There is a stack of Pokémon cards waiting to be looked at somewhere, and it might be yours. Not lost or stolen. Getting ready. After about 14 million other people.
That’s what PSA, the biggest card grading company in the collectibles world, had to deal with in the middle of 2026. The company graded 2.5 million cards in June alone, which is a record by any measure. Even so, it had to close down its four most popular submission levels because the backlog kept growing too fast for the output to keep up.
Take a moment to think about what PSA does, since it’s easy to undervalue what it does. A raw card that hasn’t been graded has no value in most circles. Someone says it’s almost mint. Someone else says the edges are worn. After PSA verifies it, rates its condition on a ten-point scale, and seals it in a case that can’t be opened, everyone in the market agrees on a number that they can trust. That number can make a piece of cardboard something that an insurance company will cover, an auction house will list, and a buyer in another country will buy without you having to touch it. It’s really just infrastructure. Infrastructure that the whole market depends on is quiet and not very flashy.
This company was built on sports cards. Now, most of the volume comes from Pokémon and other trading card games. This has completely changed the vibe. Last year, the Pokémon Company made 10 billion cards. One ten billion. Even though there are so many cards on the market, people still want to have them graded by a professional. If anything, it’s going faster. Even though PSA has spent $200 million over the past few years to increase its capacity, the number of submissions went up by 20% just in May 2026. It is said that five times as many grades are given every day as there were in 2021. It’s not enough.
As a result, the company stopped taking value-tier submissions, which is the category that regular collectors used the most to send in common cards, sentimental favorites, and even the Pikachu card that a kid pulled out of a pack in 2003. No, these are not the $100,000 entries. They make the hobby seem like something anyone can do. Even if you only cut them off for a short time, it changes who the service is for. PSA said it was necessary to take a break so that its facilities and logistics systems that learn on their own could catch up. That most likely is true. This is also the kind of thing that changes how collectors see the people who keep them in the hobby.
What’s left of the prices tells its own tale. Right now, the least expensive way to get a card graded is to pay $79.99 per card. The price for fast service starts at $149.99. The premium level costs $599.99 and comes with a grade explanation, a fitted sleeve, and a turnaround time of about a week. Those numbers make sense for very rare cards worth a lot of money. If you want to grade a card that could be worth $40 after you grade it, the math doesn’t work.
PSA has made a public backlog tracker and promised that in the next four months, the line will go from about 10 million cards to 5 million. A grading company needs a real-time counter to keep track of its own overflow, which is both comforting and a little silly. At this point, collectors often have to wait almost a year for submissions to come back.
Collectors is the parent company of PSA. It also owns SGC, Beckett, PCGS, and a group of platforms for pricing and storing items. It’s clear that the goal is to control the whole pipeline, including grading, pricing, storage, and trading. It’s still not clear whether this consolidation will eventually ease the pressure or make the bottleneck worse. The Pokémon card authentication backlog isn’t a temporary problem, that much is clear. It’s a stress test for an industry that grew faster than anyone thought it would.
