Yesterday around 10am PST, we got a new announcement from PSA that they will be opening a Standard service tier. The new service tier will cost $59.99 and have a 90-100 business day turnaround time.
This follows a positive backlog update from PSA on Tuesday, which you can find below. As you guys know, PSA recently shut down all Value tier services due to a backlog that peaked at 12.4 million cards.
A few things to note here:
The backlog fell by one million cards in just two weeks. This is definitely making me feel optimistic that PSA is actually on track to catch up. It probably helps as well that the TCG market has slowed down, leading to much less submission volume.
They were considering reopening a service tier by the end of the month, which ended up happening yesterday.
The turnaround time on the Standard service is 4-5 months. While the opening of a new service tier is a sign of progress, this is basically the old Bulk service at triple the price, which was most recently 90 business days for $24.99.
With that said, I’m feeling good about PSA’s progress overall. I was a bit worried about a month ago when PSA sent the email below to its customers:
This applied to the Regular service turnaround time, which was 20-25 business days in early 2026, but was extended to 40-50 business days when Value tier services were paused, and then in this email was further extended to 70-80 business days.
So where does that leave us now? We’ll see, but my thought is that because PSA is actively clearing through their backlog, and clearly submission volume is down, we could see turnaround times speed up soon.
For now, we will keep submitting cards at the Regular service level in hopes that this happens soon, but there are no guarantees given that this has been the worst PSA slowdown since COVID times.
Most Profitable To Buy & Grade Now
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1. 2023 All Aces Shohei Ohtani
This is our most bought card of 2026 by a lot. These go for around $1,000 as PSA 10s and have a Gem Rate north of 50%.
2. 2018 Topps Chrome Shohei Ohtani HMT1
This continues to be one of our most bought cards, with PSA 10 values over $1,000, raw values around $300, and a Gem Rate above 60%.
3. 2020 Bowman Chrome Pete Crow-Armstrong Refractor
Great cheap card to get some exposure to the MVP favorite. Raw cards go for around $150, while PSA 10s are over $600.
4. 2022 Bowman Chrome Sapphire Jacob Misiorowski
Like the PCA above, this is a cheap way to buy the Cy Young favorite. You can find raw cards for as low as $200, while PSA 10s go for around $800.
how do we break the chokehold they have on the grading world?