How to Grade Pokemon Cards — and How to Tell If It's Worth It

Grading turns a loose card into a sealed, authenticated, numerically rated asset. It also costs money and takes months, and for most cards it destroys value rather than creating it.

This page covers the process end to end, then gives you the actual arithmetic for deciding whether a specific card clears the bar — which is the part most guides skip.

The process, start to finish

1. Pick a company. PSA, CGC or BGS. They differ in scale, price and resale premium — see PSA vs CGC vs BGS for how to choose.
2. Create an account and a submission. You declare each card and its declared value — your estimate of what it is worth. This is not a formality: declared value determines both the fee tier and the insurance coverage if the card is lost.
3. Pick a service level. Every grader sells the same grading against different turnaround promises. Faster costs more.
4. Pack the cards. Each card goes in a penny sleeve, then a semi-rigid holder (Card Saver style). Do not use rigid toploaders — most graders ask you not to, because removing cards from them risks damage. Never tape the holder shut.
5. Ship insured, with the printed submission form.
6. Wait. Turnaround runs from weeks to many months depending on service level and backlog.
7. Get results, then decide: keep, sell, or crack and resubmit.

The failure points are almost all in step 2 and step 4: under-declaring value to save on fees (which caps your insurance), and packing in a way the grader has to undo.

What it costs — and why this page will not print a price table

Grading fees change several times a year. They are tiered by declared value, tiered again by turnaround, discounted by membership level, and periodically discounted further by promotions. Any article quoting exact fees is wrong within months, and this is a page about deciding how to spend money — a stale number here is worse than no number.

So instead, here is the cost structure, which does not go stale. Your all-in cost per card is:

The number that matters is not the headline fee — it is the all-in cost divided by the number of cards you actually send. A single card sent alone can cost several times the advertised per-card rate once shipping both ways is included. This is why people batch submissions.

Check the current published rates on the grader's own site before you commit, then plug your real number into the arithmetic below.

Is it worth it? The arithmetic

Here is the part that decides it. Grading is worth it when:

Expected graded value  −  current raw value  −  all-in cost  >  0

The trap is in the first term. Most people compute it as "the PSA 10 price", and that is wrong.

Weight by the grade you will actually get

You do not get a 10. You get a probability distribution across grades. The honest version is:

Expected graded value = Σ (chance of grade i × market price at grade i)

A worked example with illustrative numbers — substitute your own:

Suppose a card sells raw for $40, and your all-in cost is $30. You think it is a strong candidate, so: 40% chance of a 10, 50% chance of a 9, 10% chance of an 8 or lower. Say the market pays $200 at 10, $55 at 9, and $35 at 8.

Expected graded value = (0.40 × 200) + (0.50 × 55) + (0.10 × 35) = 80 + 27.5 + 3.5 = $111 Net = 111 − 40 − 30 = +$41 → worth doing.

Now change one input: the card is nice but not exceptional — 15% chance of a 10, 70% at 9, 15% at 8 or lower. Expected graded value = 30 + 38.5 + 5.25 = $73.75 Net = 73.75 − 40 − 30 = +$3.75 → effectively a coin flip for months of waiting.

Same card, same prices, same fee. The only thing that changed was the honesty of the grade estimate — and it moved the decision from clearly-yes to not-worth-it.

Three things people get wrong in that calculation

The 9 price is the one that decides it, not the 10 price. Most submissions come back 9. If the 9 price does not at least cover raw plus cost, you are betting the whole outcome on the 10 — and every card that misses is a realised loss.

The raw price already contains some of the upside. For cards everyone knows are worth grading, the raw market has already priced in the chance of a 10. You are not picking up the spread for free; you are buying the remaining edge, minus your costs.

Time is a cost. Months pass between shipping and results. Modern cards in particular can move a lot in that window, and the move is not reliably upward.

Where to get the three prices you need

You need the raw price, the 9 price and the 10 price for that specific card — generic multipliers ("a 10 is worth 5×") are wrong more often than they are right, and vary by card, set and era.

Every card page here shows the raw market price alongside a graded price section, so you can pull all three off one page — for example Umbreon VMAX #215. Use current numbers rather than a rule of thumb; the spread between grades moves.

Which cards to grade, and which not to

Grade it if most of these are true:

• The raw value is high relative to the all-in cost — as a rough filter, if the card is worth less than a few times the cost of grading it, the maths rarely works
• The card is genuinely near-perfect: centering first, then corners, edges, surface. Centering is the most common silent killer, and it is the one flaw you can check in seconds before spending anything
• There is a real 10-grade market for it — recent sales at 10, not just a listing price someone made up
• You intend to sell, or you want it authenticated for long-term protection

Do not grade it if:

• It is a modern bulk rare. Print runs are enormous and the graded premium usually does not cover the fee
• It has a visible flaw — whitened edges, off-centre print, a surface scratch under angled light. Check under a bright light at an angle before you pay anyone
• Nobody is buying that card graded. A 10 with no bids is worth less than a raw card that sells
• You are grading purely for the number. If you are not selling and not worried about protection, a sleeve and a binder cost a fraction of a grading fee

A cheap pre-check that costs nothing: hold the card at an angle under a bright light and look at the borders. Off-centring and edge whitening account for a large share of cards that come back 9 instead of 10, and both are visible before you spend a cent.

Start from the price, not from the card

The most common expensive mistake is falling in love with a card and then looking for a reason to grade it. Do it the other way round: look up what the card is worth raw, at 9 and at 10, and let the arithmetic decide.

If you are not sure which of your cards are even in the running, our most valuable Pokemon cards list is a fast way to calibrate what "worth grading" looks like in practice — and for a specific card, its own page carries the raw and graded prices side by side.