PSA's April 2026 monthly grading report, surfaced through GemRate's tracker and broken down by Sports Card Radio, ranks the top five categories like this: Pokémon at 1,189,145 cards, One Piece at 241,586, baseball at 222,217, basketball at 188,716, and football at 151,488. Two trading-card games beat every American sport at the top of PSA's queue. Per Sports Card Radio's read of the data, trading-card games made up roughly 72% of PSA's top-five volume and the three U.S. sports combined accounted for 28%; Pokémon by itself graded more cards (1,189,145) than baseball, basketball, and football added together (562,421).
The April 2026 Top Five at PSA
RankCategoryApril 2026 PSA submissions
1Pokémon1,189,145 2One Piece241,586 3Baseball222,217 4Basketball188,716 5Football151,488
Source: Sports Card Radio, citing GemRate.
Why this is structural, not a one-month spike
One month of data invites a "blip" reading. The longer arc does not support that. cllct's mid-2025 review of the major authenticators put trading-card and non-sports volume at 7.2 million cards versus 5.1 million sports — 59% of the 12.4 million graded across the first half of 2025 — with TCG up 70% year over year while sports fell 9%. The same review noted that Pokémon held 97 of PSA's top 100 cards by total graded volume.
The recent month-over-month progression matches that long-arc trend. Sports Illustrated's March 2026 GemRate writeup reported PSA grading 2.17 million cards in March — up 16% month over month and 47% year over year at that point — with TCG and rookie hype driving the gain. April's 2.21 million, per Sports Card Radio, makes April the second consecutive 2-million-plus month and a fresh record. The mix did not shift toward TCG in one month; it has been moving for at least a year.
What is driving the Pokémon side
Sports Card Radio's breakdown attributes the Pokémon spike largely to the EN-Mega Evolution set, which it reports surged about 48% in April to overtake every other TCG set, leading the next set by more than 14,000 cards as bulk submissions caught up with sealed activity from earlier waves. The lag between sealed activity and pop-report appearance is the practical caveat for anyone reading current pop counts: the cards that hit April's report were submitted weeks or months earlier, so April's pop reports trail the actual sealed market.
What is driving the One Piece side
Monkey D. Luffy logged 53,800 PSA submissions in April, up 31% month over month, putting the One Piece headliner roughly 60% above Shohei Ohtani's monthly volume per Sports Card Radio's April figures. That follows March, where Sports Illustrated reported Luffy as the #3 TCG card overall with 42% month-over-month growth. One Piece was already trending hard in March; April pushed its headline card past every American sport's headline player on a per-card basis.
The capacity reality check: pricing and turnaround
If PSA's submission queue is now 72% TCG at the top, the natural question is whether grader headcount, intake lines, and tier turnaround windows are allocated where the volume sits. The February 10, 2026 pricing reset is the cleanest evidence that PSA is using price and turnaround windows to ration capacity rather than scaling it on demand. Shop Cards USA's tier-by-tier breakdown of those changes:
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Value Bulk: $21.99 → $24.99 (max declared value $500)
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Value: $27.99 → $32.99 (max $500)
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Value Plus: $44.99 → $49.99, turnaround 40 → 45 business days (max $1,000)
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Value Max: $59.99 → $64.99, turnaround 30 → 35 business days (max $2,500)
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Regular: $74.99 → $79.99, turnaround 20 → 25 business days (max $5,000)
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Express, Super Express, Walk-Through: unchanged
Per the same Shop Cards USA breakdown, every Value-through-Regular tier added five business days to its posted estimate, while Express and above were left alone — a structure consistent with PSA protecting margin and capacity at the top of the tier stack while pushing bulk submitters into a longer wait. PSA's official pricing and turnaround page is the primary anchor for these numbers; secondary reporting cross-checks against it.
