Last updated September 2026. All prices, fees and population counts were checked on September 29, 2026.
Is PSA grading worth it? For a cheap card, almost never. For a card worth roughly $70 to $800 raw that gets a PSA 10 at least one time in six, often. I ran 22 popular sports and Pokémon cards through the same math as our grading calculator, using PSA’s current $59.99 Standard fee, PSA’s own population report for the grade odds, and recent sale prices. Nine came out worth grading, three were borderline and ten lost money.
There’s a big catch, which I’ll get to below: those odds are the best case. Here are the results first.
The results
| Card | Raw price | PSA 10 rate | Expected profit | Chance you lose money | Verdict | Calculator |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 Panini Prizm Patrick Mahomes II #269 (base) | $763.94 | 15.5% | +$969 | 33% | Worth it | Open |
| 1996-97 Topps Kobe Bryant #138 | $105.25 | 10.4% | +$279 | 45% | Worth it | Open |
| 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout #US175 | $275.00 | 42.8% | +$180 | 23% | Worth it | Open |
| 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. #1 | $96.89 | 3.2% | +$173 | 71% | Worth it | Open |
| 2018 Topps Update Shohei Ohtani #US1 | $115.24 | 55.3% | +$152 | 45% | Worth it | Open |
| Pokémon 151 Charizard ex 199/165 (SIR) | $353.06 | 27.3% | +$121 | 73% | Worth it | Open |
| 2023-24 Panini Prizm Victor Wembanyama #136 (base) | $70.00 | 57.6% | +$85 | 42% | Worth it | Open |
| Celebrations Classic Collection Charizard 4/102 | $155.02 | 59.0% | +$84 | 41% | Worth it | Open |
| Surging Sparks Pikachu ex 238/191 (SIR) | $285.29 | 34.8% | +$65 | 65% | Worth it | Open |
| Evolving Skies Umbreon VMAX 215/203 | $2,283.90 | 69.2% | +$274 | 31% | Borderline | Open |
| Pikachu with Grey Felt Hat SVP 085 (Van Gogh promo) | $1,031.27 | 42.5% | +$155 | 58% | Borderline | Open |
| Crown Zenith Giratina VSTAR GG69 | $296.80 | 54.0% | +$8 | 46% | Borderline | Open |
| Base Set (Unlimited) Blastoise 2/102 | $222.34 | 0.7% | −$5 | 70% | Not worth it | Open |
| 2018-19 Panini Prizm Luka Doncic #280 (base) | $51.45 | 52.4% | −$6 | 48% | Not worth it | Open |
| Pokémon 151 Bulbasaur 166/165 (IR) | $71.31 | 27.7% | −$21 | 72% | Not worth it | Open |
| 2024 Panini Prizm WNBA Caitlin Clark #22 (base) | $22.50 | 19.0% | −$24 | 81% | Not worth it | Open |
| 2024 Topps Chrome Update Paul Skenes #USC88 | $6.98 | 45.8% | −$28 | 54% | Not worth it | Open |
| 1993 Upper Deck Derek Jeter #449 | $3.82 | 5.2% | −$34 | 95% | Not worth it | Open |
| Pokémon 151 Charizard ex 006/165 (double rare) | $8.12 | 29.7% | −$36 | 70% | Not worth it | Open |
| 2020 Panini Prizm Justin Herbert #325 (base) | $6.85 | 37.4% | −$52 | 100% | Not worth it | Open |
| 2019-20 Panini Prizm Zion Williamson #248 (base) | $3.68 | 54.4% | −$64 | 100% | Not worth it | Open |
| Base Set (Unlimited) Charizard 4/102 | $944.53 | 0.5% | −$207 | 75% | Not worth it | Open |
“Expected profit” is the average you’d make per card if you graded a lot of copies and sold them all, after every fee. “Chance you lose money” is how often a single card comes back at a grade that sells for less than you paid in total. A card can be worth grading on average and still lose you money most of the time.
What the winners have in common
The cards that paid off share three things. They cost roughly $70 to $800 raw, their PSA 10 sells for at least three times the raw price, and most come back a PSA 10 at least 15% of the time. (The two exceptions, the Griffey and Kobe rookies, are gambles, covered below.) The 2011 Topps Update Mike Trout is the cleanest example: it’s a $275 card that gets a 10 on 43% of submissions, and even a PSA 9 roughly covers what you spent. It’s the only card in the list where you lose money less than a quarter of the time.
Why cheap modern cards lose
Grading a card costs about $75 before you’ve sold anything ($59.99 to PSA and around $15 for shipping both ways), and eBay takes 13.25% when you sell. A cheap card can’t carry that. The 2019 Prizm Zion Williamson base rookie is the extreme case: even if every copy came back a PSA 10, you’d lose money, because a PSA 10 sells for about $23. The 2020 Prizm Justin Herbert rookie is the same story.
