Third-party grading turns “trust me, it’s a real MS-65” into a sealed, guaranteed, resellable claim. Six services do this today, at six different price points and six different levels of market trust. Here’s how they compare — and the math on whether grading is worth it at all.
PCGS and NGC dominate market acceptance and, for comparable coins, tend to command the strongest resale premiums — they’re the two names auction houses and dealers default to. ANACS (the oldest US service) and ICG cost noticeably less and are perfectly fine for moderate-value coins, but their slabs generally carry smaller price premiums in dealer and auction circles. CAC isn’t really a competitor to any of them — it’s a second-opinion sticker (and, since 2023, a full grading service called CACG) layered on top of an existing PCGS/NGC grade.
Whether it’s worth grading a given coin at all comes down to one comparison: the fee plus shipping vs. the premium a certified holder is likely to add. For a lot of coins — especially common-date junk silver and bullion — the answer is no.
A sovereign mint used to be the trust layer: the king’s stamp on a coin was a promise about weight and purity that let strangers trade without weighing or assaying each piece. Third-party grading is a modern, private-sector version of the same idea, aimed at a different problem — not “is this really silver,” but “is this really a 1916-D Mercury dime in the condition claimed, and not a cleaned, altered, or counterfeit one.” A sealed holder with a guaranteed grade lets two strangers transact on a coin’s condition the same way a milled edge once let two strangers transact on a coin’s silver content — without either party needing to be an expert, or to trust the other. See Distributed Verification: Chopmarks, Hallmarks, and Bills of Exchange for the premodern version of this problem, and How to Spot Fake Silver Coins for what grading is actually verifying against.
This page isn’t about how grades are assigned — for the 70-point Sheldon scale and what separates a Fine from an Extremely Fine, see the grading guide. This page is about which company to send the coin to, and whether to bother.
Fees and turnaround below are approximate ranges as of mid-2026, summarized from each service’s public pricing pages. Grading fees change — check the current schedule before submitting. Sources are linked in each entry.
| Service | Founded | Market acceptance | Relative cost | Notable feature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PCGS | 1986 | Top tier — market leader, strongest premiums on US classics | $$$ (economy ~$20–30, walkthrough $250+) | TrueView imaging, Gold Shield service |
| NGC | 1987 | Top tier — co-leader, especially strong for world & ancient coins | $$–$$$ (economy ~$20, walkthrough ~$125) | Photo Proof imaging, no forced membership |
| ANACS | 1972 | Mid tier — oldest US TPG, widely accepted, smaller premiums than PCGS/NGC | $ (roughly $14–99 by tier/value) | No membership; cheapest tier needs a 5-coin minimum |
| ICG | 1998 | Budget tier — least market-premium recognition of the four graders here | $ (lowest entry point) | No membership, no minimums |
| CAC / CACG | 2007 / 2023 | Sticker (CAC) is a respected overlay on PCGS/NGC coins; full grading (CACG) is newer and still building track record | $ sticker on top of grading; $$ for full CACG grading | Green sticker = solid for grade; gold = undergraded |
| PMG | Sibling of NGC (CCG) | Dominant in paper money, same standing there that PCGS/NGC hold in coins | Comparable tier structure to NGC | Paper currency only — a different scale, not coins |
Ownership & reputation: Founded in San Diego in 1986 by dealer David Hall and a group of coin dealers, under parent company Collectors Universe. Generally regarded as the market leader for US coins — in dealer and auction circles, a PCGS holder is often treated as the reference standard, and PCGS-graded coins have historically commanded the strongest resale premiums of any service, particularly for classic US series.
Tiers & fees (as of mid-2026, check current schedule): Economy-tier grading runs roughly $20–30 per coin with turnaround measured in weeks to months; faster Express and same-day WalkThrough service runs well over $100, up to $250+ for high-value or time-sensitive submissions. Some tiers require an annual membership (historically in the ~$69–99/year range). TrueView imaging — professional photos of the coin taken right before encapsulation — runs a few dollars extra per coin.
Slab acceptance: Accepted at every major US auction house and dealer network without question.
