Eighteen months ago I wrote a guide to how PSA grades Pokémon cards. It covers centering, corners, edges and surface. It is the most read thing on this site.
Last week I pulled the search data for it and found something embarrassing.
Forty different search queries about whitening land on that guide. Together they are 8,140 impressions over sixteen months, sitting at an average position of 6.3. Page one, every time. And the word "whitening" appears in that post exactly five times, always in a list of other things, never as a section, and never once with a number attached.
People are asking me how much whitening a PSA 10 can have. Google has decided I am a reasonable answer. I am not, so I went to find out.
The short version: PSA does not publish a whitening tolerance. Not for a 10, not for a 9, not for any grade. The number you have read on forums does not come from PSA. What PSA does document about whitening is how to get your card rejected for trying to remove it.
What people are actually asking
Here is the top of the cluster, straight out of Search Console, 9 April 2025 to 8 August 2026.
| Query | Impressions | Avg position |
|---|---|---|
| psa 10 with whitening | 998 | 8.0 |
| pokemon card whitening | 544 | 6.7 |
| psa 10 whitening | 540 | 7.9 |
| can you get a psa 10 with whitening | 537 | 6.2 |
| can a psa 10 have whitening | 534 | 5.4 |
| how much whitening is allowed for psa 10 | 427 | 4.9 |
| can psa 10 have whitening | 363 | 6.5 |
| psa whitening standards | 291 | 5.6 |
| how much does whitening affect psa grade | 273 | 4.0 |
Read those again. Six of the nine are the same question phrased six ways, and the question is a quantity. How much. Not "what is whitening", which people mostly know. They have a card in their hand, they can see a white speck on a corner, and they want a threshold.
There is no threshold. That is the actual answer, and nobody publishes it because it is unsatisfying.
What whitening actually is
Pokémon cards are a paper sandwich. Two printed outer layers with an opaque core in the middle, laminated together. The core is lighter than the ink on top of it.
Whitening is what you see when the coloured outer layer gets abraded, compressed or split at a point where the core shows through. It reads as a white speck, a white line along an edge, or a pale fuzzy triangle at a corner. It is not dirt and it is not fading. It is the inside of the card becoming visible.
This is why it clusters where it does:
Corners. Four points that take every impact. A card dropped once on a corner gets a bloom of whitening you can see across a room.
Edges. Cuts from the factory sheet leave the core exposed along a thin strip already. Any handling frays it further.
Dark borders. Base Set, Team Rocket, most modern full arts. The contrast between black ink and white core is brutal. The same physical damage on a yellow bordered card is close to invisible.
That last one matters more than people expect. Two identical cards with identical handling can grade differently because one has a dark border and one does not. The damage is the same. The visibility is not, and PSA grades what a grader can see.
What PSA actually publishes
I went through PSA's grading standards page looking for a number. Any number.
There is no numeric whitening tolerance on it. There is also, and this surprised me, no numeric centering tolerance on it either. The 55/45 and 60/40 figures that every guide on the internet quotes, including my own, are not on PSA's current published standards page. I will come back to that in a separate post because it deserves one.
What the page does say, plainly, is that a chunk of grading is judgement:
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 is PSA telling you, in their own words, that the answer to "how much whitening is allowed" is "it depends on the card, the set, and the grader." A 1999 Base Set card is held to what the market expects from a 1999 Base Set card. A card printed last year is held to what the market expects from a card printed last year, which is much harsher, because the population of clean copies is enormous.
I have complained before about a company whose published rules did not match what it actually enforced. This is not that. PSA is not hiding a number. I think there genuinely is not one, and the honest version of every guide on this topic, mine included, should have said so from the start.
The one place whitening appears in PSA's rules
There is exactly one part of PSA's standards where whitening is named explicitly, and it is not in the grade definitions. It is in the list of reasons they will refuse to grade your card at all.
