PSA vs BGS vs CGC: which grader is right for this card

You are choosing a label, a fee and a wait

The card is on the desk in a semi-rigid holder and the submission form is open in another tab. PSA, Beckett with its BGS slabs, and CGC will all take it. The decision has three parts. What gets printed on the label, what the tier costs, and how long the card is gone.

Start with the value you would put on the card today. That number picks the tier at both PSA and CGC before speed gets a vote, because every tier carries a ceiling on declared value. A card you declare at $900 and a card you declare at $2,500 are two different submissions at the same company, at two different prices, with two different waits.

PSA prints one number, BGS prints five, CGC prints one plus a designation

PSA returns a single grade from 1 to 10. The card is authenticated before it is graded, then sealed in a tamper-evident case with the grade and the cert number on the PSA LightHouse label. One number does the whole job, and the market prices it as one number.

BGS prints five. Centering, corners, edges and surface each get a subgrade next to the overall grade, so a buyer can see which of the four held the card back. A 9.5 with a 10 for centering and a 9 for corners tells a very different story from a 9.5 with the reverse. When all four subgrades come back 10, the slab is a Black Label.

CGC grades on its own 1 to 10 scale and adds a rule the other two do not have. Any card with a printing error has to go through CGC's Error service, which carries no extra fee and puts the error on the label. For a miscut or a missing holo layer, that designation is the difference between a graded oddity and a graded, named error.

• PSA: one grade from 1 to 10 plus the cert number, on the LightHouse label, in a tamper-evident case.
• BGS: subgrades for centering, corners, edges and surface beside the overall grade, and the Black Label when all four are 10.
• CGC: one grade from 1 to 10 on the CGC label, with the Error service required for any card with a printing error, at no extra fee.

how card condition is graded from Near Mint to Damaged

The published fees split PSA and CGC before anything else does

Both companies publish a tier list with a price, a declared value ceiling and an estimated turnaround. Checked on 2026-09-19, they read as follows. PSA's Value services are paused, so Standard at $59.99 is the cheapest way in at PSA. CGC's Bulk tier undercuts everything PSA offers at $17 a card, and it asks for 25 cards and 150 working days in return.

Read the right-hand column twice. CGC quotes 10 working days at Standard and 90 at Economy, while PSA quotes 90 to 100 business days at Standard and 20 to 30 at Express. CGC states on its own page that the times are working days and are estimates rather than guarantees. Treat the PSA ranges the same way and add postage at both ends.

Sources: PSA trading card grading services and fees, CGC Cards grading services and fees

The declared value ceiling forces the tier as often as the deadline does

The ceiling is the number that picks the tier for most submissions. At PSA, Standard insures a card to $1,000, Priority to $1,500, Express to $2,500, Super Express to $5,000 and Premier to $10,000, and cards worth more than $10,000 go to PSA's premium options. At CGC the ladder runs $500 at Bulk, $1,000 at Economy, $3,000 at Standard, $10,000 at Express and $100,000 at WalkThrough, with an Unlimited Value tier priced at $300 plus 1% of fair market value.

Under-declaring does not work at CGC. The company states that it may move a card to a higher tier if it judges fair market value to be higher than the value you declared, so the tier you pay for is the tier the card belongs in. A $2,000 card cannot ride in on a $20 Economy submission. The 10 working days at CGC Standard are often a side effect of that card's ceiling rather than a choice anyone made about speed.

what a grading submission costs all in, postage included

Beckett was taking card submissions through a temporary form on 2026-09-19

Beckett is the third name, and it is missing from the table above for a plain reason. On 2026-09-19 its own pricing page was in the middle of infrastructure work, its per-card fees and turnarounds could not be read, and there is nothing published to put in a row.

The Beckett pricing page states that Beckett.com and the Beckett mobile app are temporarily offline, that Base and Standard card submissions are open through a temporary submission form sent to Beckett headquarters in Plano, Texas, and that pricing and estimated turnaround times are unchanged. New Beckett Authentication Services submissions are temporarily unavailable.

Payment is collected after Beckett receives and reviews the submission, which is a different rhythm from paying at checkout. If subgrades or a shot at the Black Label are the reason the card is going out at all, that temporary form is the route. Check the page first. A status like this one can change inside a week, and the form is the only thing that tells you the current terms.

Sources: Beckett grading pricing

Ten modern cards cost $399.90 more at PSA than at CGC

Take ten modern cards, all of them under the $1,000 ceiling, and put the two cheapest open tiers against each other. PSA Standard is $59.99 a card, so ten cards are 10 times $59.99, which is $599.90, against a stated 90 to 100 business days. CGC Economy is $20 a card, so ten cards are $200, against a stated 90 working days. Roughly the same wait, and a difference of $399.90.

Now divide. $399.90 across ten cards is $39.99 a card, and that is the whole question in one number. The PSA label has to add at least $40 to each card's sale price before the more expensive submission comes out ahead. That $39.99 is a flat amount and not a percentage, so it weighs far more on a cheap card than on an expensive one, and it is the reason bulk submissions and cheap cards drift toward CGC.

Postage and insurance sit on top of both figures and are paid either way, so they do not change the gap. Neither does a low grade, since the fee is spent whatever comes back.

The same sum with your own tier and card count

Measure the label premium on your own card in three minutes

The $39.99 gap is only half the answer. The other half is what the two labels fetch on your exact card, and you can measure that without trusting anyone's percentage. Search sold listings for the exact card and set, once with PSA 10 in the search and once with CGC 10. Take the last ten sales in each search and read the middle of each group rather than the average, because a single outlier auction drags an average and barely moves the middle.

Then subtract. If the middle PSA 10 sale sits more than $39.99 above the middle CGC 10 sale, PSA Standard paid for itself on that card at those volumes. If the gap is smaller, CGC Economy kept the difference. Run the same search on BGS 9.5 copies if subgrades are in play. Three searches, three middles, one subtraction, and the answer is about your card instead of about the hobby.

Label premiums move. They differ by game, by era, and by how many copies of that card already sit in each company's holder, so a gap that held last spring on a 1999 Base Set holo tells you almost nothing about a set printed last year. No published premium percentage survives contact with a specific card. The only premium that counts is the one on the card in your hand, this month, in the last ten sales.

what a grade does to a card's price, raw to PSA 9 to PSA 10

A CGC crossover is charged even when the card comes back in its old holder

Moving a card out of one company's slab and into another's is a CrossOver, and CGC charges the tier price for it whether or not the card actually crosses. Set a minimum grade, have the card miss it, and CGC returns the card in its original holder with the tier fee still charged. That is the published rule, and it is the line in the fee table that surprises people who budget a crossover as a cheap upgrade.

The same clause is why a crossover is a decision about the label rather than about the grade. You are paying to change whose opinion is on the front of the holder, and the card inside is the card either way.

The add-on fees and what a submission costs all in

Read the label first, then read the sales behind it

However the submission goes, the card comes back in a holder with a company, a grade and a cert number on it, and those three things are what the market now prices. CardLens reads PSA, BGS and CGC slab labels from a photo, records the copy with its grade, and shows a value range built on recent eBay sales of that exact printing.

The sales behind the range are visible in the app, one tap below the number, so a graded copy is priced against sales of graded copies rather than against a raw guess. That is the whole check. Do it on the raw card before it goes out and on the slab when it comes back, and both ends of the arithmetic are in front of you. Free on the App Store, with an optional premium subscription.

the card grading guide and what each grade means