The arithmetic behind sending a card away, and the two numbers most people skip.
The version of this question people usually ask is "what is this worth in a PSA 10". That is the wrong end of it. The right question is what the card is worth on average across every grade it might come back as, minus everything it costs to find out.
The fee on the grader's price list is not the cost of grading. The cost is all of this:
Check the current numbers on the grader's own site the day you send, because they change, and a stale figure from a forum post is how people end up underwater on a submission. Submitting several cards at once is what makes the per-card figure land somewhere sensible, since the shipping and insurance legs are shared.
A gem rate is the share of submissions of that card that came back as a 10. It is the closest thing to an honest probability that your copy gets the grade you are imagining.
People skip it because it is uncomfortable. If a card gems 15% of the time, then four submissions in five are not the outcome you are picturing, and the 9 price is the one you should be planning around. On a card that gems 60% of the time the same arithmetic reads completely differently.
Your own copy is not the average, of course. Centering, edges, corners and surface are yours to look at. But the population is the base rate, and a base rate is what you start from before you talk yourself into anything.
The population report says how many copies have been graded and at what grades. Two things in it matter.
The first is supply. A card with tens of thousands of 10s already in circulation is not scarce in that grade, whatever the raw copy costs, and the price reflects that.
The second is direction. Population only goes up. A card being submitted heavily right now will have more graded copies in six months than it does today, and the graded price has to absorb them. A number that is true when you send is not guaranteed to be true when it comes back.
A worked example, with round hypothetical numbers. Say a raw copy sells at $100, a PSA 9 at $150, and a PSA 10 at $400. That 10 looks like four times your money.
Now add a gem rate of 25% and an all-in cost of $30 a card. One time in four you hold $400; three times in four, call it $150. The average outcome is $212, less the $30, so $182 against the $100 the raw copy was already worth.
Still worth doing, on those numbers. But it is less than double, not four times, and that is the number to make the decision on. Move the gem rate to 10% and the same card is barely worth the postage.
Turnaround is measured in weeks or months depending on the tier. The card is not yours to trade while it is away, and the market it comes back to is not guaranteed to be the one it left. Paying for a faster tier is partly paying to be exposed to that for less time, which is a real thing to be buying even though it does not show up in the fee comparison.
Some cases do not need the arithmetic:
Every number above is one you have to go and find, per card, one at a time. Bartr does this arithmetic while you stand at the table: it prices both sides of a trade from sold-market data, applies whatever dealer rate you agree on, and writes the result down so you can check it later.
Join the free beta, or try the trade calculator in your browser first. Neither needs an account.