Notes from a former card Grader/Authenticator

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by JustinD

Thanks for opening the secret door a tad Andy!

One question that you may or may not be able to answer, how much time do you feel is spent on average looking at a singular card? Is their a company standard for review time?

You can get a pretty good estimate of this by knowing that PSA employs ~125 full time graders (stated by Nate in a recent podcast) and they grade roughly 1.2M cards per month.

I don't know what a typical day looks like, but I assume they get breaks and have meetings, take vacations, and get sick like everyone else. Let's say they spend 6 hours per day actually grading cards on average, so that's about 120 hours per month. Multiply that by 125 graders, and you get 15,000 man hours. Take 1.2 million cards divided by 15,000 hours and you get 80 cards graded per hour. So that's 45 seconds per card.