What a Fair Offer for Your Pokémon Collection Looks Like

A shop offering half of what your good cards list for isn't robbing you. Four shops that publish their buy rates pay 50% to 75% of a single's price in cash. Bulk gets paid by the card, at a penny or so, which is why an offer on a whole binder can land well under half and still be fair. You can work out the right number before you walk in. Here's how, in five steps, with an example binder priced on our numbers.

Look every card up at its Near Mint price and sort them three ways: cards asking $20 or more, the middle from $3 to $20, and bulk under $3. The $3 line comes from the shops. Empire Games counts any rare under $3 as bulk, and Draw For Turn calls anything under $3 on TCGplayer bulk. Below that line a shop stops pricing your card one at a time.

Old cards don't belong in the bulk pile just because they're commons. On the fuller count in Bulk's Hidden Floor, corrected on September 22, 2026, only 12.0% of priced WotC-era cards asked under a dollar, and the cheapest tenth of all of them asked 86 cents or less. For Sword & Shield era cards that tenth stops at seven cents. Knight & Day Games won't take yellow-bordered bulk, Sword & Shield era or older, at all. Pull vintage out and price it as singles.

Shops price singles as a percentage and bulk per card. Here are five that print their numbers for Pokémon cards, read on November 15, 2026. Two are in Canada. Two more Canadian shops we read post only bulk rates in Canadian dollars, so they're left out. Every shop here chose to publish, and that makes the range a reference point for your own shop, which may pay more or less.

Two things in that table change your sum. Store credit pays 10 points more at Empire and Chimera and 5 to 10 more at Draw For Turn, so decide which you want before you start haggling. And the percentage is of a named price. Empire's is the low listing, which sounds stingy until you see how close the low listing sits to the price our card pages print. On September 22, 2026 the two matched to the cent on 82.7% of the lines we priced, as Pokémon Card Ask vs Sold Price, Measured found. Empire doesn't say whose low listing it means, and that 82.7% covers every card we price, including the cheap ones. For most cards, half of the low and half of our price still land close together.

Treat a posted rate as a ceiling. Empire says stock and how fast a price is moving can lower it. Knight & Day turns down any card under 50 cents on its buylist and any bulk card below lightly played. Read the shop's own page before you count on its number.

Worn cards lose twice. Their own price is lower, and the shop's percentage applies to that lower price. Empire Games is the one shop of the five that puts numbers on its condition cuts, and it uses them when it can't find a price for the condition itself. Its 60% promotion covers Near Mint and lightly played cards only, so a moderately played card or worse falls back to its 50% rate. Here's what that works out to beside the gaps between conditions in the Pokémon Card Condition Price Guide, where every figure is an asking price from live listings read on September 28, 2026.

Read the last column. A lightly played card still gets about two thirds of its own asking price. Moderately and heavily played cards get under three fifths, and a damaged one gets about two fifths. Knight & Day sets lightly played as its minimum for anything you send in. Two cautions on the market column. Those are medians with a wide range around them: a quarter of lightly played quotes sit below 68.7% of Near Mint. And the cut gets deeper as the card gets dearer, from 88.2% under $5 to 70.2% at $200 and up for lightly played, which The Condition Tax found too. Don't let an honest Near Mint copy of an expensive card go in at a lightly played price.

This binder is made up. It holds 500 bulk commons and uncommons, 40 reverse holos and six cards over $20, all Near Mint and all from recent sets. We picked the six prices: $22, $28, $35, $48, $65 and $140. The bulk uses two of our published medians. The typical 2025 or 2026 set had a median card of 19 cents on September 22, 2026, in Which Pokémon Sets Are Mostly Bulk?, and the median reverse holo from a 2023 to 2026 set asked 24 cents on September 28, 2026, in Are Reverse Holo Pokémon Cards Worth More?.

So a fair cash offer for this binder is about $175 to $209. The low end is a shop paying a flat 50% on the six, Empire's rate without its promotion, and it comes to $175.20, or 39.6%. The rates come from different shops, so no single shop would quote you exactly this sum. Take store credit at 70% and Knight & Day's sorted credit rates on the bulk, a penny and four cents, and it's $243.20, or 54.9%. The 540 bulk cards ask $104.60 and fetch $6.20. That's about six cents on the dollar, and it's why they barely move the offer.