Sources: pcgs.com/trueview, Wikipedia: PCGS, third-party fee aggregation via coingraderai.com and findcoinshows.com (PCGS’s own submission-tier pages returned an access error at time of writing — verify current figures directly at pcgs.com before submitting).
Ownership & reputation: Founded in 1987 in Parsippany, NJ, by John Albanese (who had also co-founded PCGS the year before). Now a subsidiary of Certified Collectibles Group (CCG), majority-owned by Blackstone since a 2021 investment valuing CCG at roughly $500 million. Widely treated as PCGS’s co-leader — NGC holders are fully accepted at auction and by dealers, and NGC is generally considered the stronger of the two for world and ancient coins.
Tiers & fees (revised schedule effective January 2026; as of mid-2026, check current schedule): Published tiers run roughly Economy $20 (about 60 business days), Modern $30 (about 25 days), Express $60 (about 10 days), and WalkThrough $125 (about 5 days), plus a $10 per-submission handling fee and separate shipping. Turnaround estimates are explicitly not guaranteed.
Slab acceptance: Accepted at every major auction house and dealer network, on par with PCGS.
Sources: NGC: Revised Services and Fees, Wikipedia: NGC, NGC: Blackstone acquisition.
Ownership & reputation: Founded in 1972 by the American Numismatic Association (ANA) originally as an authentication-only service, expanding into numeric grading in 1979 — the oldest third-party coin certification service in the US. The ANA sold it in 1989 to the publisher of Coin World, and it has changed private ownership since. Widely accepted at coin shows and by dealers; treated as a solid mid-tier option, but coins in ANACS holders generally sell for less than comparable coins in PCGS or NGC holders.
Tiers & fees (as of mid-2026, check current schedule): Published tiers run from roughly $14–19 per coin on the cheapest Economy/Modern tiers (these require a 5-coin minimum submission) up to $25 (15-day, up to $2,000 value), $39 (5-day, up to $5,000), and $99 (2-day, up to $10,000). No membership fee.
Slab acceptance: Accepted by major auction houses; older ANACS holders ("old-holder" slabs) are even collected as a niche of their own.
Sources: anacs.com/services, anacs.com/about-anacs, Wikipedia: ANACS, CoinWeek: ANACS, the ANA Years.
Ownership & reputation: Founded in 1998; markets itself on simplicity and low cost, with no membership requirement and no minimum submission size. Of the four numeric graders on this page, ICG generally carries the least premium recognition in dealer and auction circles — a reasonable choice for protecting and identifying a coin, less reliable for maximizing resale value on anything but common material.
Tiers & fees: ICG prices by declared coin value and turnaround speed rather than a single flat tier list; multiple speed options are offered (including same-day at some shows). Aggregated third-party comparisons place ICG’s cheapest tier below ANACS’s. Check icgcoin.com directly for the current fee schedule — it was not fully itemized on their public pages at time of writing.
Slab acceptance: Accepted by major auction houses, though generally with a market discount relative to PCGS/NGC.
Sources: icgcoin.com, findcoinshows.com: TPG comparison.
What it is: CAC (Certified Acceptance Corporation) was founded in 2007 by John Albanese — the same person who co-founded both PCGS and NGC. Rather than grading coins itself, CAC reviewed coins already slabbed by PCGS or NGC and applied a small sticker: green means the coin is solid-to-high-end for its assigned grade; gold means CAC believes the coin is undergraded relative to its holder. Fewer than half of submitted coins receive a sticker, which is precisely why the sticker carries a documented resale premium — it’s a second, independent opinion layered on top of the first.
Since October 2023, CAC has also run CACG, a full in-house grading service with its own holders, putting CAC in direct competition with PCGS and NGC rather than only reviewing their output. CACG is newer and still establishing a long-run market track record.
Fees (as of mid-2026, check current schedule): CAC stickering runs roughly $24.50 at the Economy tier (coins valued up to $3,000, priced increased June 2025) up to $1,000 for uncapped-value "Rarity" tier coins, plus a small handling fee. CACG full grading runs roughly $15–20 at its cheapest classic-coin tiers up to $2,000 for the highest "Ultra Rarity" tier.
