Do graded tickets hold their value, or is this a bubble?

It was a correction, not a bubble, and it is measurable: across 3,793 tickets that have sold more than once, buyers in 2022 are down 29% at the median while 2025 buyers are up 31%. The losses concentrated in one window rather than spreading across the market, and the collectors who arrived during the correction are the base that stayed.

How liquid is a graded ticket? How long until I can sell it?

It depends entirely on the moment, not the grade. Only 13,685 of the 72,575 item varieties in the census have ever recorded a tracked sale, so a professional debut has a waiting audience and moves quickly, while a lesser milestone can sit until the one collector who wants it appears.

Is a big moment in low grade better than a small moment in high grade?

The big moment, and the two highest sales on record prove it: Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut stub at $480,000 in a PSA 2, and Michael Jordan's debut full ticket at $468,000 in PSA Authentic, with Wayne Gretzky's first professional game full ticket making $252,006 in a PSA 2 in October 2026. That is shifting as card money arrives and bids up the top grades, but with 43,316 items sitting at population 1 the moment still sets the price.

Do signed tickets sell for more than unsigned ones?

Yes, by roughly 2.3 times at the same grade: signed PSA 9 tickets have a median of $393 against $171 for unsigned, across 5,250 sales at that grade, and PSA 8 shows the same gap at $408 against $156. Every ticket autograph is also signed in person on the ticket itself, which is not true of the sticker autographs used on many cards.

Does the auction house change the price I get?

More than it should, because no house has claimed this category yet. Lelands and SCP carry the highest medians at $847 and $685, Heritage sits at $480 and Goldin at $330 (and those two hold the record sales), while eBay's median is $150 and Fanatics Collect's $115, so a good ticket can go unnoticed in the wrong sale.

How much money do I need to start collecting tickets?

Less than most people assume: 73.3% of every sale we track closed under $500, and 27.5% under $100. Genuinely significant moments still sit unrecognised inside ordinary collections, which stopped being true of the best-known trading cards years ago.

Are debut tickets always the best thing to buy?

They carry a real and measurable premium: debut lots have a median of $324 against $200 for everything else, across 47,891 sales. Collectors arriving from cards want the earliest possible item connected to a player, and a debut ticket is the only object that dates the moment itself.

Which sport holds its value best?

Baseball and basketball, with baseball ahead. The 30 highest single-lot sales we track split 13 lots worth $2.93M to baseball and 12 worth $2.36M to basketball, with football third at $472,800 across three lots and hockey fourth at $410,606 across two, Gretzky's professional debut at $252,006 and his NHL debut at $158,600.

Do ticket prices spike on anniversaries, milestones and deaths?

Anniversaries move almost nothing, milestones move a lot, and milestones are the only one you can act on in advance: if a player sits on 998 goals, the ticket for the next game is buyable before the record happens. Deaths lift prices too, hardest on signed items, because the supply of genuine autographs closes permanently on that day.

Is it cheaper to buy a graded ticket or buy raw and grade it yourself?

Buying raw and grading it yourself is almost always cheaper. Grading also improves the item it grades, because a folded or creased ticket presents far better held flat in a slab, which is rarely true of a card.

Should I grade my ticket, and when is it not worth it?

Grade it when it is worth meaningfully more than the fee, and do it sooner rather than later, because PSA's pricing has risen year on year and now adds charges on high-value and high-grade tickets. The case to skip is a low-value ticket where the fee would swallow most of what the ticket is worth.

What do graders punish most? Why did my ticket come back low?

A fold through the middle caps a ticket at roughly a PSA 3 and a staple hole at roughly a 2 or 3, which is why the population is bottom-heavy: 168,586 graded tickets sit at 6.5 or below. Compare your ticket against the 137,117 graded examples in the scan database to see what PSA punished on the same item.

My ticket has a pen mark. Can it still grade well?

Yes, up to a ceiling. A pen mark earns the MK qualifier and is survivable a long way up the scale, and our records hold 52 tickets graded 9 (MK) and not a single 10 (MK), so a marked ticket can reach Mint but never Gem Mint.

How do I know if my ticket is real?

Grading is the answer, and it is the reason this hobby scaled at all. Short of buying it outside the stadium on the day of the event, a graded slab is the only thing that reliably turns a piece of printed card into something tradeable.

