When PSA said in May that it would be investing $200 million, collectors all over the world knew that something big was about to happen. What no one quite saw coming was the speed with which it happened: a rush of submissions so big that it broke the line.
Just a few weeks after the May 14 announcement, PSA’s backlog had grown to about 10 million cards. Just seeing that number would have made people wonder. But on June 9, the company quietly changed that number to almost 14 million. The jump wasn’t sneaky. It was clear that the initial investment announcement wasn’t so much a business update as it was a pistol shot.
In response, PSA did something it doesn’t do very often: it stopped. The company stopped all new submissions for its Value Bulk, Value Plus, and Value Max services on June 2nd. These are the services that collectors on a budget depend on the most. Everything made sense on paper. Before letting more cards in, make sure the ones that are already there are safe. But for collectors who had been waiting for weeks or months past when they thought the work would be done, the break didn’t feel like a solution. Instead, it felt like proof that something had gone wrong.
It’s easy to see how angry the customers are right now. People who replied to PSA’s June 30th post on X, in which the company confirmed that the backlog had been cut down to about 12 million units, were either resigned or very angry. PSA is responding to comments, which is good to see, but the responses seem like they were written in a template, which probably doesn’t help. Being helpful is not the same as making someone feel like they were heard.
PSA created a Backlog Tracker, a bar chart that shows progress toward the 5 million card mark, which is when value tiers are expected to reopen. This was done to keep people from getting too excited. The move to be more open is a good one, but it also makes the problem’s size impossible to ignore every time someone looks at it.
Based on how quickly cards are graded, PSA probably handles about two million cards every month when everything is running smoothly. That number could go up to about 2.4 million if teams work extra hours and on weekends. Based on a backlog of 12 million and the assumption that submissions have slowed down a lot, October seems like the most likely date for the reopening, but nothing is certain.
What’s really interesting about this moment is what’s going on around PSA as it works through the pile. In 2026, the market for grading is not the same as it was even two years before. Collectors Universe, the company that owns PSA, bought SGC in 2023 and Beckett in 2025, bringing together a big part of the market under one roof. The second-largest independent player is still CGC. TAG grades more than 50,000 cards a month, and that number is still growing. Even their cheaper levels are full right now. Collectors who can’t or won’t wait are interested in C3 Grading because it is newer and less expensive.
That being said, the PSA pause might just be what it seems to be: a company dealing with an unexpected volume problem after a big public investment. It’s also possible that a company that is combining market share from different grading brands wants to gradually move collectors toward higher levels. Those two things can happen at the same time, and it’s important to consider both of them.
Collectors who are most interested right now are those who are waiting for the June GemRate report to see if the number of submissions changed significantly in favor of PSA’s competitors during the break. If they did, the question would no longer be about how to handle backlogs, but about whether habits change when people have to look elsewhere. That’s the kind of change that doesn’t always go back, even when the first choice comes back up.
