How centered is your Pokémon card?
Snap a straight-on, well-lit photo. Place the border guides yourself — free, unlimited, no account — or let the AI find them, and get the left/right and top/bottom ratios plus the maximum PSA grade that centering alone would allow.
Tap the four corners of the card, then the four corners of its inner border, and we'll read off the centering — all on your device. A tilted photo is fine; tapping the corners measures the card, not the angle you held it at.
Centering is one of several grading factors. This reports the best grade the centering alone would allow under PSA's published tolerances — not a predicted final grade, and not an official PSA assessment.
What is card centering?
Centering is how evenly a card's image sits inside its own border — measured as the ratio between the wider and narrower border on each axis, left/right and top/bottom. A card that's 50/50 left-to-right but 70/30 top-to-bottom is held to the 70/30, and the front and back are measured separately.
PSA centering standards
Centering is the one criterion PSA publishes as a hard number, so it is the only part of a grade you can check yourself before paying. The ratios below are the widest border PSA allows at each grade — a card is judged on its worse axis, and the reverse is graded too. Meeting the centering limit does not earn the grade: corners, edges and surface all still have to hold up.
| Grade | Front | Back | What the card looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| PSA 10 GEM-MT | 55/45 | 75/25 | Effectively flawless to the naked eye. Four sharp corners, clean edges, full original gloss and no staining. A minor printing flaw can survive if it does not hurt the card's overall look, but wear cannot — this is the grade where centering is tightest and most 10 attempts fail. |
| PSA 9 MINT | 60/40 | 90/10 | Mint to the eye, with one small permitted flaw: a faint surface imperfection, a tiny printing blemish, or slightly off-white borders. Corners and edges still look sharp. The usual difference between a 9 and a 10 is centering or a single point of very light wear. |
| PSA 8 NM-MT | 65/35 | 90/10 | Very light wear that needs looking for. Typically one slightly fuzzy corner, a minor surface mark, or minimally off-white borders. Still presents as a clean card at arm's length. |
| PSA 7 NM | 70/30 | 90/10 | Light wear that is visible without hunting for it — slight fraying at a corner or two, minor surface wear, or a small loss of gloss. No creasing. |
| PSA 6 EX-MT | 80/20 | 90/10 | Obvious but modest handling. Corners show visible rounding, edges show wear, and the surface may have lost some gloss. Colour is still strong and the card is free of creases. |
| PSA 5 EX | 85/15 | 90/10 | Clearly played. Rounded corners, noticeable edge wear and some surface scuffing, with colour beginning to dull. Still whole and presentable. |
| PSA 4 VG-EX | 85/15 | 90/10 | Well handled. Corner rounding is pronounced, surface wear is easy to see, and a very light crease may be present without dropping the card further. |
| PSA 3 VG | 90/10 | 90/10 | Heavy handling. Rounded corners, dulled colour, scuffing or scratching, and light creasing. The card reads as used rather than collected. |
| PSA 2 GOOD | 90/10 | 90/10 | Substantial wear throughout — heavy corner rounding, creasing, surface damage or writing. Intact and identifiable, but plainly worn. |
| PSA 1.5 FR | 90/10 | 90/10 | Severe wear, stopping short of destroyed. Heavy creasing, major surface loss or damage, but the card is complete with no missing pieces. |
| PSA 1 PR | — | — | The floor. Extreme damage — major creasing, staining, tears, missing paper or pieces. Graded so the card can be authenticated and slabbed at all, not because condition is being certified. |
Grade criteria and centering tolerances are published by PSA. Summaries here are ours. See the official PSA grading standards for the authoritative text.
BGS and CGC publish their own separate centering standards under their own scales — check with each grader directly before submitting, since their tolerances and label formats don't map one-to-one onto PSA's.
How to measure card centering at home
The classic method is a ruler or a plastic centering jig held against the card by hand — accurate if you're careful, but slow, and error-prone on cards with a thin or uneven border. A photo-based tool is faster, but only if it measures the card correctly: a tool that fits a straight box around the photo only works when the card was shot perfectly square to the camera, and almost nobody photographs a card that precisely.
That's why the manual mode above has you tap the card's four outer corners and then its four inner (printed-border) corners, rather than drawing a box — it measures the actual corner-to-corner distances, so a slightly tilted photo doesn't skew the result, much the way a jig measures the physical card rather than a photo of it. It's free, unlimited and runs entirely in your browser — no upload, no account, no daily limit.
Centering calculator — FAQ
Want the full picture beyond centering? The AI card grader scores corners, edges and surface too, and the grading cost guide covers what PSA, CGC and BGS actually charge.