Cards
PSA halts Value grading services amid 10 million card backlog
With the sports card market booming, grading card giant PSA has seen demand for its services skyrocket, leading to a 20 percent increase in submissions in recent weeks.
The spike flooded PSA’s grading team with another 1.6 million cards to grade, creating a backlog of nearly 10 million submissions.
The flood of new submissions has prompted PSA to pause some of its services to catch up on the backlog.
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According to PSA, it’s grading output is at an all-time high—up fives times since 2021, when it faced another backlog of nearly 11 million cards.
“Continuing to accept submissions at this breakneck pace would put more pressure on our operations and compromise the turnaround times of existing orders,” PSA said in a statement released May 28.
To help clear the backlog, PSA is pausing new submissions for its four Value service tiers beginning on June 2. The Value service tiers include: Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus, and Value Max. All active submissions will continue to be processed under the submitted turnaround times.
“We are aggressively committing our resources to focus on processing the cards currently in our care,” the PSA statement read.
PSA’s Regular, Express, Super Express and Walk-Through services will remain active.
The estimated turnaround times for Regular service will be temporarily extended from 40 to 50 days, and 50 to 60 days for dual-service authentication. PSA says keeping those services open will not slow progress since they represent a smaller fraction of its total volume.
PSA estimates it will take up to four months to reduce its backlog by five million submissions.
PSA says the move will not impact the $200 million capital investment it announced recently.
“This pause is a deliberate, structural defense of the future we are building, not a retreat from it. PSA’s operational health has never been stronger,” the PSA statement said.
“By temporarily halting the influx of our most in-demand service levels, we are giving our newly upgraded facilities, advanced machine-learning logistics tech, and new team members the necessary breathing room to operate at peak efficiency and provide collectors with the service you and your items deserve.”
