The PSA 10 premium index
How much does a gem-mint grade actually add? Across every Pokémon card we track with a real raw value, a PSA 10 sells for a median of 13.5× the ungraded price — but the premium ranges from almost nothing to more than 25×. Here's where it lands, and where it pays off most.
What the index measures
The premium is a ratio, not a price: a card's PSA 10 value divided by its raw near-mint value, taken card by card and then summarised across the catalogue. A 13.5× median means that for the middle card in the set, a gem-mint slab sells for 13.5 times what the same card fetches ungraded. It says nothing about how likely any copy is to earn that grade — that is the gem rate's job — and nothing about what grading costs, which is why the lower half of this page brings both in, and why the best cards to grade list ranks on all three at once.
Two filters keep the number honest. Cards with a raw value under $5 are excluded, because a 25-cent common in a PSA 10 holder sells for the price of the holder and the postage, and dividing that by 25 cents produces a "premium" of forty times that has nothing to do with the card. Multiples above 200× are dropped as data artefacts, usually a stale graded price sitting on top of a raw price that has since collapsed. What remains is 5,273 cards where both prices are real; the pricing methodology explains how each is blended.
How the premium has moved
The median PSA-10-to-raw multiple over time — the same monthly series used on the grading ROI page.
The series is the median multiple recomputed each month from PriceCharting prices, over cards with a raw price of $20 or more, so it sits on a narrower base than the $5 floor behind the headline and the two readings are not directly comparable. It began at 9.3× in 2021 on 62 cards and the latest point reads 11.8× on 2,434, which puts the current premium above where it started. The direction matters more than any single reading: a rising median says the market is paying more for the certainty of a slab relative to a raw copy; a falling one says raw prices are catching up or the supply of gems is growing. The market report tracks the raw side of that ratio.
How the premium is distributed
The spread is wide and skewed. 1% of cards carry a premium under 2× — a PSA 10 worth less than double the raw card, which at current fees rarely covers grading — while 31% sit above 25×. The largest single bucket is 25×+ at 31%. The median therefore describes the middle of a long tail rather than a typical outcome: 61% of cards sit at 10× or above, and a minority of scarce, hard-to-gem cards — the same names that fill the rarest Pokémon cards list — pull the top of the distribution a long way out.
Premium by rarity · median PSA 10 multiple
Rarity sorts the premium in a way that makes sense once you consider what a 10 certifies. Rare Holo leads the table at a median 45.1× across 698 cards, and Shiny Rare sits at the bottom at 13.1×. The pattern in between is consistent: tiers where gem-mint copies are genuinely scarce carry the widest gap, and tiers that grade 10 routinely carry the narrowest, because a slab is only worth a lot when the market cannot easily find another one. Only rarities with at least 40 qualifying cards are shown; the rarity chart covers every tier.
A premium only tells you what a PSA 10 sells for, not how likely your copy is to get one — check the gem rate and PSA population report before grading. A big multiple on a card that rarely gems is a long shot, however large the multiple.
Premium by era · by the set's release year
Age tells a similar story, if not in strict date order. Split by the era of the card's set, the median PSA 10 multiple is 20.0× for Vintage (1999–2003) (1,090 cards), 27.8× for Classic (2004–2010) (1,046 cards), 13.2× for Modern (2011–2019) (1,660 cards) and 6.9× for Current (2020–) (1,477 cards). Classic (2004–2010) carries the highest median premium and Current (2020–) the lowest.
Scarcity of clean survivors does most of the work for the older eras: the number of copies that survived decades without a soft corner or a scratched holo is small, and it cannot grow. A modern card's premium rests instead on print quality and demand — how many clean copies came out of the packs and how many people want one — and both of those can change with a reprint or a shift in what the hobby is chasing, which the biggest movers list shows month to month.