Why do some events have thousands graded and others only one?

Predictability and occasion decide it. Baseball and basketball telegraph their debuts so spectators keep the ticket, football debuts often land in unglamorous mid-season or qualifying games nobody thought to save, and Messi's 2003 Barcelona debut is common for two reasons at once: every attendee was given a ticket, and the game was the stadium's inauguration.

How do I find out how rare my ticket actually is?

Search the event in the population database, which carries PSA's full per-grade census, and match the exact variety wording from your label rather than the game. Rarity is more ordinary here than in cards: 43,316 of the 72,575 items PSA has graded exist as a single example.

What is the difference between a ticket, a stub, a pass, a proof and a phantom?

A full ticket is worth the most because a full can always become a stub and never the reverse, and passes sit below both because more of them survived intact. Proofs and phantoms carry little value because they never admitted anyone to the event, and the census counts 17,083 full headings, 16,685 stub, 4,391 pass, 262 proof, 201 badge and 117 phantom.

Should I collect by player, team, venue or moment?

Collect what you love or what you believe will hold its value, because there is no structurally correct answer. Big moments carry the deepest demand while niche ones are where a collection stands out, and even the most common tickets top out in the low hundreds of examples.

Why do two identical-looking tickets get different grades?

Centering, corner wear, where the tear falls and where the staple went all decide it, and none of that is readable in an angled listing photograph. This is exactly what a scan database is for, because comparing many graded examples of the same ticket shows what separated a 4 from an 8.

My certification number is not in the population report. What happened?

PSA renumbers its headings and item records when it re-catalogues a set, so a certificate can point at a page that no longer resolves. If your ticket is missing from our population report, you can add it on the contribute page and it joins the index.

When did ticket grading start, and why?

Earlier than most collectors assume, and originally to authenticate the autograph on a ticket rather than to grade the ticket itself. Interest built from around 2000, stepped up in 2012 and rose sharply in 2020, and BGS opening a dedicated ticket department with specialist hires is the clearest sign the category is now permanent.

What is the oldest graded ticket?

A private viewing at Somerset House in London in 1827, exhibiting work by Turner and Constable. The catalogue also holds Queen Victoria's 1838 coronation at Westminster Abbey, an 1847 meeting in Brussels listing Marx and Engels among its delegates, and the 1851 Great Exhibition.

What is the most expensive ticket ever sold?

Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut stub at $480,000, sold at Heritage in February 2022 and graded PSA 2. Jordan's debut full ticket sold the same night for $468,000 in PSA Authentic, so the two largest sales in the hobby are both low-grade tickets.

Do ticket prices follow trading card prices?

Generally yes, with a lag of a few months that narrows as the two markets converge. Messi is the clearest live example: his ticket median sat between $510 and $561 from 2022 to 2025, then reached $818 in 2026 as card interest in him peaked.

What happens to ticket collecting now that tickets are digital?

Print-at-home tickets are not collected, because anyone can print another copy, and the supply gap is already visible: events from the 2020s account for 15,078 graded tickets against 41,491 for the 2010s, even allowing that the decade is unfinished. The counter is that organisers including FIFA are still issuing printed and souvenir tickets through the 2026 World Cup.

How many tickets does PSA grade each year?

PSA graded roughly 43,000 tickets in 2025, about 4% more than the year before. Set against the 284,401 tickets in the full population census, that means about 15% of every graded ticket in existence was graded in that single year, so the category is still expanding quickly against a small base.

How many graded tickets are genuinely population 1?

43,316, which is 59.7% of every item variety PSA has graded, and 64,773 varieties have five examples or fewer. That scarcity is the single biggest structural difference between graded tickets and graded cards.

Do concert and non-sport tickets matter?

They matter, they simply top out lower: the Beatles' first US concert full ticket made $41,480 in PSA 7 and Elvis Presley's last live performance made $34,800 in PSA 8, against $480,000 at the top of sport. The same logic drives both markets, with first shows and final shows carrying the money.

Does it matter whether a ticket is graded by PSA, BGS or SGC?

PSA dominates by a margin nothing else approaches: 46,950 of the graded sales we track are PSA, against 787 BGS and 153 SGC. BGS is building a serious ticket department and is worth watching, while SGC is not yet a meaningful factor in this market.

How much of the ticket market is a handful of names?

