Pokémon card centering explained: how to measure it, and what PSA 10 and 9 need

Last updated October 3, 2026. Written by Should I Grade It?, the free Pokémon card grade checker.

Centering is the one condition factor you can measure precisely at home, and the one that can't be fixed. Here's how it's judged, how to measure your own cards, and the mistakes that make a card look better centred than it is.

What centering means

When cards are cut from the printed sheet, the cut rarely lands dead centre on the design. The result is a border that's a little wider on one side than the other. Centering describes that imbalance as a percentage split: 50/50 is perfect, 60/40 means one border is 60% of the total border width and the opposite one is 40%. It's measured twice, left against right and top against bottom, and the worse of the two is what counts.

On older Pokémon cards the yellow border makes this easy to see. On modern full-art cards there's no border at all, so graders judge it from the artwork's position inside the card edge, which is harder to eyeball and a bigger source of surprises.

PSA's centering limits by grade

These are PSA's published standards. TAG measures centering by machine to a fraction of a percent and reports the exact figure on its label, with similar thresholds. Both graders cap the grade at the centering limit regardless of how clean the rest of the card is: a flawless card that measures 62/38 cannot be a PSA 10 or 9.

How to measure it yourself

You need a straight-on photo of the front, taken from directly above so the card isn't skewed. Then:

1. Measure the width of the left border and the right border in the same units, pixels on a screen is fine.
2. Add them together. Divide the wider one by the total. That's your left/right split. A left border of 3.0 mm and a right of 2.4 mm gives 3.0 / 5.4, about 56/44.
3. Do the same for top and bottom.
4. Your centering is the worse of the two splits.

Measure the printed border, not the distance to the artwork, and measure at the middle of each side, since corners can be slightly different. The checker does exactly this from your photo, sampling dozens of points down each side and taking the median so one stray pixel can't skew it, and it reports the split to the percent.

The mistakes that make centering look better than it is

• Shooting at an angle. Even a small tilt shrinks one side of the card in the photo and fakes a centering shift either way. Phone straight above the card, every time.
• Measuring through a sleeve or toploader. The plastic edge is often mistaken for the card edge. Take the card out.
• Eyeballing from a thumbnail. A 60/40 card looks fine at a glance. The difference between a 9 and a 10 is a fraction of a millimetre on a real card.
• Ignoring the back. Back centering is judged loosely, but a card that's 80/20 on the back still can't be a PSA 10.

Why it matters so much

Centering is the only condition factor that's fixed at the factory. Corners, edges and surface can all be perfect on a fresh pull, but if the cut was off, the card's ceiling is set before you ever touch it. That's why experienced submitters check centering first and don't send 60/40 cards hoping for a 10: the fee is the same whatever comes back, and in 2026 that fee is $60 to $95 all in.

It also explains some pricing. A PSA 9 of a card that's commonly off-centre, with few 10s in existence, can hold more of its value than a 9 of a well-cut card, because the 10 is genuinely rare rather than just missed.

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