The Bulk consolidation and what it actually changed
The structural change, more than the dollar increases, is the elimination of the legacy $18.99 TCG Bulk tier. Per Shop Cards USA, that tier was rolled into a Collectors-Club-only Value Bulk at $24.99 — category-agnostic, and gated behind PSA's $149 or $199 annual Collectors Club membership. For TCG submitters, who by volume are the highest-frequency users of the cheapest tier, that is roughly a $6 floor increase per card plus an annual membership requirement to access that floor at all. Sports submitters lose access to TCG-only economics they were never using; TCG submitters lose the open-door $18.99 entry point.
Where the throughput is heading next
The editorial framing in Sports Card Radio is that any new throughput PSA brings online — including continued capacity expansion through 2026, a planned European facility, and ongoing automation investment — will follow the submission mix, which per the April report is now TCG-led. That is the part PSA's own messaging makes hardest to dispute: a grading service whose top category is more than five times its second-largest sports category at the top of the report does not allocate new capacity to the smaller line.
What PSA has not disclosed publicly: how grader headcount is split between TCG and sports queues, how intake lines are physically allocated, and which categories see new automation capacity first. Those operational variables decide whether posted Value-tier turnarounds (25 to 45 business days, depending on tier, per the Shop Cards USA breakdown) actually hold for a sports submission entering the same queue as a Pokémon bulk shipment.
Sports-card turnaround consequences
Sports volume is not collapsing in absolute terms. Per Sports Card Radio, 2026 Topps Series 1 Baseball still led PSA's overall set list at 22,100 cards in April with a 20% month-over-month gain, driven by Ohtani parallels and Paul Skenes #1 (up 154% month over month). The headline numbers for sports flagship products are healthy. The question is queue priority. With Pokémon and One Piece sitting on the bulk lanes, sports Value submissions compete for the same Value-tier slots TCG bulk fills. The posted +5 business day push disclosed in the February reset is a floor expectation, not a ceiling.
Pricing-tier strategy implications for collectors
The declared-value caps decide what is realistic at each tier per the Shop Cards USA breakdown. Value and Value Bulk are capped at $500 declared value, which excludes most premium parallels and rookies. Value Plus tops out at $1,000, Value Max at $2,500, and Regular at $5,000. A modern rookie graded at PSA 10 frequently breaches the $1,000 line in current markets, which forces it to Value Max or Regular and a 35-to-25-business-day window. For genuine bulk — base rookies, common parallels, lower-end vintage — the $24.99 Value Bulk tier with Collectors Club membership is the math, and at sufficient volume, CGC and SGC's bulk economics merit a side-by-side run. None of that is an endorsement of either; it is a cost-to-grade calculation that varies by submission profile.
The forward look
April 2026 is the public confirmation that PSA's submission economics are TCG-led. The questions worth asking before the next submission, given what is and is not disclosed: which tier is realistic for the declared values in your batch; whether the posted turnaround window is the actual queue position you will land in, given current TCG bulk inflow; whether Collectors Club membership at $149 or $199 a year pays for itself over your annual submission volume at the new $24.99 Value Bulk floor; and whether categories outside Pokémon, One Piece, and the major U.S. sports are likely to see priority any time soon, given how clearly the April report ranks PSA's revenue concentration.
The structural read, per Sports Card Radio's framing: leverage that sports-only campaigns historically had over PSA prioritization is largely gone. Product roadmap, turnaround investment, and customer-service follow the volume. The April 2026 volume is in trading-card games.
Related reading
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Junk Wax 2.0 Is the Wrong Frame: April's Record Sales Are a Demand Story, Not a Supply Story
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The CGC vs PSA Pokémon Premium in 2026: Modern Spread Collapses, Vintage Wall Holds
Sources
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Sports Cards Are Now A Side Business At PSA — Sports Card Radio
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March GemRate Report: PSA, TCG & Rookie Hype Drive Record Card Month — Sports Illustrated
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Pokémon cards dominating grading submissions in 2025 — cllct
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PSA Grading Cost Increase 2026 (Prices & Turnaround) — Shop Cards USA
Note: This article contains AI-assisted content and has been reviewed in our editorial workflow.
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