Graded Ticket Sales: $28.5M Across 16,724 Auction Results

We track graded ticket sales across Heritage, Goldin and Fanatics Collect. The running total is $28.5M from 16,724 results (PSA, BGS and SGC), and it is overwhelmingly a recent story: 92% of that value has changed hands since 2019. The single biggest was a $480,000 Jackie Robinson debut stub. Read this as a floor, not a ceiling: it counts only slabbed tickets sold at the three houses we aggregate, and nothing else.

Every figure here is a realised hammer-plus-premium result from our auction archive. Our earliest record is 2004, but the market barely existed then; the volume and the value are concentrated in the last few years, as the table below shows. Coverage runs through June 2026, and we update the data daily. We count only graded tickets with a grading service on the slab (PSA, BGS, SGC); raw and ungraded lots are excluded. Where a sale carries a PSA cert number you can open the slab on our ticket scan database.

What this number leaves out

The $28.5M is real money across real lots, but it is a fraction of what the ticket hobby actually trades. Three large channels sit outside it entirely:

eBay is the biggest gap. It is almost certainly the largest single venue for graded ticket sales by volume, but it only exposes about 90 days of sold history, so there is no clean back-catalogue to draw on. Capturing it means aggregating continuously from here on, not backfilling. Private sales between collectors, the deals done in Discords, group chats and DMs, never touch a public venue at all. And card shows have become a genuine marketplace for slabbed tickets, with cash changing hands on the floor and no record anywhere. None of that is in this figure.

Graded ticket sales, year by year

This is a recent phenomenon. Of the $28.5M total, $26.3M, 92%, has changed hands since 2019, and 88% of the 16,724 sales are from 2019 on. Before that the graded ticket market was a rounding error: a few hundred sales a year worth under $0.5M. The table makes the inflection unmistakable.

The shape is the hobby's whole story. Sales held near $0.5M a year through 2020, then the collectibles boom hit: $2.1M in 2021 and a peak of $8.4M across 3,220 sales in 2022. The market cooled to roughly $3.0M in both 2023 and 2024, then rebounded to $5.5M in 2025. 2026 is already at $2.9M through June, on pace to clear the prior two years.

The 2022 spike was as much supply as demand: that year alone saw 3,220 graded ticket sales, more than any year before or since, as the boom pulled long-held collections to market. Volume has stayed high (2,300 to 3,200 sales a year) while average prices normalised from the $2,611 peak in 2022 back toward $1,700 in 2025-26.

Where the money is

The three houses play different roles. Heritage is the high end: 6,110 graded ticket sales but $16.1M of value, an average of $2,639 a lot, and it owns almost every six-figure result. Goldin is the volume leader at 7,311 sales worth $11.2M. Fanatics Collect is the entry tier, 3,303 sales but just $1.2M, averaging $361, where the affordable graded tickets trade.

By grading service it is no contest: PSA is 97% of the value ($27.6M across 16,033 sales), with BGS at $0.9M and SGC a rounding error. PSA is the default slab for tickets, and the premium end is almost entirely PSA-graded.

Most of the money is a handful of sales

The $28.5M is not spread evenly. 971 sales, just 5.8% of the 16,724, sold for more than $5,000, and those alone account for $18.9M, 66% of all the value. Push the bar higher and it concentrates further: only 21 sales cleared $100,000, one-tenth of one percent of the count, yet they made up $4.5M, 16% of the total. At the other end, 78% of all sales, 13,040 of them, were under $1,000 and together added up to just $3.7M, 13% of the value. The graded ticket market is a few trophies sitting on top of a deep, affordable base.

This is the $5,000-plus market: 971 lots, but two-thirds of every dollar traded. And the $100,000-plus market is just 21 tickets across the whole dataset, almost all of them debut or milestone stubs, the lots covered in the next section. Everything below $1,000, the bulk of the sales by count, is where most collectors actually buy.

The top sales, and what they have in common

Every result at the top of the market is a debut or milestone ticket: the first game, the famous moment. Jackie Robinson's 1947 MLB debut, Michael Jordan's 1984 NBA debut, Mickey Mantle's 1951 MLB debut, Lou Gehrig's 1939 "Luckiest Man" speech, Tom Brady's NFL debut, Wayne Gretzky's NHL debut. Condition is almost secondary: the $480,000 Robinson stub is a PSA 2, and a Jordan debut stub graded PSA 8 still cleared $341,600. For tickets, the moment prices the paper, not the grade.

The arc: $28.5M of graded ticket sales we can see and verify, a market that boomed in 2022, cooled, and is rebounding, run on PSA slabs and topped by debut tickets where the moment matters more than the grade. The real market is bigger still, the part on eBay, in private deals and across card-show tables that no public feed reaches.