Go back to Step 3 and make the six lightly played. At Empire's 60% with its 90% cut, the shop pays 54% of $338, which is $182.52, before anything for the bulk.

Run this check when an offer feels low. Work out what share of your binder's asking value sits in cards worth $3 or more. If it's half, a cash offer around a third of the total is in line with what these shops publish. If it's nearly all of it, you should hear something close to 60%.

Selling a card yourself costs about 13 cents of every dollar. On TCGplayer that's a 10.75% commission for Level 1 to 4 sellers, in force since February 10, 2026, plus a 2.5% transaction fee and 30 cents per order. On eBay it's 13.25% on trading cards up to $7,500 a card, plus 40 cents on any order over $10. Both also take their cut of the sales tax the buyer pays, 2.5% of it on TCGplayer and 13.25% on eBay, so the real take is a little higher than the figures here. Then there's postage. A stamped letter is 82 cents under the USPS price list effective October 4, 2026. A toploader can make the envelope too stiff for USPS machines, which adds a 49 cent surcharge, so count on $1.31. A tracked package at the counter starts at $8.40.

Sell the example's six cards on TCGplayer at their asking prices, one card per order, and you keep about $291 before postage and sales tax. The shop's 60% is $202.80, so that's about $89 more. Post the four cheaper cards in envelopes and send the $65 and $140 cards tracked, and postage comes to $22.04, which leaves you about $67 ahead. Against the store credit offer of $236.60 you'd be about $33 ahead after postage. Here's that gap one card at a time.

Check the sold price before you count a hit at its asking price. On expensive cards the ask and the sale mostly agree, but not always in your favor. In eBay sales medians from September 21, 2026, cards asking $100 to $500 typically sold for 1.08 times their ask, and 43.2% of them had a sold median below their ask. At $500 and up it was 1.05 times, with 45.0% below. Charizard from Base Set asked $919.98 on September 22, 2026, and its last 25 verified raw sales had a median of $515.00. The Ask Is Lying to You has the longer version.

Grading the hits first is a different bet with its own fixed cost. In The Fee Is a Fixed Cost, measured on September 2, 2026, a PSA 9 paid back the raw card plus a $25 fee on 64 of 192 cards.

We don't record what shops pay. Every rate here is one a shop chose to post. Plenty post nothing, and the shop down your road may sit well outside 50% to 75% either way. We never see private offers, so what a dealer offers for a whole collection at a show stays between the two of you. The example's bulk prices are rough. The 19 cents is the median card of the typical set in our 2025 to 2026 group, every card counted, so plain commons likely ask less. Selling yourself takes time, and a buyer can always say the card arrived damaged. Nothing here is financial advice.