Twelve names account for 46.1% of every dollar we track. Michael Jordan alone is 12.5% at $6,409,965, ahead of Tom Brady at 6.0% and Babe Ruth at 5.4%.

Market Insight

Guide4 August 2026Updated 15 October 20269 min read

Thirty questions about ticket collecting, answered from the data

The questions collectors ask most, answered in two sentences each from the largest set of graded ticket records in the hobby.

By Collectors Tools Research

Thirty questions about ticket collecting, answered from the data — Image: Goldin

Nothing below is an opinion. The price answers come from 47,891 graded ticket sales we track across eighteen venues, from Heritage, Goldin, Lelands, REA and SCP to Fanatics Collect and eBay, worth $51,163,554 between October 1991 and 15 October 2026. The rarity answers come from the first complete census of PSA's ticket population, 284,401 graded tickets across 72,575 item varieties, as of 8 July 2026. This page first ran in August 2026 on 17,610 sales; every figure was re-read on 15 October 2026 after eBay and five more houses joined the archive.

284,401

Graded tickets in existence

PSA census, July 2026

43,316

Items that are population 1

59.7% of all varieties

47,891

Sales tracked

$51.2M since 1991

73.3%

Of sales are under $500

35,086 of 47,891

Ticket collecting FAQ, money and investment

The most useful number in this section is not an average price, it is what happened to people who bought and later sold the same ticket. We can follow 3,793 certificates that sold more than once, 4,265 resales in all, which turns opinion about the market into a measurement. A second sale only counts when it came more than 45 days after the first, so one sale reported by two venues is never read as a resale. Grouped by the year the buyer bought, the median change on the next sale looks like this.

Year bought	Resales tracked	Median change on resale
2019	Resales tracked332	Median change on resale+18%
2020	Resales tracked228	Median change on resale+60%
2021	Resales tracked374	Median change on resale-15%
2022	Resales tracked765	Median change on resale-29%
2023	Resales tracked503	Median change on resale-9%
2024	Resales tracked447	Median change on resale0%
2025	Resales tracked302	Median change on resale+31%

Median change between a ticket's purchase price and its next recorded sale, by the year it was bought. Same certificate both times; 2026 is omitted as a partial year.

The correction bottomed in 2022, not 2021, and it ran longer than most people remember: a ticket bought in 2023 still resold 9% below what its owner paid, and 2024 buyers broke even. The first positive median since the peak is 2025, at +31%.

Do graded tickets hold their value, or is this a bubble?: It was a correction, not a bubble, and it is measurable: across 3,793 tickets that have sold more than once, buyers in 2022 are down 29% at the median while 2025 buyers are up 31%. The losses concentrated in one window rather than spreading across the market, and the collectors who arrived during the correction are the base that stayed.
How liquid is a graded ticket? How long until I can sell it?: It depends entirely on the moment, not the grade. Only 13,685 of the 72,575 item varieties in the census have ever recorded a tracked sale, so a professional debut has a waiting audience and moves quickly, while a lesser milestone can sit until the one collector who wants it appears.
Is a big moment in low grade better than a small moment in high grade?: The big moment, and the two highest sales on record prove it: Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut stub at $480,000 in a PSA 2, and Michael Jordan's debut full ticket at $468,000 in PSA Authentic, with Wayne Gretzky's first professional game full ticket making $252,006 in a PSA 2 in October 2026. That is shifting as card money arrives and bids up the top grades, but with 43,316 items sitting at population 1 the moment still sets the price.
Do signed tickets sell for more than unsigned ones?: Yes, by roughly 2.3 times at the same grade: signed PSA 9 tickets have a median of $393 against $171 for unsigned, across 5,250 sales at that grade, and PSA 8 shows the same gap at $408 against $156. Every ticket autograph is also signed in person on the ticket itself, which is not true of the sticker autographs used on many cards.
Does the auction house change the price I get?: More than it should, because no house has claimed this category yet. Lelands and SCP carry the highest medians at $847 and $685, Heritage sits at $480 and Goldin at $330 (and those two hold the record sales), while eBay's median is $150 and Fanatics Collect's $115, so a good ticket can go unnoticed in the wrong sale.
How much money do I need to start collecting tickets?: Less than most people assume: 73.3% of every sale we track closed under $500, and 27.5% under $100. Genuinely significant moments still sit unrecognised inside ordinary collections, which stopped being true of the best-known trading cards years ago.
Are debut tickets always the best thing to buy?: They carry a real and measurable premium: debut lots have a median of $324 against $200 for everything else, across 47,891 sales. Collectors arriving from cards want the earliest possible item connected to a player, and a debut ticket is the only object that dates the moment itself.
Which sport holds its value best?: Baseball and basketball, with baseball ahead. The 30 highest single-lot sales we track split 13 lots worth $2.93M to baseball and 12 worth $2.36M to basketball, with football third at $472,800 across three lots and hockey fourth at $410,606 across two, Gretzky's professional debut at $252,006 and his NHL debut at $158,600.
Do ticket prices spike on anniversaries, milestones and deaths?: Anniversaries move almost nothing, milestones move a lot, and milestones are the only one you can act on in advance: if a player sits on 998 goals, the ticket for the next game is buyable before the record happens. Deaths lift prices too, hardest on signed items, because the supply of genuine autographs closes permanently on that day.
Is it cheaper to buy a graded ticket or buy raw and grade it yourself?: Buying raw and grading it yourself is almost always cheaper. Grading also improves the item it grades, because a folded or creased ticket presents far better held flat in a slab, which is rarely true of a card.