What grading costs · PSA fees as of 2026-09-26
The premium is gross; the fee is what turns it into a margin. PSA prices a submission by the declared value of the slab it hands back, so a card is charged for the grade it gets rather than the grade you hoped for. Its cheapest bookable tier, Standard, costs $60 per card for slabs up to $1,000 and quotes 90–100 business days; the next step, Priority, is $80 up to $1,500. Add round-trip insured shipping and the all-in cost this page uses for a $1,000 ten is $90. The full three-grader table is in the grading cost guide.
Put the two together and the arithmetic is short: grading pays when the premium multiplied by the raw price, minus the raw price, beats the fee — and that is before weighting by how often the card actually gems. A 3× premium on a $10 card is $20 of gross gain against a fee several times larger; the same 3× on a $300 card is $600 against the same fee. The multiple is identical and the answer is opposite, which is why the tiers below are cut by raw value rather than by premium, and why the grading ROI calculator asks for the card before anything else.
Time is the third input. At 90–100 business days on the Standard tier, a card is out of your hands for roughly 20 weeks plus postage, and every price on this page will have moved by the time it returns — the biggest movers list shows how far prices travel in a month. On a modern card whose raw price is still settling, that drift can be larger than the fee.
Is grading this card worth it? · by raw value
For a typical card in each raw-value tier: the median PSA 10 premium, PSA's grading cost for a slab of that PSA 10 value (service fee plus round-trip shipping, excluding PSA's annual membership — see the grading cost guide for other graders), and the net result if the card grades a 10. Every verdict assumes a 10 — most submissions come back lower, so check the card's gem rate before counting on it.
| Raw value | Median premium | PSA fee + shipping | Net if it grades a 10 | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5 – $15 | 13.3× | $81 | +$29 | Thin margin at a 10 |
| $15 – $40 | 12.0× | $83 | +$160 | Pays well at a 10 |
| $40 – $80 | 10.7× | $86 | +$450 | Pays well at a 10 |
| $80 – $200 | 22.2× | $396 | +$2,145 | Pays well at a 10 |
| $200+ | 23.5× | $706 | +$7,636 | Pays well at a 10 |
Read the verdict column with its condition attached. The first tier where a typical card clears the fee with room to spare is $15 – $40: the median premium there is 12.0×, fee and shipping come to $83 and the net if the card grades a 10 is +$160. Below that tier a card needs a well above-median premium, or an unusually high gem rate, to justify the cost. In every tier the net assumes a 10; a 9 lands far lower, and a sub-9 grade on a cheap card may not cover the fee at all.
Biggest PSA 10 premiums · cards with $25+ raw value
| # | Card | Raw | PSA 10 | Premium |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $75 | $15,000 | 200.0× | |
| 2 | $551 | $110,100 | 199.8× | |
| 3 | $53 | $10,500 | 198.7× | |
| 4 | $107 | $21,000 | 195.4× | |
| 5 | $85 | $16,500 | 194.1× | |
| 6 | $30 | $5,800 | 193.4× | |
| 7 | $80 | $15,400 | 192.5× | |
| 8 | $42 | $8,000 | 192.1× | |
| 9 | $28 | $5,400 | 190.9× | |
| 10 | $38 | $7,206 | 190.0× | |
| 11 | $95 | $18,000 | 189.4× | |
| 12 | $35 | $6,600 | 188.6× | |
| 13 | $192 | $36,000 | 187.1× | |
| 14 | $450 | $84,000 | 186.7× | |
| 15 | $126 | $23,375 | 185.5× | |
| 16 | $27 | $5,000 | 185.3× | |
| 17 | $28 | $5,200 | 185.3× | |
| 18 | $27 | $5,000 | 185.0× | |
| 19 | $135 | $24,655 | 182.6× | |
| 20 | $962 | $175,297 | 182.1× |
Two of these, worked through
The premium multiple alone doesn't say whether grading pays — the fee has to come out too. Two cards from the table above, with PSA's fee (plus shipping) for a slab at that PSA 10 value subtracted from the swing.
