Trading card grading leader Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) has paused four service levels due to an overwhelming backlog of submissions, the company announced Thursday.Effective June 2, PSA is pausing Value Bulk ($24.99 per card), Value ($32.99), Value Plus ($49.99) and Value Max ($64.99) tiers to new submissions.Thursday’s decision to pause popular service tiers follows PSA parent company Collectors announcing a $200 million investment for the grader earlier this month. That money will be used to expand operations over the next 18 months with plans to double the company’s physical footprint and to add more than 1,000 new hires. PSA reported a 20 percent surge in submissions following that announcement, which added an additional 1.6 million cards to a backlog approaching 10 million cards.Submission tiers will reopen based on operational milestones with a target to bring the backlog down to five million cards. PSA projects it will take up to four months to reach that threshold. The company plans to publish a Backlog Tracker so hobbyists can see progress in real time.PSA also announced extensions to current Collectors Club memberships, which give customers access to the Value Bulk grading tier. Each membership that was active on May 14 will be extended for free during the full duration of the tier’s service pause.Service tiers above Regular ($79.99) are planned to remain active, though PSA reported estimated turnaround times for Regular will be temporarily extended to 40-50 days.PSA graded more than 19 million cards in 2025, according to grading tracker GemRate. The second closest competitor by submission volume was CGC Cards with 4.92 million.The current backlog has been heavily driven by a significant increase in submissions for Pokémon and other popular trading card games (TCG) in recent months. According to GemRate, PSA graded more than 11.5 million TCG cards in 2025 for an 85 percent increase year-over-year. In total, PSA’s graded card output has increased from 11 million cards in 2022 to 13.5 million in 2023 and 15.3 million in 2024.Collectors announced earlier this month that it expects PSA to top more than 20 million graded cards in 2026, with output from January through April up 39 percent year-over-year. PSA announced significant changes to turnaround times alongside news of the $200 million investment, with Value Bulk jumping from an estimated 95 business days to a range of 140–160 days and Value from 75 days to 100–120 days.PSA last paused service tiers due to overwhelming demand in March 2021 at the height of the hobby’s pandemic popularity. Prices for some popular PSA-graded cards saw a rise in price at the time as hobbyists anticipated fewer copies would enter the marketplace. Then-president Steve Sloan wrote to customers at the time that PSA had raised its employee count to 783 in addition to physical expansions of 58,000 and 62,500 square feet to its California operation.