PSA Reopens Value Grading at $39.99 on October 29

PSA is bringing back its Value service level on Thursday, October 29 at 8 a.m. PT. In the U.S. the tier costs $39.99 per card, handles cards insured up to $500, and comes with a turnaround estimate of 90 to 100 business days.

For a lot of Pokémon submissions, that price point is a practical one. Most modern pulls worth grading sit under the $500 insured cap, and $39.99 is the cheapest way into a PSA slab right now.

A global tier, not just a U.S. one

Value reopens as a new global service level across all PSA geographies: the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan. Pricing outside the U.S. lands at $56.99 CAD, €39.99, and ¥5,980. Japan is the one region with a longer estimate, at 120 business days.

PSA says new Value orders will be processed after the orders already in house, and opening the tier does not change delivery estimates for anything currently submitted. If you have cards sitting at PSA today, this launch does not push them back.

Standard and Priority just got faster

The second half of the announcement is a speed bump for the paid tiers above Value. Estimated turnaround on both Standard and Priority drops by 20 days each:

• Standard: now 70 to 80 estimated business days
• Priority: now 50 to 60 estimated business days

Any order placed from October 28 at 8 a.m. PT onward gets the new estimates. Submissions already moving through the system keep their original terms, though PSA says the faster pace may still help them. Turnarounds are estimates rather than guarantees, and they can move based on submission volume. Standard itself only launched last month, so PSA is cutting its estimate shortly after introducing it.

Why Value went away in the first place

The background here is a volume crunch. According to PSA, April and May this year brought in twice and a half the submissions of those same two months back in 2025. More than half of the orders now running past their estimates arrived during a five-week window this spring, when intake climbed 165% above the same stretch a year earlier.

The company has been grading its way out of it. Output is up nearly 50% in 2026 and up 150% from PSA’s 2020 to 2025 average items graded per week. For scale, PSA graded 59 million items in the past three years, compared to 57 million in the 23 years before that.

The backlog still sits at 7.2 million items, above the 5 million target PSA set in May before fully reopening. That is why Value is coming back in phases rather than all at once, with lower-priced options like Value Bulk planned to follow.

What this means for your submissions

If you have been holding raw cards waiting for an affordable tier to come back, October 29 at 8 a.m. PT is the date to put on the calendar. Just go in with the right expectations: 90 to 100 business days is a long wait, and your order queues behind everything already at PSA.

For cards where the grade matters more than the wait, the faster Standard and Priority estimates make those tiers more usable than they were a month ago. And if you would rather skip the grading queue entirely, you can browse PSA-graded Pokémon cards that are already slabbed and ready to ship.