The Cheapest Grading Tier Is Now a Window, Not a Price. Beckett's $17 Just Closed Again.

The cheapest tier accepting cards today is CGC Bulk at $17, with a $500 maximum declared value, a 25-card minimum, and a 150-working-day queue. CGC Economy runs $20 with a $1,000 cap and a 90-day turnaround. CGC Standard is $55 with a $3,000 cap and a 10-day turnaround. All three CGC tiers are open.

SGC Standard is $50 with a $1,500 cap and a 40-plus business day turnaround. That price represents a significant increase from its previous $15 floor, though the turnaround improved from 75-plus days. SGC is accepting cards.

PSA Value remains paused. PSA Standard is $59.99 with a $1,000 cap and a 90-100 business day turnaround. PSA Priority, the tier previously called Regular, is $79.99 with a $1,500 cap and a quoted turnaround that has roughly doubled to 70-80 business days. PSA Express is $199 with a $2,500 cap and a 20-30 day turnaround. Super Express is $349 and Premier is $599.

Beckett Express is $79.95 with a 15-business-day turnaround, and it is the only Beckett tier open. Base and Standard are closed with no published reopening date.

For years, the entry-level grading tier was a standing product. You could build submission math around it on a Tuesday and submit on a Friday and the price would be there. That assumption is no longer reliable across any of the four major graders. PSA Value is paused. Beckett Base and Standard are paused. The two tiers that are stable at the low end, CGC Bulk and SGC Standard, are stable for different reasons: CGC Bulk is open because its 150-working-day queue absorbs volume that would otherwise overwhelm faster tiers, and SGC Standard is open because its price tripled.

Stability at the bottom is now purchased either in volume and time or in dollars. CGC Bulk's terms, 25 cards and five months, exclude the collector with a small stack of mid-value raws who needed a cheap window. SGC Standard at $50 is accessible in card count but costs more than three times what the old SGC floor did. The collector the cheap tier was designed for, someone with three cards and a thin margin between 'worth grading' and 'not worth grading,' has fewer actual options than the published price board suggests.

Three of the four major graders repriced or restructured their entry tiers within six weeks. The one that did not, CGC, achieved stability by building a queue long enough to act as its own buffer.

The practical consequence of a capacity-gated floor is that submission planning changes shape. The question used to be what grading costs. The question now is what is open when a card is ready, and those are not the same question.

For high-value cards, a closed cheap tier is an inconvenience. The math works at Express or Priority because the margin between raw and graded is wide enough to absorb a higher submission fee. For mid-value raws, the margin is thin enough that the difference between a $17 tier and a $50 tier can flip a positive submission decision to a negative one. If a collector runs that math against Beckett's Value tier on 18 September and tries to submit on 25 September, they are not just facing a higher price. They are facing a service that no longer exists. The submission form is still there. It now offers one tier, at $79.95.

That asymmetry, between a price that is published and a service that is open, is the thing that has structurally changed. A price is static until someone changes it. A capacity window closes on its own schedule, and it does not notify the collector who was planning around it.

Verify a tier is open before building any submission math around its price. The board above is accurate as of 25 September 2026. It will not be accurate forever, and possibly not for long.

If CGC Bulk at $17 is the plan, get into that queue sooner rather than later. It is open now, and volume displaced from PSA's paused Value tier and Beckett's closed Base and Standard has to go somewhere. A 150-working-day estimate lengthens as it absorbs that volume, so the timing of entry is itself part of the cost.

For a collector holding a small stack of mid-value raws who cannot meet the CGC Bulk minimum, the only other stable cheap option is SGC Standard at $50 with a 40-plus business day turnaround. That is the honest floor for that collector today. Whether it pencils depends on the card, and the math should be run against $50, not against a closed tier's price.