The State of Pokémon Card Prices, 2025 to 2026

The market

The index below is a fixed basket of English singles that were priced at $5 or more on the first day of the window. Every card in it is tracked for the whole year, so the line measures price movement rather than changes in which cards we happen to be looking at.

Market index, weekly

Base 100 on 22 August 2025. Value weighted follows total market value; the median card follows the typical card.

Breadth was unusually wide. 86.4% of the basket gained more than 2% and only 11% fell, so this was a rising tide rather than a handful of cards carrying an average. Extending the window back to the start of our continuous coverage in May 2025 gives 97.7% over fifteen months.

Vintage took the year

Sorting the basket by the era a card was printed in produces the clearest result in the study. Cards from the 2000 to 2009 e-Card and EX era roughly doubled. Cards printed in 2025 gained 12.9%.

Median return by release era

English singles priced $5 and above, trailing twelve months.

One result runs against the usual story about vintage. The Wizards of the Coast era from 1995 to 1999 gained 37.8%, which puts it near the bottom of the table. Base Set returned 26.8%, the third weakest set of the 100 or so we can measure. The money this year went into the middle of the vintage range rather than the famous early sets.

Rarity told the same story from a different angle

Grouping by the rarity printed on the card produces a gap of more than 100 points between the top and bottom of the list.

Median return by rarity

Commons in this basket average $28, so these are old and scarce cards that happen to carry a low rarity symbol.

The year's biggest movers

These are cards that were worth $20 or more at the start, never moved more than 50% in a single day, and had at least ten separate price updates. That filter removes the database glitches and leaves gradual re-ratings. Every one of the top 25 came from a set printed before 2010.

The cards that fell hardest are almost all modern.

Graded cards outpaced raw ones

Comparing PSA 10 prices against ungraded prices for the same 5,923 cards on the same days, the graded copies gained 73.2% against 55.7% for raw. PSA 10 came out ahead on 63.4% of the cards we could pair up.

PSA 10 against ungraded, median card

Base 100 on 22 August 2025, same cards in both lines.

Splitting that comparison by era turns up the most interesting number on this page. Raw cards from 1995 to 1999 gained only 33.6%, while their PSA 10 copies gained 99.1%. The premium on those cards widened from 19 times to 30 times. Vintage did not stall this year. Ungraded vintage stalled, and the money moved into certified condition instead.

The 2005 to 2009 era is the one place where raw beat graded, and that is also where the largest raw gains were concentrated.

Popular characters beat the market, with a catch

We tested a list of 50 well liked Pokémon that was drawn up from a public poll, so the list was fixed before anyone looked at prices. Cards featuring those 50 species returned 105.5% against 57.4% for everything else.

The two groups started the year at almost exactly the same average price, so this is a real difference in how they performed rather than a comparison of cheap cards against expensive ones. The gap holds up in all five price brackets, all eight rarity groups, all seven eras, and all five quarters we can measure. It also shows up independently in PSA 10 prices.

Median return by group

The Eevee family is the interesting exception. All nine Eeveelutions together returned 61%, which is close to the market. They also started the year at an average of $60.61, about 54% above the typical card in the basket. Their popularity was already reflected in their price at the start of the window.

New sets lost value all year

Five sets launched inside our window with enough coverage to follow from release. Every one of them finished below where it started, during a year when the wider market rose 73.5%.

Sets tracked from launch

Median card, indexed to 100 at the first price we recorded. The dashed line marks flat.

Within a new set, the expensive cards fell hardest. Ascended Heroes launched at the end of January 2026 and is far enough past the price changes described at the bottom of this page to read cleanly.

Ascended Heroes at 191 days, by rarity

Released 30 January 2026. Index base 100 at first observation.

Buying what is already rising worked badly

We sorted the basket into ten groups by how much each card had moved over the previous 30 days, then measured what those groups did over the following 30 days. We repeated this on 298 separate start dates.

Next 30 days, by how the previous 30 days went

Group 1 holds the biggest fallers, group 10 the biggest risers.

The pattern runs cleanly down the whole list. Cards that had just fallen went on to gain 11.7%, and cards that had just risen sharply went on to lose 1.4%. The biggest risers failed to beat the biggest fallers on every one of the 298 start dates, and on every start date at each of the seven time horizons we checked, covering 1,756 measurements in total.

How to read these numbers

Two things about the underlying data shape every figure on this page, and both are worth stating plainly.

A fuller description of where this data comes from, how the basket is built, and what we had to correct along the way is in the accompanying blog post: How we built the 2026 Pokémon price report.