Population reports: what “pop 6” really means

Every major grading company publishes a running count of what it has graded. PSA's glossary defines the “Pop Report” simply as the publication that reports the graded population — the census — of a particular PSA-graded card. PSA put its report online in May 2000, describing it as a research tool listing every card it had graded and encapsulated to date. CGC Cards and SGC publish their own reports, and auction descriptions lean on these numbers constantly: “only two higher”, “pop 6, none higher”.

How the table is laid out

For a single card, the report lists each grade with two figures: how many examples the company has assigned that grade, and how many it has graded higher. Here is PSA's published breakdown for one of the cards in our files, the 1939 Play Ball Mel Ott #51, as shown on PSA CardFacts in October 2026:

Read across a row: 37 examples sit at PSA 8 and 9 sit above them. Nine is more than the six at MINT 9 because the “higher” column also counts half grades in between — here, the 8.5s. That is why an auction blurb such as “only five examples grade higher” can be checked against the report: it is the “higher” figure on the row for the grade being sold. Robert Edward Auctions' 2022 listing for a PSA 8 1934 Goudey Gehrig #61 said exactly that — five higher out of 817 graded at the time — and PSA's own table for that card still shows five above PSA 8.

What a pop report does not tell you

Joe Orlando set out the main cautions in a PSA market report on population figures, and they still apply:

• It counts graded cards only. The figures do not represent all cards in existence — only those someone chose to submit.
• Rejected cards are left out. Cards turned away for alteration, restoration or questionable authenticity do not appear.
• Submission bias tilts the numbers upward. Low-grade cards are often not worth the grading fee, so they are under-represented. If every vintage card were graded, Orlando wrote, the low-grade counts would grow far more than the high-grade ones.
• Low pop can just mean low value. A card that is rarely submitted because it is inexpensive can show a tiny population without being genuinely scarce. A card that stays scarce in top grade despite years of heavy submissions is the stronger signal.

Two further limits come from how the reports are built. Each company counts only its own slabs, so a card's PSA and SGC populations have to be read separately and added by hand. CGC's report states plainly that it reflects only cards CGC has graded, is for information only and should not be used to make purchase or investment decisions. A reference review of SGC's report notes that the same issue has sometimes been recorded under different names (for example “1909” and “1909-11” for T206), so searches need care.

Where to look

A sensible way to use pop data

1. Find the row for the exact grade, and read both columns.
2. Check the other graders' reports for the same card before calling anything “the finest”.
3. Compare the count with how often the card sells: a high-grade card that appears every month is not scarce in practice, whatever the pop says.
4. Write down the date. Every figure on this site is a snapshot; the counts move weekly.