N7 - Cleaning. Evidence of Cleaning - When a whitener is used to whiten borders or a solution is used to remove wax, candy, gum or tobacco stains.
An N7 is not a low grade. It is a no-grade. The card comes back in a holder that says the card was altered, which is worse than any number they could have given it, because a documented altered card is close to unsellable.
It sits alongside the others in the same family:
| Code | What triggers it |
|---|---|
| N1 | Trimming. "When a card's edge appears to have been altered." |
| N2 | Restoration. "When a card's paper stock appears to have been built up." |
| N3 | Recoloration. "Where a card's color appears to have been artificially improved." |
| N5 | Altered stock. "Characteristics on the card that appear to show some form of alteration." |
| N7 | Cleaning. Whitener used on borders, or solution used on stains. |
Look at what N1, N3 and N7 have in common. They are the three things you would try if you were attempting to make whitening go away. Sand or trim the frayed edge, colour in the white with a marker, or bleach and re-white the border. PSA has a dedicated rejection code for each one.
This is the part of the research that changed how I think about the topic. The grading standards are quiet about whitening because whitening is ordinary wear. The alteration standards are loud about it because trying to hide whitening is fraud.
So can a PSA 10 have whitening
Practically, on a modern card, a visible white corner is not getting a 10. Corners are the highest resolution signal on a card and graders examine them under magnification.
The interesting case is not "visible", it is "visible under what". PSA's own Joe Orlando wrote in 2008 about corner flips, a defect so small it needs the right light to catch, and called them "responsible for more otherwise NM-MT or Mint cards dropping to a grade of PSA NM 7." A defect you cannot see holding the card in a room can cost you three grades. Whitening behaves the same way.
Here is what I can say honestly, and where the line is between fact and inference:
Fact. PSA publishes no whitening tolerance for any grade. Fact. PSA will no-grade a card if it looks like whitening was chemically removed. Fact. PSA states in writing that eye appeal and market expectation move grades. Inference. On modern cards, corner whitening visible at arm's length caps you well below a 10, and the community consensus that a 10 must look clean under magnification matches every graded card I have handled.
That last line is inference, not policy, and I would rather label it than dress it up.
Where my own theory gets shaky
If I am going to claim the number does not exist, I should name what argues back.
Older PSA material did carry numbers. Centering percentages circulated for years in PSA's own published grading standards and in their print material, which is why every guide quotes them with such confidence. It is possible whitening guidance exists in a grader training document I have no access to, and that "there is no published number" is a statement about what is public rather than what is real. I think that distinction is worth making, and I cannot close it from the outside.
Consistency implies a rule. PSA grades a very large number of cards and the results are consistent enough that people build businesses on predicting them. Something is standardising those decisions. Calling it purely subjective undersells whatever is actually going on inside the room.
I am arguing from three cards. I own a PSA 10, a 9 and an 8. That is not a sample, that is an anecdote with a plastic case.
The thought I keep landing on
The reason this question gets asked eight thousand times a year in slightly different words is that people are hoping for a rule they can measure themselves against before spending money. PSA's Regular service is currently $79.99 a card with a 40 to 50 business day turnaround, and their value tier is paused entirely. My own grading guide still quotes $25. That table went stale without me noticing, which tells you something about how much of the grading advice on the internet is being maintained.
At eighty dollars a card, "it depends on eye appeal" is an expensive answer. I understand why the forums invented a number. A made up threshold at least lets you make a decision.
But the card does not care what number you read. The white speck on the corner is the inside of the card showing through, it has been there since the moment it happened, and no amount of searching for a tolerance is going to put the paper back.
Sources
- PSA grading standards, including the N1, N2, N3, N5 and N7 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, and these prices move, so check them again before you submit anything.
- Joe Orlando, "Taking My Hacks: A Few More Grading Tips", PSA, 6 May 2008, for the corner flip observation.
- Search query data is my own, from Google Search Console for coffeeandfun.com, 9 April 2025 to 8 August 2026.