Is PSA Grading a Scam? Inside the Upcharge, the Price Hikes, and the #NoPSAMay Revolt

PSA grading has gotten expensive enough that collectors are openly asking whether they are being cheated. This is a look at the “success tax” upcharge model, the 2025 to 2026 price hikes, the June Value-tier pause, the #NoPSAMay boycott, and the small but stubborn camp that says you agreed to the terms when you mailed the card. PSA charges more for a card after it grades it, the cheap tiers are frozen, and the company that grades your card also owns the data on how many exist and runs a program to buy it back from you. When collectors call that a scam, they are reacting to something real. Whether “scam” is the right word is a different question, and worth separating out before you decide where you stand.

What Collectors Actually Mean When They Call PSA a “Scam”

Search “is PSA grading a scam” and you are not landing on a niche gripe. You are landing on a raw nerve. The people typing it are active hobbyists, flippers running break-even math on every submission, and newcomers who just opened a surprise invoice. The topic touches money, fairness, and trust at the same time, and almost everyone in the hobby has skin in the game.

The anchor for this whole conversation is a single Reddit thread: a collector posted a screenshot of a PSA invoice with the deflated title “Just got this from PSA, I mean I guess it’s good.” It drew hundreds of upvotes and a long tail of furious replies. When one photo of a grading bill pulls that kind of reaction, it tells you people are not curious. They are mad, and they are looking for either confirmation, an explanation, or a way out.

Such a scam. The only extra cost for an expensive card should be whatever the extra insurance costs when mailing it back to you. Anything above that completely ridiculous.

u/jc1257 (r/baseballcards, 321 upvotes)

That comment is the whole outrage camp in two sentences. The complaint is not that grading costs money. It is that the size of the bill seems tied to how good your card turned out to be, not to any work PSA actually did.

How Value-Based Upcharging Really Works

The thing collectors call a scam has a name: value-based pricing, or the “upcharge.” Here is the mechanism.

1. You pick a service tier tied to a declared card value and pay that tier’s fee.
2. PSA grades the card.
3. After grading, if PSA decides the card’s market value is higher than the tier you paid for, it charges you extra to move the card into the correct, more expensive tier.

The grade does not change in step three. It is purely a pricing adjustment that lands after the fact, which is exactly why it feels like a trap. Collectors call it a “success tax,” because the better and more valuable your card turns out to be, the more PSA takes. You cannot know the final price until the work is already done and your card is already in their building.

That timing is the heart of the anger. A second camp asks a sharper question than the pure venting does:

How is this not a scam? You pay for a service. And they expect to get a part of the value. How is this not a scam. What exactly are they doing?

u/Similar_Grocery8312 (r/baseballcards, 9 upvotes)

It is a fair question. The honest answer is that PSA is charging for risk and liability, not labor. Handling a five-figure card carries real insurance and custody exposure, and the upcharge is how PSA prices that exposure. Whether that justifies the size of the markup is a separate argument. But “what exactly are they doing” has an answer, and it is not nothing.

The 2025 to 2026 Price Hikes and the June Value-Tier Pause

The upcharge would sting less if the base prices had held. They did not. PSA raised prices twice and then pulled the cheap tiers off the table entirely.

Date	Cheapest Entry Tier	Price	Note
Before Sep 2025	Value Bulk	$19.99	Baseline
September 2025	Value Bulk	$21.99	Value to $27.99, Value Plus to $44.99
February 10, 2026	Value Bulk	$24.99	Value to $32.99, new Value Max at $64.99
June 2, 2026	Regular	$79.99	All four Value tiers paused

On June 2, 2026, PSA paused new submissions for all four Value tiers (Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus, Value Max), saying it needed to cut its backlog from roughly 10 million cards down to 5 million before reopening them. With those tiers frozen, the cheapest way to grade a card became the Regular tier at $79.99, more than triple the old bulk entry point. PSA framed it as a temporary, milestone-based pause tied to clearing the queue, not a permanent change, and committed to a monthly backlog tracker. The company also extended Collectors Club memberships free for the duration of the pause.

The Break-Even Math, Worked Out on a Real Card

This is the part Reddit argues about but rarely calculates. Grading only makes money when the graded price minus the all-in fee beats the raw price. Here is that math on a real, mid-tier modern card, using PSA’s actual 2026 pricing.