Grading, rarity and building a collection

Tickets were used. They were folded to fit a pocket, torn at the gate, and stapled into programmes, and the grade curve shows it: 168,586 graded tickets sit at PSA 6.5 or below, against 21,613 that reached a PSA 10.

Authentic

43,610

PSA 1 to 3.5

55,026

PSA 4 to 6.5

69,950

PSA 7 to 7.5

22,988

PSA 8 to 8.5

35,540

PSA 9

27,188

PSA 10

21,613

Every PSA-graded ticket by grade, from the July 2026 census. Covers the 275,915 tickets carrying a standard grade; the remaining 8,486 carry qualifiers.

Should I grade my ticket, and when is it not worth it?: Grade it when it is worth meaningfully more than the fee, and do it sooner rather than later, because PSA's pricing has risen year on year and now adds charges on high-value and high-grade tickets. The case to skip is a low-value ticket where the fee would swallow most of what the ticket is worth.
What do graders punish most? Why did my ticket come back low?: A fold through the middle caps a ticket at roughly a PSA 3 and a staple hole at roughly a 2 or 3, which is why the population is bottom-heavy: 168,586 graded tickets sit at 6.5 or below. Compare your ticket against the 137,117 graded examples in the scan database to see what PSA punished on the same item.
My ticket has a pen mark. Can it still grade well?: Yes, up to a ceiling. A pen mark earns the MK qualifier and is survivable a long way up the scale, and our records hold 52 tickets graded 9 (MK) and not a single 10 (MK), so a marked ticket can reach Mint but never Gem Mint.
How do I know if my ticket is real?: Grading is the answer, and it is the reason this hobby scaled at all. Short of buying it outside the stadium on the day of the event, a graded slab is the only thing that reliably turns a piece of printed card into something tradeable.
Why do some events have thousands graded and others only one?: Predictability and occasion decide it. Baseball and basketball telegraph their debuts so spectators keep the ticket, football debuts often land in unglamorous mid-season or qualifying games nobody thought to save, and Messi's 2003 Barcelona debut is common for two reasons at once: every attendee was given a ticket, and the game was the stadium's inauguration.
How do I find out how rare my ticket actually is?: Search the event in the population database, which carries PSA's full per-grade census, and match the exact variety wording from your label rather than the game. Rarity is more ordinary here than in cards: 43,316 of the 72,575 items PSA has graded exist as a single example.
What is the difference between a ticket, a stub, a pass, a proof and a phantom?: A full ticket is worth the most because a full can always become a stub and never the reverse, and passes sit below both because more of them survived intact. Proofs and phantoms carry little value because they never admitted anyone to the event, and the census counts 17,083 full headings, 16,685 stub, 4,391 pass, 262 proof, 201 badge and 117 phantom.
Should I collect by player, team, venue or moment?: Collect what you love or what you believe will hold its value, because there is no structurally correct answer. Big moments carry the deepest demand while niche ones are where a collection stands out, and even the most common tickets top out in the low hundreds of examples.
Why do two identical-looking tickets get different grades?: Centering, corner wear, where the tear falls and where the staple went all decide it, and none of that is readable in an angled listing photograph. This is exactly what a scan database is for, because comparing many graded examples of the same ticket shows what separated a 4 from an 8.
My certification number is not in the population report. What happened?: PSA renumbers its headings and item records when it re-catalogues a set, so a certificate can point at a page that no longer resolves. If your ticket is missing from our population report, you can add it on the contribute page and it joins the index.

