What to work out before you send Pokémon cards to be graded

Greedy TCG — Mon, 09 Nov 2026 07:54:43 +0000

If you sell trading cards, the grading fee is only one line in the math. A card can come back with a great grade and still lose money for the seller. Here is how resellers work it out before they send anything in.

The costs people forget

The grading fee gets all the attention, but a submission has more parts:

The grading fee itself. It depends on the service level, and the fast tiers cost more. The grader's current fee table is the only number to trust, because it changes.
Shipping both ways, with insurance. Cards travel to the grader and back, and insured shipping scales with declared value.
Supplies. Sleeves, top loaders and a shipping box add up across a batch.
Selling fees. Marketplace and payment fees come out of the sale price, so a $100 sale is never $100 in your pocket.
Time. Turnaround can be weeks or months. Money tied up in cards waiting at the grader is money you cannot reinvest.

If you want the full picture of what the major graders charge and how the tiers differ, this breakdown of PSA grading cost walks through it.

The gap that matters

Don't compare a graded card to a raw card in general. Compare three numbers for the exact card:

The raw (ungraded) price today.
The PSA 9 sale price.
The PSA 10 sale price.

Then subtract your all-in cost per card from each graded price. For many cards the gap between raw and PSA 9 is smaller than the total cost of grading, so only a PSA 10 pays. If so, the real question is how often your cards land a 10, and that is a condition question, not a price question.

A simple way to run a batch

Pull every candidate card and look up the raw, PSA 9 and PSA 10 prices.
Inspect corners, edges, surface and centering under bright light. Be strict: a card that looks like a 9 to you may come back an 8.
Work out the result at PSA 8, 9 and 10 after all costs. Keep only the cards that still make sense at 9.
Send the keepers in one batch, so shipping and insurance are shared across cards.

Timing

Prices move. A card that is worth grading during a hype window may not be worth it by the time it returns, since set releases, tournament results and reprints all shift demand. Looking at recent sales, not asking prices, keeps the numbers honest.

Keep notes

Record what you paid, what grade came back and what the card sold for. After a few batches you will know your own hit rate for 10s, and that number is more useful than any average you read online.