Take a 2024 Bowman base prospect that sells raw around $12, with a PSA 10 trading near $45 and a PSA 9 near $18. “All-in” means the grade fee plus realistic shipping both ways, because the sticker fee is never the real cost. Industry breakdowns put true all-in PSA cost at roughly $30 over the base fee once you add shipping to PSA, return shipping, and insurance.

Scenario	PSA Tier (Era)	All-In Cost	If It Grades PSA 10	If It Grades PSA 9
Old Value tier	$24.99 (Sep 2025)	~$45	$45 sale − $45 = ~$0	$18 sale − $45 = −$27
Mid Value tier	$32.99 (Feb 2026)	~$53	$45 sale − $53 = −$8	$18 sale − $53 = −$35
Regular tier	$79.99 (Jun 2026)	~$110	$45 sale − $110 = −$65	$18 sale − $110 = −$92

Read that bottom row. On the only tier you can use today, a $12 card that grades a perfect 10 still loses about $65. The card has to clear roughly $150 raw before a single Regular submission even has a path to profit, and that assumes it hits the 10. Miss to a 9, which is the more common outcome, and you are deeper underwater at every tier. This is the actual mechanism behind u/jc1257’s anger and the cheap-card complaints. The fee did not just rise. It crossed the line where most modern cards can no longer be graded profitably at all.

Gotta be a 20k card, or it better be lol for that price.

u/Amazing_Charity9600 (r/baseballcards, 50 upvotes)

That is the sticker-shock camp doing the math out loud. The running joke across the thread is collectors guessing how absurdly valuable a card would have to be to justify the bill, with most settling on a $20,000 to $25,000 estimate just to make the invoice make sense. The lesson is not “never grade.” It is that the raw-value floor for grading roughly tripled in eighteen months, from cards worth $50-plus to cards worth $150-plus, and the cards most hobbyists own sit below that line.

From Upcharge Anger to the Buyback Scandal and Monopoly Fears

The pricing rage did not stay in its lane, and that matters. It bled into PSA’s wider credibility problem.

In December 2025, a collector exposed what became known as the buyback scandal. He submitted a batch of about 30 identical modern cards (a mix of 2019 Prizm Zion Williamson rookies and Pokemon Tag Team cards), and they all came back as PSA 9s. He accepted PSA’s Direct Buyback offers at PSA 9 prices, roughly $35 each. Weeks later, following the certification tracker, he watched about 11 of those same cert numbers reappear in the system as PSA 10s. The implication writes itself: grade low, buy cheap, upgrade, resell high.

PSA officially called it an “isolated grading error” and returned the upgraded cards. But Nat Turner, head of parent company Collectors Holdings, went on X himself and acknowledged a “systematic failure,” and in the same exchange admitted PSA “authenticates counterfeit cards sometimes.” A CEO conceding a systematic failure is a much larger admission than the corporate line of an isolated error. Dealers cut ties, some card shows suspended submissions, and PSA slab resale values reportedly softened 10 to 20 percent on platforms like eBay in the weeks after.

…the entire hobby is rigged and has been for a long time even before Fanatics… And PSA grading cards PSA 9 and offering to buy them immediately and then changing the grade to 10 after they pay you the price of a 9. I just collect low end raw cards of guys most people don’t care that much about so I mostly avoid all this funny business.

u/[deleted] (r/baseballcards, 25 upvotes)

Layered on top is the monopoly angle. Collectors Holdings now owns PSA, SGC, and Beckett. By the figures cited in Congressman Pat Ryan’s December 2025 letter to the FTC, that is PSA at roughly 72 percent of grading volume, SGC around 8 percent, and Beckett around 3 percent, for a combined share above 80 percent, leaving CGC as the only independent competitor of scale. Ryan asked the FTC to open an antitrust investigation, pointing to vertical integration: the same company grades the card, owns the pricing data (through CardLadder), and buys and sells graded cards itself. That is the structural conflict the buyback story made concrete.

“I Can See a Class Action,” and Why That One Aged Well

One commenter, stuck on the feeling that once your card is inside PSA you have no good options, made a prediction:

What alternative do you have? If you decline; they’ll charge you the regular grading fee and send it back without a holder. I can see a class action in a few years.

u/Agitated-Remote1922 (r/baseballcards, 31 upvotes)

When that comment was written, “I can see a class action” looked like venting. It is not anymore. In April 2026, Michael Rasmussen filed a proposed antitrust class action, Rasmussen v. Collectors Holdings, in the Central District of California, naming Collectors, PSA, SGC, and Beckett, and seeking damages plus forced divestiture of SGC and Beckett. Collectors moved to dismiss (and separately to compel arbitration) in June 2026. The case is unresolved and Collectors has denied wrongdoing, so nobody should treat the allegations as proven. But the collector who predicted litigation called it. The FTC, for its part, has not publicly confirmed whether it opened an investigation off Ryan’s request.