The wider graded ticket market

A small number of names carry this market. Michael Jordan alone accounts for 12.5% of every dollar we track, and twelve names together account for 46.1%.

46.1%

held by 12 names

12.5%Michael Jordan

6.0%Tom Brady

5.4%Babe Ruth

4.9%Jackie Robinson

17.3%Eight other top names

53.9%Everyone else

Share of $51.2M in tracked graded ticket sales, by subject.

Card money reaching tickets is visible in a single player. Messi's ticket median held between $510 and $561 for four years after the correction, then rose 46% in 2026 to $818, his strongest year by value since the 2021 peak.

Median Lionel Messi ticket sale by year. 2021 is excluded, only 13 sales were recorded that year.

When did ticket grading start, and why?: Earlier than most collectors assume, and originally to authenticate the autograph on a ticket rather than to grade the ticket itself. Interest built from around 2000, stepped up in 2012 and rose sharply in 2020, and BGS opening a dedicated ticket department with specialist hires is the clearest sign the category is now permanent.
What is the oldest graded ticket?: A private viewing at Somerset House in London in 1827, exhibiting work by Turner and Constable. The catalogue also holds Queen Victoria's 1838 coronation at Westminster Abbey, an 1847 meeting in Brussels listing Marx and Engels among its delegates, and the 1851 Great Exhibition.
What is the most expensive ticket ever sold?: Jackie Robinson's 1947 debut stub at $480,000, sold at Heritage in February 2022 and graded PSA 2. Jordan's debut full ticket sold the same night for $468,000 in PSA Authentic, so the two largest sales in the hobby are both low-grade tickets.
Do ticket prices follow trading card prices?: Generally yes, with a lag of a few months that narrows as the two markets converge. Messi is the clearest live example: his ticket median sat between $510 and $561 from 2022 to 2025, then reached $818 in 2026 as card interest in him peaked.
What happens to ticket collecting now that tickets are digital?: Print-at-home tickets are not collected, because anyone can print another copy, and the supply gap is already visible: events from the 2020s account for 15,078 graded tickets against 41,491 for the 2010s, even allowing that the decade is unfinished. The counter is that organisers including FIFA are still issuing printed and souvenir tickets through the 2026 World Cup.
How many tickets does PSA grade each year?: PSA graded roughly 43,000 tickets in 2025, about 4% more than the year before. Set against the 284,401 tickets in the full population census, that means about 15% of every graded ticket in existence was graded in that single year, so the category is still expanding quickly against a small base.
How many graded tickets are genuinely population 1?: 43,316, which is 59.7% of every item variety PSA has graded, and 64,773 varieties have five examples or fewer. That scarcity is the single biggest structural difference between graded tickets and graded cards.
Do concert and non-sport tickets matter?: They matter, they simply top out lower: the Beatles' first US concert full ticket made $41,480 in PSA 7 and Elvis Presley's last live performance made $34,800 in PSA 8, against $480,000 at the top of sport. The same logic drives both markets, with first shows and final shows carrying the money.
Does it matter whether a ticket is graded by PSA, BGS or SGC?: PSA dominates by a margin nothing else approaches: 46,950 of the graded sales we track are PSA, against 787 BGS and 153 SGC. BGS is building a serious ticket department and is worth watching, while SGC is not yet a meaningful factor in this market.
How much of the ticket market is a handful of names?: Twelve names account for 46.1% of every dollar we track. Michael Jordan alone is 12.5% at $6,409,965, ahead of Tom Brady at 6.0% and Babe Ruth at 5.4%.

The through line across all thirty answers is that this market prices the moment first and the grade second, and that most of it is affordable: 35,086 of the 47,891 sales we track closed under $500, including 692 in the last 90 days.

Explore the data behind this report

Search every graded ticket sale, browse PSA population data, and track sold prices on Collectors Tools.

Search ticket scans Population report