Alright, some actual good news out of PSA. Back in early June they had to pause their cheapest grading tiers — Value, Value Bulk, Value Plus, Value Max, all of it — because their active queue had ballooned to nearly 14 million cards. Fourteen million. That's not a backlog, that's a small country's worth of cardboard sitting in a warehouse in New Jersey. Well, the update this week says that number is down to about 12 million. They also launched a public "Backlog Tracker" on their site so you can watch the number move instead of just wondering into the void, which I'll give them credit for — that's more transparency than I've seen out of them in years.
Here's the part that'll actually affect you: those Value tiers are still paused, and PSA is now saying it could take five to six months before the backlog gets down to their target of 5 million and those cheap tiers reopen. So if you were planning to send in a stack of commons or lower-value cards hoping for a bargain grading rate, you're still out of luck for a while yet. The pricier tiers — Regular, Express, Super Express, Walk-Through — never stopped taking submissions, they just cost a lot more and PSA raised those prices again earlier this year too. I remember when sending in a box of cards didn't require doing math on whether it was worth it. Those days are gone, and they're not coming back.
My take, for what it's worth: this is what happens when everybody and their brother decided cardboard was an investment vehicle during the boom, and the grading companies expanded to match demand instead of building for the long haul. PSA's doing a $200 million expansion now to try to catch up, which is smart, but it's also about three years late. If you're sitting on cards you were hoping to grade cheap, my advice is the same as always — don't rush it. A card that's worth grading today will still be worth grading in six months. The ones that aren't worth grading, well, save yourself the fee either way.