Disclosure Raw and ungraded, and ours alone. No grading company, owner or marketplace paid for it, previewed it or touched a word of it, and Cardboard Journal has no financial ties to any of them. Nobody is paying us to think this. We just do.
PSA has a page of advice for collectors explaining why buyers trust graded cards. Someone other than the seller has offered an opinion, it says. Then, in its own words: "Unlike the seller, we have no financial stake in the item's sale. All perceived conflict of interest is eliminated, and so is the risk. Everyone wins."
That page was still live this week. On another page of the same website, PSA lists what it charges to sell your graded card on eBay. It isn't a fee for the work. It's a percentage of the price. The higher your card sells, the more PSA makes.
A cut of the price, not a fee for the work
PSA will list your card on its own eBay storefront, photograph it, ship it and handle the buyer. Its fee is a single percentage of the final sale price, which also covers eBay's own fees.
| Your card sells for | PSA's rate | PSA's fee |
|---|---|---|
| $200 | 13% | $26 |
| $2,000 | 10% | $200 |
| $10,000 | 7% | $700 |
| $50,000 | 5% (a "limited-time offer"; normally 7%) | $2,500 |
Listing a $50,000 card takes the same photos, the same listing page and the same box as listing a $200 one. A flat fee would pay PSA for that work. A percentage pays PSA for the price.
Auction houses charge this way, and nobody minds, because an auction house is the seller's agent. It's supposed to want a high price. A grader is supposed to be the one party in the hobby that doesn't. PSA is now both, and it charges like the auction house.
Referees don't bet
Every major American sports league bars its referees from betting on games. The reason isn't that referees are crooks. It's that a referee with money on the game turns every close call into a question: did he make that call because of what he saw, or because of what he stood to win? Once the money is there, even the right calls look wrong. The rule protects the honest referee as much as the fans.
A grader is a referee. Its call sets what a card is worth, and the closest calls are worth the most. PSA's own grading standards admit that when a card sits on the line between two grades, "that final determination is made based on experience, eye appeal and market acceptability."
Now put PSA's sale fee next to that call. Say a card would sell for about $500 as a 9 and $2,000 as a 10. If PSA sells it, its fee is $60 on the 9 and $200 on the 10. The referee's cut more than triples on a single borderline call.
We are not saying PSA bumps 9s to 10s. We have no evidence of that, and we aren't claiming it. We are saying that every time it makes a close call on a card it may go on to sell, it has money on the game. In every major sport, that is the one thing a referee is never allowed to have. In card grading, no rule says PSA can't.
And in sports, somebody watches the referees. Leagues review the calls, rate their officials and stop assigning the ones who miss too many. Nobody grades PSA's graders. No outside body reviews its calls, checks its standards or audits what it earns when the cards it graded sell.
Follow the money
Here is how a card moves through PSA, in PSA's own order of events.
First, PSA grades it, and bills you before it will show you the result. Its FAQ says so in one line: "Payment is now requested when grading is completed, and grade reveals are available once payment is received." The grading fee rises with the card's declared value. Return shipping is priced by declared value too, and PSA's FAQ says it costs the same wherever the card ends up: "The rate is determined by overall card count and declared value—not where the cards end up."
Only then, with the grade paid for, does PSA ask where the card should land: home, the PSA Vault in New Castle, Delaware, a listing on PSA's eBay storefront, or a cash offer from one of its partner buyers. Pick the storefront and you pay again: the percentage, taken out of your payout before it reaches you. Leave the card in the Vault and decide later to take it home, and from October 29 PSA charges insured shipping by the card's value, with the value "prefilled using our value estimation tools." You can change that number, but the starting point is PSA's.
Grade it, ship it, sell it: every charge rises with what the card is worth, and none of the work does. The vault itself came from eBay in 2024, in a set of deals in which eBay bought the Goldin auction house from PSA's parent, and the companies said at the time that PSA would let customers list on eBay at the moment their cards are graded. They built exactly that.
Paid to Grade
PSA Partner Offers puts cash offers from dealers and retailers in front of you at the moment your grades are revealed, on the same screen. PSA's slogan for it is "You Can Get Paid to Grade." It says cards are "allocated" to fill the buyers' requests. The buyers it names include Fanatics, Courtyard, Dave & Adam's and GameStop Power Packs.
That last one is worth a second look. Since November 2024, GameStop's board has included Nat Turner, chairman and chief executive of Collectors, PSA's parent. So the buyer bidding on your freshly graded card may share a director with the company that just graded it. We found no public account of how PSA handles that. PSA also doesn't publish how Partner Offers are priced, how cards are allocated to buyers, or what, if anything, it earns from the buyers' side.
Every side of eBay
On eBay, the biggest market for graded cards, PSA is also the authenticator: it checks the cards sold through eBay's Authenticity Guarantee, competitors' slabs included, and since 2025 buyers can add PSA grading at checkout. The company that confirms the card is real, grades it and sells it is the same company, on the same site.
Who's to say?
Here is the question this setup forces, and we'll ask it plainly. If PSA makes more money when graded cards sell for more, what stops it from nudging the prices up?
Look at what PSA controls. The grade, which is most of what a card is worth. The PSA price guide, which it says has "enhanced stability in the marketplace." Its own value estimation tools. Card Ladder, the price tracker its parent owns. Partner Offers, where it allocates your freshly graded cards to buyers. And a storefront on the biggest market in the hobby. Every one of those touches the price of a graded card, and PSA now earns more when that price is higher.
Is PSA using any of them to push prices up? We don't know. We have no evidence that it does, and we aren't claiming it. But nobody outside PSA could check, and that matters more for PSA than for anyone else. With SGC and Beckett under the same parent, it is most of the market: a congressman warned the FTC last December that the combined company would control more than 80 percent of grading. When the referee is also most of the league, there is no rival left to call foul, and no one above it to call foul either. We made the case for grading the graders in "Nobody can prove PSA is better than anyone." This is why it can't wait. PSA could settle much of it by publishing three things: why it charges a percentage instead of a flat fee, what it earns from the buyers in Partner Offers, and whether its own sales feed its price guide or Card Ladder. We couldn't find any of them. Its only public answer is still a line promising it has no stake in the sale.
Sell it yourself
Third-party grading was worth paying for because the grader had nothing riding on the outcome. That was PSA's promise, and it still prints it, word for word, with a cheerful sign-off: "Everyone wins."
So you have a choice PSA's workflow doesn't put in front of you: you don't have to let the grader sell your card. eBay, Facebook Marketplace, a card show, a shop, the collector who's been asking about it. It's more work, and depending on where you sell, it may not be cheaper. But every sale you make yourself is one the referee has no stake in, and that's the whole point. Everyone wins.