A rough rule: suppose only a PSA 10 would sell for more than the raw card, and you get a 10 about 40% of the time. Then the PSA 10 has to sell for about 25 times the price of a $10 card to break even, 7 times a $50 card, or 4 times a $250 card. That’s why grading a $5 rookie almost never works, however clean it looks.
The near misses
The 2018 Prizm Luka Doncic base rookie gets a PSA 10 more than half the time, which sounds like a sure thing. It still loses about $6 per card on average, because a PSA 10 only sells for about four times the raw price. It would need a 58% PSA 10 rate just to break even. The Base Set Unlimited Blastoise comes out almost exactly even for the opposite reason: a PSA 10 is worth thousands, but fewer than 1% of submissions get one.
Worth it on average, but a gamble
Some cards come out ahead only because the rare PSA 10 is worth so much. The 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey Jr. is the clearest case, and the 1996-97 Topps Kobe Bryant works the same way. A PSA 10 sells for about $5,700, but only 3% of submitted copies get one, and 71% of the time you’d get back a grade worth less than you spent. On average it pays. For one card, it’s a lottery ticket. The 151 Charizard ex special illustration rare is similar: worth grading on average, but you lose money on nearly three out of four copies.
Expensive modern Pokémon: it’s a 10 or nothing
For the high-end modern Pokémon cards, like the Evolving Skies Umbreon VMAX alt art and the Grey Felt Hat Pikachu, a PSA 9 sells for about the same as the raw card or less. Everything depends on getting a 10. They came out borderline, and they’re expensive enough that one bad grade costs you hundreds of dollars.
Vintage: the PSA 10 rate kills it
The Base Set Unlimited Charizard gets a PSA 10 on half of one percent of submissions. With a near mint raw copy selling for around $945 on TCGplayer, a typical grade doesn’t cover the cost, and the card loses over $200 on average. The average raw sale, played copies included, is much lower, but a played copy won’t get the grades behind these odds. If you own one, grading it makes sense for protection or to prove it’s real, not as a way to make money. Our guide to 1st Edition vs Shadowless cards covers how much more the earlier prints are worth.
The catch: these odds are the best case
PSA’s population report only counts cards people chose to send in, and people send in their best copies. Some are graded straight out of fresh packs, and some are resubmitted until they get the grade the owner wanted. A random raw card from your binder is less likely to get a 10 than the report suggests.
To see how much that matters, I reran every card with each grade knocked down one step: every PSA 10 became a 9, every 9 an 8, and so on. On those odds, all 22 cards lose money, including the Mahomes rookie, the best result on the list. So treat the verdicts above as the ceiling. Grading pays when you have a card that’s clearly better than average, with sharp corners, clean edges and good centering. How to select cards for grading explains how to check.
How I worked it out
- Cost is the raw price (what you could sell the card for instead), plus PSA’s grading fee, plus $15 for shipping both ways.
- The grading fee starts at $59.99 (PSA Standard, for cards worth up to $1,000). If the card grades high enough to be worth more than that, PSA moves it up to the right service level and charges the difference, so the fee I used is the average over all the grades a card could get. For the Base Set Charizard, a PSA 10 is worth more than PSA’s top published level, so its real fee would be higher still.
- Grade odds come from PSA’s population report for each card, grouped into PSA 10, 9, 8, 7, and 6 or lower. Half grades count with the grade below.
- Sale prices are the median of recent PSA-graded sales for each grade, from PriceCharting’s record of completed eBay sales. Where there were fewer than five recent sales, I used PriceCharting’s price guide. Raw prices are TCGplayer’s market price for Pokémon and PriceCharting’s ungraded price for sports cards.
- Selling fee: 13.25%, eBay’s rate for trading cards. See where to sell Pokémon cards for other options.
- Left out: promoted listing fees, the cost of shipping to your buyer, and the fact that prices can move during PSA’s 90 to 100 business-day wait.
Sports raw prices blend every condition. A copy clean enough to get a 9 or 10 usually costs more than the average raw price, which would make the sports results slightly worse.
Run the numbers on your own card
Every card in the table opens in our grading calculator with these numbers filled in. Change the price you paid, the odds or the sale prices to match your card, or type in your card’s own counts from PSA’s population report, and it’ll tell you whether grading is likely to pay.
FAQ
Is PSA grading worth it?
Only for some cards. In this test, cards worth roughly $70 to $800 raw, with a PSA 10 worth several times the raw price and a decent PSA 10 rate, came out ahead. Every card under $25 raw lost money on average.
What PSA 10 rate does a card need to be worth grading?
It depends on how much a PSA 10 sells for compared with the raw card. A card whose PSA 10 is worth four times the raw price needs a PSA 10 rate close to 60%. The 1996-97 Topps Kobe Bryant, whose PSA 10 is worth about 28 times the raw price, came out ahead with a PSA 10 rate of about 10%.
Is it worth grading cheap rookie cards?
Usually not to sell. Grading and shipping cost about $75 per card, and many modern rookies sell for less than that even in a PSA 10. Grade them if you want them in a slab for your own collection.
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