measurement. It isn’t. A card doesn’t contain an intrinsic microscopic “8” or “9” waiting for someone to discover it. Grading involves standards, measurements, experience and judgment. That means reasonable graders can disagree. Collectors have consequently developed practices such as cracking cards out and resubmitting them in hopes of receiving higher grades. The very existence of that strategy demonstrates an uncomfortable truth: grading has an unavoidable subjective component. That becomes considerably more consequential when a single company’s opinion can materially alter a card’s market value.
A difference between a PSA 9 and PSA 10 on the right card can mean hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. That is a remarkable amount of economic power concentrated in a number printed on a small label.
Competition Is Good for PSA, too…
None of this means PSA is a bad company. In fact, PSA’s backlog demonstrates something very important: Collectors desperately want its product. Companies don’t accumulate millions of customer submissions because nobody likes their service.
PSA has built tremendous trust and brand recognition. Its slabs are liquid. Its population database is valuable. Its standards are widely understood. Its enormous grading volume gives collectors abundant comparable sales.
The company is also clearly spending money trying to solve its capacity problem. PSA says its grading capacity has grown from roughly 15,000 cards per day globally in 2021 to approximately 90,000 per day, and it has announced major additional infrastructure investment. Those are meaningful improvements.
But no company benefits indefinitely from being insulated from meaningful competitive pressure. Strong competitors force everyone to improve.
- Lower prices.
- Faster turnaround.
- Better holders.
- More transparent grading.
- More detailed grader notes.
- Better customer service.
- Better imaging.
- More consistent standards.
Collectors should want PSA to succeed.
They should also want CGC, Beckett, TAG and emerging grading companies to succeed. Because the healthiest possible trading-card industry is one where collectors actually have choices.
Maybe We Need to Rethink What a Slab Is For
Perhaps the larger issue isn’t PSA at all. Maybe collectors have allowed the hobby to become too dependent on the number printed at the top of a slab. There are really several different reasons to encapsulate a card: authentication, protection, condition assessment, presentation and resale liquidity. Those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
A collector who owns a 1950s baseball card because he loves the player may care primarily about authentication and preservation. A dealer preparing a five-figure card for auction may care enormously about the grading company’s resale premium. Those two customers don’t necessarily need the same product. There should be room in this hobby for premium grading, inexpensive authentication, collector-grade encapsulation and even attractive custom slabs designed primarily for preservation and presentation.
Not every $20 card needs $40 worth of plastic wrapped around it before someone is allowed to enjoy it.
The Hobby Needs More Choices
PSA isn’t going anywhere. Nor should it. The company has played an enormous role in creating the modern graded-card marketplace and remains the dominant grading brand by a very wide margin. But dominance should never become dependency.
When collectors face million-item backlogs, rising prices and months-long turnaround estimates while simultaneously feeling that they must use one particular grading company to maximize the value of their cards, something is out of balance.
PSA’s enormous backlog is partly a PSA problem. But it is also an industry problem. We have collectively created a marketplace where three letters printed on a slab can sometimes matter almost as much as the collectible inside it. Perhaps it’s time for collectors to start asking a different question.
Instead of: “What will this card be worth in a PSA holder?” Maybe we should occasionally ask: “Why have we allowed one company’s holder to determine so much of what this card is worth?” That’s a conversation worth having.
Editor’s note: PSA is not a monopoly in the strict legal sense; multiple third-party grading companies compete in the market. The discussion above uses “monopoly” in the colloquial sense of perceived market dominance and network effects. Current PSA pricing, service availability and backlog figures referenced here are based on information available in August 2026 and can change.
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