Sources: cacgrading.com/pricing, CAC: stickering fee changes, June 2025, Wikipedia: Certified Acceptance Corporation.
PMG is NGC’s sibling under Certified Collectibles Group — the same relationship PCGS has to its parent, but for paper currency instead of coins. If a coin collection includes banknotes, PMG occupies roughly the market position for paper money that PCGS and NGC occupy for coins; it uses a different, note-specific grading scale rather than the coin-grading Sheldon scale described in the grading guide. Fee schedules were also revised effective January 2026, on a tier structure comparable to NGC’s.
Source: PMG: Updated Services and Fees, 2026.
Before picking a service, there’s a prior question: is grading worth doing at all? The arithmetic most collectors run is simple — add up the grading fee, the per-submission handling fee, and return shipping/insurance, then weigh that total against the premium a certified holder is expected to add over the coin’s raw, ungraded value.
grading fee + handling + shipping/insurance vs. expected premium from a certified holder
If the total cost is close to or greater than the expected premium, grading doesn’t pay for itself financially — whatever else it might do for peace of mind or long-term protection.
Common-date junk silver and bullion coins — circulated pre-1965 dimes, quarters, and half dollars bought for their silver content, generic gold or silver bullion rounds and bars — almost never clear this bar. A $20–30 economy grading fee plus shipping can easily exceed the coin’s entire bullion value, and a slab adds essentially no premium to material whose worth is its metal content, not its numismatic condition. This is also why bullion buyers and stackers generally never send junk silver out for grading.
Key dates, coins in unusually high grades, and varieties that are frequently counterfeited sit on the other side of the line. A key-date coin (low mintage, high demand) or a coin claimed to be in an unusually high mint-state or proof grade can be worth many multiples more once its grade and authenticity are guaranteed by a recognized third party — both because of the market premium a slab commands and because a sealed, guaranteed holder is more liquid: buyers don’t have to trust the seller’s own grading claim. Coins in series with well-known counterfeiting problems (early gold, certain Chinese-market-driven rarities, high-value Morgan dollars) are graded partly for authentication, independent of any grade premium — the guarantee that the coin is genuine is itself the product.
Between those two poles sits most of a typical collection, where the answer depends on the specific coin’s value, its series’ grading premiums, and the intended sale path (a dealer buy, an online auction, a specialist numismatic auction house).
There is no single "best" — it depends on the coin. By market acceptance, PCGS and NGC are the two dominant services: their slabs are preferred at major auction houses and, for comparable coins, tend to command the strongest resale premiums. ANACS and ICG cost less and are widely accepted for moderate-value coins, but carry smaller price premiums in dealer and auction circles. CAC is a second-opinion sticker (and, since 2023, a full grading service) layered on top of an existing grade, not a direct competitor in the same sense.
As of mid-2026, economy-tier grading runs roughly $14–$30 per coin at ANACS, ICG, NGC, and PCGS, with turnaround measured in weeks. Faster tiers (express, walkthrough, same-day at shows) run from roughly $45 up to $150–$300+ per coin depending on declared value, plus handling and return shipping/insurance. Fees change — check the service’s current published price sheet before submitting.
The math most collectors run: add the grading fee, handling fee, and shipping/insurance, then compare that total to the premium a certified holder is expected to add over the coin’s raw value. For common-date junk silver and bullion, the total cost usually exceeds any premium a slab adds, so grading rarely pays for itself. For key dates, high mint-state or proof grades, and counterfeit-prone rarities, a certified grade can add far more value than it costs.
CAC (Certified Acceptance Corporation, founded 2007) reviews coins already graded and slabbed by PCGS or NGC and applies a green sticker if the coin is solid-to-high-end for its assigned grade, or a gold sticker if it’s undergraded relative to its holder. Less than half of submitted coins receive a sticker. Since October 2023, CAC has also offered CACG, a full in-house grading service competing directly with PCGS and NGC.