The ticket grading habits you can read from PSA cert numbers

PSA stamps a cert number on every slab in the order it grades them, one after the next. So a run of consecutive cert numbers that are all tickets came out of one submission, graded back to back. We sorted every graded ticket in our database by cert number and reassembled those runs, which turns the cert ledger into a record of how collectors actually use the grading service: how many tickets they send at once, and what they send together.

The method: every figure here comes from the 73,843 PSA-graded tickets we track, sorted by cert number and grouped into 15,015 submissions wherever the certs run consecutively. One caveat sets the floor: a missing ticket can only break a run, never lengthen it, so every batch size below is a minimum, real submissions are at least this large. "Signed" means the cert carries a PSA/DNA autograph, and those counts are read as of June 2026. The premise, that consecutive certs equal one submission, is the same cert-sequence logic behind our ticket scan database.

Almost nobody grades one ticket at a time

Single-ticket submissions are the exception. 40.3% of submissions are one lonely ticket, but those solo tickets are only 8.2% of all graded tickets. Flip it around and the point lands: 92% of graded tickets arrived as part of a multi-ticket batch. The typical collector does not walk a single stub to PSA, they save up a stack and send it in one go. The median submission is 2 tickets, the mean is 4.9, and the tail runs long, all the way to a single 224-ticket submission.

The volume is top-heavy. Submissions of 11 or more tickets are just 10.9% of all submissions but hold 51% of every graded ticket. A small number of dealers and big collectors sending stacks at a time account for half the population, while the lone collector grading one keepsake barely moves the totals.

The cert run tells you who submitted it

Sort the batches by what is inside them and a hard split appears. Among multi-ticket submissions, 78.2% are entirely unsigned and 19.8% are entirely signed. Only 2.0% are a mix of signed and unsigned tickets. People do not blend the two: they send a stack of base tickets or a stack of autographs, almost never both in the same submission.

The clustering is near-total. About 1 in 6 graded tickets is autographed overall, but if one ticket in a batch is signed, the chance its neighbour is also signed is 98.1%, almost six times the base rate. Of the submissions that contain any signed ticket at all, 90.8% are fully signed. That is two different people doing two different things: an autograph collector sending a run of signed tickets, and a base-grade collector sending a run of unsigned ones. The cert sequence shows which.

Autograph submissions stay separate. The biggest signed batch we can read is 132 consecutive signed tickets from Messi's 2016 Copa America run, and a 144-ticket Super Bowl XXXII submission where every single ticket is signed. Nobody slips a base ticket into a stack like that, you can browse the signed tickets and see how tightly they cluster.

What the biggest submissions look like

The largest runs are the clearest stories, because a 150-plus block of consecutive certs is almost always one person grading one find. They come in two flavours that match the split above: a stack of the same base ticket in top grade (a dealer working a hoard), or a stack of signed tickets (an autograph project). The 2024 Shohei Ohtani Dodgers-debut block is the cleanest example of the first kind, 158 consecutive tickets, 151 of them PSA 10, the clear sign of one big submission of a single game's tickets.

The unsigned mega-batch is just as distinctive. A run of 150-plus consecutive certs at the same event, landing mostly on the same one or two grades, is one person submitting a hoard, not a market organically grading itself over years. The grades cluster because the tickets were stored together and survived together. That is supply arriving in a single drop, the kind of event that can quietly double a population overnight.

Read off the cert ledger, ticket grading is batch behaviour, not one-at-a-time: the median submission is two tickets, the average is about five, and half of all graded tickets come from the largest 11% of submissions. Those submissions sort cleanly into two camps, all-signed or all-unsigned, with mixed batches at 2%, so the cert run tells you whether an autograph collector or a base collector sent it. The sequence PSA stamps on each slab is not just an ID, it records who graded what, and how.