Alakazam (Mysterious Treasures) is the sharper of the two: $75 raw against a $15,000 PSA 10 is 200.0×, and after $1,169 of fee and shipping the swing is +$13,756. Charizard-EX (XY Black Star Promos) shows the fee weighing more: $28 to $5,200 is still 185.3×, yet $671 of fee and shipping takes 13% of the swing, against 8% on Alakazam, and leaves +$4,501. Both figures assume the card comes back a 10. A 9 on either would land far lower, and the gem rate on each card's own page says how often that happens.
How to use this page
Start with the raw price of your card, not its premium. Find its tier in the table above; if the typical card there loses money even at a 10, the index is telling you to stop unless your card is an outlier — its own PSA 10 price is on the card page, via the card value checker. If the tier pays, the next question is the gem rate: the population report shows what share of graded copies came back a 10, and a premium is only ever collected on that share.
Then run the specific card through the grading ROI calculator, which weights every grade by its population share and prices the sub-10 outcomes from the card's graded ladder. The index is the market-wide context; the calculator is the decision for one card in one condition. The biggest-premiums table is best read as a list of cards where a 10 is exceptionally valuable — not as a list of cards to grade, since several of them gem rarely; that list is the best cards to grade, ranked by expected profit.
A big premium only pays off if your card grades a 10 — and after the fee.
FAQ
How much more is a PSA 10 Pokémon card worth than raw?
Across the 5,273 cards we track with a real raw value ($5+), a PSA 10 sells for a median of about 13.5× the ungraded price. The premium varies enormously by card — from under 2× to well over 25×.
Why is the PSA 10 premium so different between cards?
It comes down to scarcity at the top grade and demand. Older or harder-to-grade cards (where few survive in gem-mint condition) command the biggest multiples, while modern cards that grade 10 easily carry a smaller premium.
Does a high PSA 10 premium mean I should grade?
Not on its own — you also need to factor in the grading fee and the odds your card actually gets a 10. Use the grading ROI tools to weigh the premium against cost and gem rate before submitting.
Where does this data come from?
Raw and PSA 10 values are blended from Cardmarket, PriceCharting and eBay sold listings, refreshed daily. We exclude sub-$5 raw cards and implausible outliers so the premium reflects cards people actually grade.
What counts as a good PSA 10 premium?
Relative to the catalogue: the middle half of cards sit between 6.7× and 32.4×, so anything above 32.4× is in the top quarter and anything above 76.6× is in the top tenth. But a good premium is one that clears the grading fee at your card's raw price and is collected often enough to matter — a 30× multiple on a card that gems 2% of the time is a worse bet than 4× on one that gems half the time.
Do cheaper cards carry bigger PSA 10 multiples?
Not consistently. By raw value, the median PSA 10 premium is 13.3× at $5 – $15, 12.0× at $15 – $40, 10.7× at $40 – $80, 22.2× at $80 – $200, 23.5× at $200+, so the highest sits in the $200+ band and the lowest in the $40 – $80 band. What does change with price is whether the fee leaves anything: a typical $5 – $15 card nets +$29 at a 10 after $81 of fee and shipping, against +$7,636 after $706 for a $200+ card. The biggest-premiums table is limited to cards with $25+ raw value so a tiny denominator cannot inflate a multiple.
Does the premium apply to a PSA 9?
No — this index measures the PSA 10 only. A PSA 9 carries a smaller premium than a 10 on every card, often a much smaller one, so a decision built on the numbers here assumes the card gems. The grading ROI calculator prices the 9 and the sub-9 grades from each card's own graded ladder, which is the number to use if your card is more likely to land a 9 than a 10.
Method: across 5,273 cards with a raw value of $5 or more, we take each card's PSA 10 ÷ raw multiple (excluding implausible outliers above 200×) and report the median and distribution. Raw and PSA 10 values blend Cardmarket, PriceCharting and eBay sold data, updated daily. For informational purposes — not financial advice.