Three thousand searches a year reach this site asking for PSA 10 requirements. They want a checklist. Something to hold a card against before spending money.
I went to build that checklist properly, and ran into a problem worth telling you about before the list: most of what circulates as "PSA 10 requirements" is not published by PSA. It is community consensus, repeated confidently enough that it reads like policy.
So this page is in two halves. What PSA documents, and what the hobby has worked out. Both are useful. Confusing them is how people end up angry at a grade.
The checklist
Hold your card against these. This is the practical version, and I flag the source of each line below.
| # | Requirement | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Corners sharp under magnification, no whitening, fuzz, or rounding | Consensus |
| 2 | Edges clean, no chipping, fraying, or nicks | Consensus |
| 3 | Surface free of scratches, print lines, dents, and creases | Consensus |
| 4 | Full original gloss, no dulling from handling or cleaning | Consensus |
| 5 | Centering roughly 55/45 front, 75/25 back | Consensus, widely quoted |
| 6 | Not trimmed, recoloured, restored, or cleaned | PSA, documented |
| 7 | Authentic, not counterfeit | PSA, documented |
| 8 | Eye appeal that meets what the market expects for that issue | PSA, documented |
Six of those eight are things everyone agrees on and nobody can cite. The two that come with PSA's own wording are the two that get you rejected rather than downgraded.
What PSA actually documents
I read PSA's grading standards page looking for the requirement list everyone quotes. It is not there.
There are no numeric tolerances published for centering, no maximum whitening, no scratch count. What is there is a statement about how grading works:
The other component of grading is somewhat subjective. The best way to define the subjective element is to do so by posing a question: What will the market accept for this particular issue?
And:
The graders reserve the right, based on the strength or weakness of the eye appeal, to make a judgment call on the grade of a particular card.
That second sentence is the real requirement number 8, and it overrides the rest. A card can pass every checklist item and still not get a 10 if it does not look like a 10.
The word "issue" in the first quote is doing a lot of work. A 1999 Base Set card is judged against what a good copy of that card looks like in 2026, when almost none survived clean. A card printed last year is judged against a population of millions of pack-fresh copies. Same checklist, completely different bar.
What disqualifies a card outright
This is the half PSA is precise about, and it is the half most guides skip.
These are not low grades. They are refusals. The card comes back unranked, in a holder documenting what was found, and it stays that way forever.
| Code | PSA's wording |
|---|---|
| N1 | "Evidence of Trimming - When a card's edge appears to have been altered." |
| N2 | "Evidence of Restoration - When a card's paper stock appears to have been built up." |
| N3 | "Evidence of Recoloration - Where a card's color appears to have been artificially improved." |
| N4 | "This is the term used when a card appears to be counterfeit." |
| N5 | "Altered Stock - Characteristics on the card that appear to show some form of alteration." |
| N7 | "Evidence of Cleaning - When a whitener is used to whiten borders or a solution is used to remove wax, candy, gum or tobacco stains." |
| N8 | "Miscut - This term is used when the factory cut is abnormal for the issue." |
If you take one thing from this page: PSA is vaguer about what earns a 10 than about what makes a card ungradeable. That asymmetry is not an oversight. Quality is a judgement. Alteration is a fact.
The requirements nobody can cite
Now the honest half.
Centering at 55/45 front and 75/25 back. This is in every guide including my own PSA grading guide. It is not on PSA's current published standards page. It circulated in older PSA material and has been repeated ever since. It matches observed grades well enough that it is a useful working rule, and it is not a published requirement. That distinction deserves its own page, which is coming.
No whitening at all. Also unpublished. PSA never states a whitening tolerance for any grade, as I found when I went looking for the number.
Sharp under 10x magnification. The specific magnification figure is hobby lore. PSA confirms graders use magnification. The number is ours.
None of this means the rules are wrong. It means they are inferred from outcomes rather than read off a document, and you should hold them a little more loosely than the internet does.
What actually stops most PSA 10s
From handling graded cards and reading the population reports, the failure modes are not evenly distributed. In rough order of how often they cost people the 10:
Centering. The only criterion that is a measurement rather than a judgement, and the one you can check yourself with a ruler before spending anything. A card that is off-centre is off-centre in the pack. No amount of careful handling helps.
Corner whitening you cannot see. PSA's own Joe Orlando wrote about corner flips in 2008, calling them "responsible for more otherwise NM-MT or Mint cards dropping to a grade of PSA NM 7." A defect invisible at arm's length, worth three grades.
Print lines and surface marks straight from the pack. Not your fault, still counted. This is the one that makes people angriest, because the card was never mint and there was nothing anyone could have done.
Holo scratches. Foil is a scratch magnet and a penny sleeve is enough to mark it.
Qualifiers, and why a 10 never has one
A qualifier is a note PSA attaches to a grade when one specific flaw is out of line with everything else. The common ones are OC for off-centre, ST for a stain, PD for a print defect, and MK for a mark.
The logic is that a card can be otherwise excellent and let down by exactly one thing, so rather than dragging the whole grade down to match that one flaw, PSA grades the rest and flags the outlier.
Two things follow from that, and both matter if you are chasing a 10.
A 10 by definition cannot carry a qualifier. Gem Mint means nothing is out of line. The moment something is flagged, you are not in that conversation.
Qualified cards sell for less than clean cards at the same number. A PSA 8 OC is not worth what a PSA 8 is worth. Buyers treat the qualifier as the real grade, which is roughly correct. If you are submitting hoping a qualifier saves a flawed card, it usually does not save the price.
Before you submit
The cost has moved and most guides have not kept up. PSA's Regular service is currently $79.99 a card with a 40 to 50 business day turnaround, and the value tier is paused. My own older guide still quotes $25, which tells you how fast this advice goes stale.
At eighty dollars, the checklist matters less than one question: what is this card worth at a 9? Because a 9 is the likely outcome for a card you think is a 10, and if the maths only works at a 10, you are not grading, you are gambling.
The thought I keep landing on
Everyone wants the requirements to be a spec, because a spec can be met. You could measure your way to a 10.
The published parts are all prohibitions. Do not trim it, do not colour it, do not clean it, do not fake it. The part that decides the grade is a person deciding whether the card looks like the best version of itself that the market has agreed to expect.
You cannot checklist your way past that. You can only send in a card that was already good, and find out.
Sources
- PSA grading standards, for the no-grade definitions and the quoted passages on subjectivity and eye appeal. Checked 10 August 2026.
- PSA trading card grading service levels and pricing. Checked 10 August 2026.
- Joe Orlando, "Taking My Hacks: A Few More Grading Tips", PSA, 6 May 2008.