The Real Alternatives, With Current Prices

If PSA no longer pencils out, here is the field as of mid-2026. Prices are base grading fees per card before shipping, and they move often, so confirm before you submit.

Grader	Cheapest Tier	Faster Tier	Membership?	Notes
PSA	Regular $79.99	Express $175	Yes (Collectors Club)	Highest resale premium; Value tiers paused until backlog clears
CGC	Economy ~$15	Standard ~$55	No	Raised prices Jan 6, 2026; strict 10 scale; strong in Pokemon
SGC	Standard ~$18-25	Silver/Gold $50-75	No	Flat rate, no upcharge; best for vintage; now owned by Collectors
TAG	Value ~$20	Priority ~$149	No	AI-based, clear slab; lower tiers periodically closed in 2026 backlog

Inside the #NoPSAMay Boycott and What Collectors Are Demanding

All of this fed #NoPSAMay in 2026, a coordinated push asking collectors to stop submitting to PSA for a month. Unlike a generic “PSA bad” pile-on, the demands were specific:

• End value-based upcharging in favor of flat-rate tiers.
• Add grader transparency so collectors can see how grades are reached.
• Ban the conflict of interest of a grader owning and selling the inventory it grades.

Whether the boycott “worked” is hard to measure cleanly. But PSA 10 premiums reportedly softened as buyers tested CGC, SGC, and TAG, and the broader migration toward alternatives is real and documented, not Reddit rumor. A month-long submission strike does not bankrupt a company processing 19 million cards a year. What it does is signal that the pricing model has lost the room.

“You Agreed to the Terms,” the Minority View That Deserves a Hearing

The smallest camp is also the most interesting, because it is not actually a defense of PSA. It is a warning to the submitter:

Hate to be the one to say it, but they do state that stuff like this will happen when you agree to send it in to get graded… I absolutely do not agree with what they are doing at all and I think it’s a billion dollar company scamming the little guys, but you should’ve also seen this coming.

u/Difficult-Reason3781 (r/baseballcards, 7 upvotes)

Notice that even this person calls PSA a scam. The only thing they add is that the upcharge is disclosed in PSA’s terms, so the shock is on you. And that is the cleanest distinction in the entire debate. A scam, in the strict sense, means deception. The upcharge is not hidden, it is written into the terms you accept. That does not make it fair, and it does not make a near-monopoly’s pricing power any less aggressive. But it does mean the accurate label is “disclosed, value-extracting pricing from a dominant company,” not “fraud.” The feeling is justified. The specific word is doing more work than the facts support.

Expected Outcome: Is It Worth Grading in 2026?

Smarter Grading Strategy

• Set a raw-value floor. With $79.99 as the practical minimum, the worked math above shows most modern cards under roughly $150 raw cannot clear breakeven.
• Pre-screen before you pay. Centering, corners, edges, and surface decide the grade. Be honest about whether a card is a true 10 candidate or a likely 9, because at current prices a 9 usually loses money.
• Compare resale spreads, not sticker fees. The cheapest grader is not automatically the best return once you account for the resale premium gap on your specific card.
• Separate the scandals from the pricing. The buyback and monopoly stories are reasons to watch PSA closely. They are not, by themselves, a reason to overpay to grade a $40 card.

Bottom Line: Is PSA Grading a Scam?

PSA grading is not a scam in the strict, legal sense, because the upcharge is disclosed and you consent to it. But “not technically a scam” is a low bar, and it is the only bar PSA clears comfortably right now. The pricing is aggressive, the cheap tiers are gone for now, the buyback episode damaged trust, and one company controls most of the market while grading, pricing, and trading the same cards. The collectors flooding that Reddit thread are not wrong to be angry. They are just angry at something more accurately described as unchecked market power than as fraud. Grade the cards that clear the math, hold the rest raw, and watch how the lawsuit and the FTC question land before you assume the old rules still apply.

Data Sources & Methodology