For many serious Pokémon fans, the moment they realized the binder on their shelf wasn’t just a nostalgia project is the moment they describe in the same way. It was a valuable asset. Some people had it happen when a single card sold at auction for more than their whole yearly salary. It was quieter than that for some people. The population report showed that there were only a few copies at that grade, and all of a sudden, a piece of cardboard felt a lot more fragile.
Now that way of thinking is showing up in insurance data, and the numbers are harder to ignore than most people thought they would be. During the past year, claims about collectibles, especially Pokémon cards, have gone up sharply. One of the biggest insurance companies in the UK, Aviva, said that between 2022 and 2025, the average number of collection claims went up by 238%. It’s not a rounding mistake. There is a structural change in how collectors think about risk, and the insurance business is picking up on it right away.
Simple math is part of the reason for this. It’s hard to believe that the market for Pokémon cards has grown at such a fast rate—values are said to have gone up more than 3,800% since 2004, which is a lot faster than most of the traditional investments most people were taught to trust. Leave.Compare found that people in the UK had put more than £2 million worth of Pokémon memorabilia on their active insurance policies. A hobby that used to be associated with trading with other kids on the playground is now on the same level as watches and old wine.
It’s possible that the pandemic played a bigger role than most people think. There wasn’t much sealed product left, YouTube rip videos got millions of views, and a new generation of adult collectors, many of whom had extra money and a strong sense of nostalgia, entered a market that wasn’t made to handle that much demand. Prices changed quickly. As it usually does, awareness came on slowly after that.
What’s going on now is like a delayed reckoning. Collectors who bought a lot during the boom now have collections worth five or six figures. They are also becoming more and more aware that standard home contents insurance wasn’t made with them in mind. There are a lot of rules that say single-item payouts can’t be more than the market value of a PSA 10 vintage card. Others don’t cover collectibles at all or need a specific statement. These are the kinds of details that most people don’t read until something goes wrong. Everyday risks like theft, fire, flood, and shipping loss are easy to forget about until they’re too late.
A newer worry that wasn’t around in the early days of the hobby is the graded slab itself. A card in a BGS or PSA holder has both the value of the card and the certification that goes with it. Damage to the case can make a claim more difficult, lead to disagreements about condition, and take away value in ways that are hard to measure without specialized knowledge. Most standard insurers don’t always know how to say that. More and more, specialized collectible insurers do.
What I think is important to note is how common this conversation is in collecting communities. Forums and subreddits for the hobby no longer see posts about insurance as overly cautious or strange. Collectors talk openly about which policies offer agreed-value cover, whether their cards are safe when they’re not at home, like at card shows, and how to properly record a collection in case of a claim in the future. That change in tone, from casual hobby talk to managing assets, tells us something about where this market is at the moment.
It’s really not clear if the current values will last in the long run. Collectibles markets have gone down and then come back in strange ways in the past. But information from insurance companies shows that collectors aren’t waiting for sure things to happen before they act. Their math has been done and the prices have shown that the risk is real enough to cover. That number, more than any other, maybe says the most about how seriously this hobby has become.
