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Wait til next year! has been a common saying in the baseball world since it was initially popularized by the Brooklyn Dodgers eight decades ago.
And more and more, its now becoming a plan of action for many collectors who have submitted cards to PSA in recent months.
The grading card heavyweight announced on May 28 it would shut down its value grading offerings the following week amid a 10 million card backlog and would reopen the value tiers once that number fell to 5 million.
Amid a last-minute surge of value entries prior to the June 3 shutdown date, the backlog jumped to 14 million entries.
From that point, PSA estimated that it would take five to six months to reach the 5 million mark.
Promising bi-weekly updates, PSAs next update on June 30 announced the backlog at 12 million cards.
In the most recent update posted on July 14, the backlog was listed at 11 million cards, with PSA saying its output is accelerating.
Julys grading projections are on track to surpass Junes record pace, which exceeded our previous monthly high by more than 10 percent, PSA said in the July 14 update.
The facility expansions, technology integrations, and hiring pipelines we have been building for years are now systematically increasing throughput.
Most importantly, this surge in volume has not come at the expense of quality.
Internal error rates continue to decline, while grading accuracy and card safety remain at a 99.4% operational success rate.
So, the numbers are trending in the right direction, and if the rate of PSA catching up on about a million cards every two weeks holds, that means that value tiers could reopen as soon as mid October, which would be slightly ahead of PSAs earlier projection.
The emphasis is on the word could because of a couple of things happening in the card world: The lowest-priced current grading tier currently available through PSA for new submissions costs $79.99 per card.
And while that price point and higher ones have scared away many collectors in the short term, there are still a good number of collectors still sending new submissions daily, especially taking advantage of a card marketplace where PSA-graded cards of any releases from after June 3 are incredibly scarce.
Those submissions should only multiply with two huge releases on the horizon: 2026 Topps Chrome on July 22 and 2026 Bowman Chrome later this summer.
And any new submissions would guarantee a faster turnaround time than any previously submitted value submissions, which means that the value submissions would stay at the back of the line.
The two biggest sports card conventions of the year are both coming up this month: Fanatics Fest is this weekend in New York, and the National is at the end of the month in Chicago.
PSA will figure prominently into both conventions, and is already marketing various programs and promotions that are likely to draw a new round of heavy submissions, even at higher price points.
Although PSAs pause is in part to continue a planned $200 million infrastructure upgrade, there has also been discussion online about what value tiers will look like when reopened by PSA.
Prior to the pause, the lowest-priced bulk grading submission cost $24.99 per card with a minimum of 50 cards (with turnaround times of up to 160 business days), which was up from $19.99 per card with a minimum of 20 cards roughly a year before that.
Collectors continue to debate: Will PSA raise prices and turnaround times again? Will they eliminate certain value options? The backlog has created not only a virtual grading purgatory for cards submitted during the final weeks before the pause but also for cards submitted even during the early months of 2026, back when value turnaround times were still listed as being only 95 business days or less.
For more information, you can check out the bi-weekly tracke r on the PSA website.
The post PSA Backlog Still At 11 Million Cards After Announced Pause To Value Card Grading appeared first on College Baseball, MLB Draft, Prospects - Baseball America .