PSA announces it's pausing new card submissions after seeing 20 percent spike with backlog already near 10M

The precipitous rise in card collecting in recent years has led to a lot more work for the PSA, the premier card-grading service. While the PSA has undoubtedly appreciated the rise in business, it’s reached a point where the company is getting overwhelmed with new requests.

That hit a tipping point Thursday, as the PSA announced it would be pausing new card submissions following a recent influx that drove the company’s backlog to nearly 10 million cards.

The PSA announced the news in a statement Thursday, saying it’s pausing multiple tiers of service on June 2 in an attempt to work through its current backlog.

In the statement, the company said its grading output is at an all-time high, but even that’s not enough to keep up with new submissions.

While our daily grading output is at an all-time high, with capacity up 5x since 2021, continuing to accept submissions at this breakneck pace would put more pressure on our operations and compromise the turnaround times of existing orders.

To clear this bottleneck and protect the integrity of the PSA standard, we are taking a direct, proactive step. Effective Tuesday, June 2, 2026, we are temporarily pausing new submissions for the four Value service tiers: Value Bulk, Value, Value Plus, and Value Max.

Card submissions won’t be paused for everyone, though. Per the statement, those who pay for higher-tier services will still be allowed to send in cards after June 2. Those tiers include “Regular, Express, Super Express, and Walk-Through and above,” per the company’s statement. Of that list, “regular” is the cheapest submission option. It costs $79.99 to use that service.

Collectors who choose to use one of the PSA’s open services can expect longer turnaround times. The “regular” tier usually promises a 30-40 business day turnaround. That will jump up to 40-50 days or 50-60 days depending on the type of authentication involved.

The PSA said it would reopen all tiers of service once its backlog was reduced to roughly 5 million. While the PSA did not put an exact date on it, the company estimated it would take roughly four months to accomplish that goal.

TAG also suspends new submissions for certain tiers of service

The PSA was not the only card-grading service to suspend certain tiers of service Wednesday. TAG temporarily closed another tier of service Thursday, citing “incredible demand.”

TAG did not announce when its tiers would reopen.