Shop rates. Each was read from the shop's own page on November 15, 2026 and the raw pages are kept for the fact-check. A shop is in the table if its page prints a buy percentage or a per-card rate for Pokémon. Paradox TCG (Hamilton, Ontario) and Black Rose Hobbies (Toronto) print only bulk rates in Canadian dollars and are left out. Draw For Turn and Chimera Gaming are Canadian too and are kept for their percentages, which carry no currency. Draw For Turn's bulk rates are not used. Empire Games, https://empire-games.com/pages/buylist-policy, marked 'Policy current as of 8.13.2026', pays 50% cash and 60% store credit of the card's Low Marketplace value. Its current promotions pay 60% cash and 70% credit for Near Mint and lightly played English Pokémon singles valued over $20. Where no condition comparison is available it pays LP 90%, MP 70%, HP 50% and DMG 30% of the Near Mint buylist value. The condition table applies the promotion to lightly played and the 50% general rate to the three lower conditions. Rares under $3 are bulk, and ex, EX, GX, V, VSTAR, VMAX and Illustration Rare bulk is $0.25 each. The Anderson, SC address is in the page footer. Chimera Gaming, https://chimeragamingonline.com/pages/our-buylist-makes-trades-easy, pays 60% cash and 70% store credit on Pokémon, 'a percentage of current market value'. Its page gives a Kitchener, Ontario address. Knight & Day Games, https://knightanddaygames.com/pages/tcg-buy-rates, writes 'Our buy rates for cash average approximately 60% and we pay up to 80% in store credit on a case by case basis for all cards not listed within our Buy List.' No card under $0.50 goes on its buylist, and its minimum condition is lightly played. Its bulk page, https://knightanddaygames.com/pages/sell-us-your-bulk, pays $8 cash or $12 store credit per 1,000 unsorted Scarlet & Violet or Mega Evolution cards. Sorted rates are store credit only, $0.01 a common or uncommon and $0.04 a holo or reverse holo. It takes nothing below lightly played and no yellow-bordered bulk. Mighty Meeple, https://mightymeeple.com/pages/selling-bulk, pays $0.01 for any non-foil Pokémon card, $0.03 for a reverse or holo foil and $0.05 above holo, for lightly played English cards. Its Concord, NC address is in the page footer. It prints no singles rate and is not part of the 50% to 75% range. Draw For Turn, https://drawforturn.ca/pages/sell-to-us, pays 75-80% store credit and 65-75% cash on English Pokémon non-bulk, 'based on TCG Player', and calls anything under $3 on TCGplayer bulk. Fees. TCGplayer's seller post of January 8, 2026, https://seller.tcgplayer.com/blog/important-changes-to-tcgplayer-direct-minimum-pricing-and-marketplace-fees, raised the Level 1-4 commission from 10.25% to 10.75% from February 10, 2026 and the cap from $50 to $75 per product. The transaction fee, 2.5% of the order total including shipping and tax plus $0.30, is from the fee table at https://help.tcgplayer.com/hc/en-us/articles/201357836-Fees, which refused a direct read and was read from its Internet Archive copy of October 14, 2026. eBay, https://www.ebay.com/help/selling/fees-credits-invoices/selling-fees?id=4364, charges 13.25% of the total amount of the sale, including shipping and sales tax, up to $7,500 per item in Toys & Hobbies > Collectible Card Games, with a per-order fee of $0.30 at $10.00 or less and $0.40 above. Postage is from USPS Price List Notice 123, effective October 4, 2026, https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm. A stamped 1 oz First-Class letter is $0.82, and a letter USPS counts as nonmachinable pays a $0.49 surcharge. Being too rigid makes a letter nonmachinable under DMM 101.1.2, https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/101.htm, which is why a toploader is costed at $1.31. A retail Ground Advantage parcel up to 4 oz is $8.40 in zone 1 and up to $10.20 in zones 8 and 9. Our figures are taken from the published studies linked in the text and are not recomputed here. The 19 cents is the median, across the 2025 to 2026 group of sets, of each set's median card on day 20718 (September 22, 2026). The 24 cents is the median reverse holo ask over 2,376 pairs in sets released 2023 to 2026, from the era table of the reverse holo study read on September 28, 2026. The condition medians are LP 82.9%, MP 60.6%, HP 42.9% and DMG 36.0% of Near Mint, with the LP 25th percentile at 68.7% and LP at 88.2% under $5 and 70.2% at $200 and up, all asks read September 28, 2026. The printed price equalled the cheapest listing on 82.7% of 52,309 priced lines on September 22, 2026. The eBay raw sold median ran 1.08x the ask with 43.2% below it on 125 products asking $100 to $500, and 1.05x with 45.0% below on 40 products asking $500 or more, from eBay medians of September 21, 2026. The Base Set Charizard pair is as that study dates it, September 22, 2026. The WotC era had 12.0% under a dollar and a 10th percentile of $0.86 on 1,652 cards in the September 22, 2026 correction, against a Sword & Shield 10th percentile of $0.07. The 64 of 192 is from the grading study's September 2, 2026 reading. The example binder is invented: six cards at $22, $28, $35, $48, $65 and $140, 500 bulk at $0.19 and 40 reverse holos at $0.24, all Near Mint. It combines rates from different shops. A shop's offer is the rate times the ask for singles and the per-card rate times the count for bulk. Selling on TCGplayer keeps the ask x (1 - 0.1075 - 0.025) - $0.30 per one-card order, with buyer-paid shipping and sales tax left out. The per-card gain over a 60% cash offer is the ask x 0.2675 - $0.30 - postage, which breaks even near $6.02 at $1.31 and near $32.52 at $8.40. Against 70% credit it is the ask x 0.1675 - $0.30 - postage. The six-card total after postage sends the four cards under $50 in envelopes at $1.31 and the $65 and $140 cards tracked at $8.40. The bulk-drag table assumes 60% on every card priced as a single ($3 and up) and 5.9% on everything under $3, the example's ratio of $6.20 paid to $104.60 asked. Percentages are rounded once from the full value.