What the slab is actually worth
The fee tells you what grading costs. This tells you what you get back.
Same cards, every company's 10, from real sold prices. It reorders the question
completely: BGS costs about half what TAG does and its 10 resells for more
than either PSA or TAG.
Median of 153 cards read from pricecharting.com on
August 23, 2026. A snapshot, not a live feed, and a different source from the
PSA 10 prices in the fee table above.
The last column is the median of each card's OWN ratio to its PSA 10, not the two medians
in this table divided by each other, which is why a company can show a higher median price and a lower
multiple. They answer different questions: the price column is what a typical slab of that make sells for
across the sample, and the multiple is what that make typically does to the same card.
The part that changes the math
Cheap to grade is not cheap
SGC is the cheapest slab you can buy at $15, and an SGC 10 sells for
about 0.60x what the same card makes in a
PSA 10. A Beckett 10 sells for 1.30x. So the
fee is the smaller half of the decision: paying less to grade can cost you more than it saves, and the gap is
far bigger than the difference in fees.
And every figure above is the price of a 10. You do not find out which grade you are
getting until the card is already back, so treat the whole table as the best case rather than the expected
one. We will not guess at the odds of any particular card coming back a 10, because nobody
publishes that. What the companies do publish about grade outcomes, and it is less reassuring
than it sounds, is on will it grade.
Five things worth knowing
- Grading does not make a card valuable. It confirms what condition it is already in, and a 9 is a common outcome that is worth far less than a 10.
- A 9 is usually worth barely more than the raw card, and sometimes less than the raw card plus what you paid to grade it. Price the downside, not just the PSA 10.
- Straight out of a pack is not the same as mint, and the manufacturer agrees: The Pokemon Company will not exchange a card for minor scratching or printing defects. The number that decides most submissions is front centering, where PSA and CGC both want roughly 55/45 for a 10 while allowing about 75/25 on the back. Check the front, then the back, then the worst corner, before anything else.
- Fees are per card whatever the grade, so the math has to clear on the likely outcome, not the best one.
- If the gap between raw and PSA 10 is smaller than the fee, there is no version of this that pays.
All of this assumes a 10. That is the assumption
doing the most work here, and it is the one most likely to be wrong. Front centering has to be about
55/45 before PSA or CGC will call a card a 10, one print line is the whole difference between a 9 and a
10 on a holo, and your worst attribute caps the grade no matter how good the rest is.
Will it grade? goes through what each company actually publishes,
and it is worth ten minutes before you spend the fee.
If it is from 1999, check the printing first. A Base Set card can be a 1st
Edition, a Shadowless or an Unlimited, the three are worth wildly different amounts, and the difference is
a small stamp and a shadow that is either there or is not.
1st Edition, Shadowless or Unlimited? shows both marks magnified on a real
card.
Fees and turnarounds read on August 13, 2026 and they change often,
sometimes with two weeks' notice, so click through before you send anything.
Raw prices are pricecharting.com's price guide value for an ungraded copy, read August 31, 2026. A guide value is computed across the sales PriceCharting tracks, which is a wider set of venues than any one marketplace. 2 cards of the 5,396 priced here are not listed by PriceCharting and keep their TCGplayer market price via TCGdex instead.
They are the same figures the rest of this site quotes.
PSA 10 prices come from the same PriceCharting guide, read between August 23, 2026 and August 31, 2026, so both halves of the subtraction describe one printing of one card out of one source.
Which cards appear here is still decided by pokemonpricetracker.com's recorded sale counts, because it is the
only feed that publishes one, and only cards with at least ten recorded sales are used. Card scans
are TCGdex's, mirrored here at the size the rows draw them, and each one is the card named beside it. No affiliate
links and no recommendation: we are not paid by any grading company and which one is right depends on your card
and your patience. Not financial advice, just subtraction.
