Pokemon bulk prices for sorted commons and uncommons run from $10 to $30 per 1,000 cards in cash right now, depending on whose buylist you use. We pay $20 per 1,000 in cash and $24 in store credit, as of September 7, 2026.
This is a living guide. We refresh it at this same address, we re-read every shop's published rates on the day we update rather than trusting our own last edition, and we keep our old numbers in print so you can see how the market moved.
Pokemon bulk prices by category, September 2026
Bulk is not one price. Shops sort cards into tiers, and the tier decides the rate. Here is our full buylist as of September 7, 2026, with cash and store credit per 1,000 cards:
| Category | Cash per 1,000 | Credit per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Commons and uncommons | $20 | $24 |
| Non holo rares | $30 | $36 |
| Holo and reverse holo | $50 | $60 |
| Cosmos holo | $100 | $120 |
| Amazing Rare | $500 | $600 |
| Baby shiny | $500 | $600 |
| VMAX and VSTAR | $1,000 | $1,200 |
| GX, EX and V | $750 | $900 |
| Full art Pokemon and Trainer | $750 | $900 |
| Pikachu ultra rare | $750 | $900 |
| Gold foil secret rare | $1,250 | $1,500 |
| Trainer Gallery and Illustration Rare | 80 pct of market, min $1,000 | 80 pct of market, min $1,200 |
| Rainbow foil ultra rare | 80 pct of market, min $2,000 | 80 pct of market, min $2,400 |
Store credit is always 20 percent over cash on every line, because it is calculated from the cash rate rather than typed in beside it. When a cash rate moves, its credit rate moves the same day.
The pattern to notice is that the top tiers are priced per card in practice. $750 per 1,000 for the GX, EX and V class means 75 cents each, and $2,000 per 1,000 for rainbow foils means $2.00 each. Nobody ships a thousand rainbow foils. They ship six, and those six are worth pulling out of the pile before you do anything else with it.
Three of those lines are not a flat figure at all. Trainer Gallery cards, Illustration Rares and rainbow foil ultra rares pay 80 percent of the card's TCGplayer market value, priced when we count your box rather than when you submit it, with the figures above as a floor under them. Those three are also the only lines where condition is pass or fail: a card below Near Mint is not paid at all, so leave played copies out rather than hoping they slip through.
What changed since the last edition
September 7: two ultra rare lines went up and one new line appeared. VMAX and VSTAR went from 60 cents to $1.00 a card. Gold foil secret rares went from $1.00 to $1.25. The GX, EX and V class was raised to 90 cents and then to 80 and then settled back at the 75 cents it started the day on, so it ends where it began; we are printing the walk because all three figures were live on this page at some point during the day and somebody may have read one of them. Nothing else on the board moved: commons stayed at $20, holos at $50, full arts and Pikachu ultra rares at 75 cents, and the three percentage of market lines are untouched. Reading QuickFlips the same day, they pay 60 cents on both the GX, EX and V line and the VMAX and VSTAR line, and $1.00 on gold secrets, so the line by line parity we had on September 4 is over on those three.
Cosmos holos are a new line at $100 per 1,000, or 10 cents a card. That is double the ordinary holo rate, and it is the only line on our board that is decided by the foil PATTERN rather than by a word, a symbol or a frame. Tilt the card: if the shine is made of scattered dots and rings of different sizes across the picture, like a starfield, rather than straight lines or one flat sheet, it is a cosmos holo and it goes in its own pile. Cosmos was the standard holo pattern the game shipped for about a decade, from Base Set 2 in 2000 until it was replaced at the start of Black & White in April 2011, and it still turns up on promos, which is why it is worth pulling rather than leaving in the holo pile. None of the nine shops below publishes a rate for it, so there is nothing to compare this line against.
The September 4 edition
Our board moved to match QuickFlips line for line on September 4, and it moved down on most lines. We would rather print that than bury it, because this guide's whole promise is that the old numbers stay visible.
The unsorted line is gone, and so is the non holo Trainer line. There is no unsorted rate any more. Every box has to arrive sorted by category, because the count is the categories, and non holo Trainers are now counted with the commons and uncommons at the same rate instead of at half of it.
Most per card lines came down. Illustration Rares merged into the Trainer Gallery line and went from $3.00 to $1.00 a card. Baby shinies went from $2.00 to 50 cents. VMAX and VSTAR went from $2.00 to 60 cents. Gold secret rares went from $2.00 to $1.00. Amazing Rares went from 75 cents to 50 cents. The GX, EX and V class went from 90 cents to 75 cents, and full art Pokemon moved off that line onto the full art line at the same 75 cents. Rainbow foils held at $2.00.
Commons went from $25 to $20 and holos from $100 to $50.
Pikachu ultra rares are a new line at 75 cents. Any Pikachu V, VMAX or ex leaves the other ultra rare piles for this one.
Trainer Gallery, Illustration Rares and rainbow foils moved to 80 percent of market. They were flat at $1.00 and $2.00 a card. They now pay a share of what the card is actually worth, floored at those same figures, and they are Near Mint only.
For the record, the August 28 edition paid $15 per 1,000 sorted commons and $9 unsorted with a 25 percent credit premium; the August 30 edition rebuilt every tier and set the credit premium to 20 percent; and the August 31 edition paid $25 sorted commons, $10 unsorted, $100 holos and $3.00 Illustration Rares.
What other shops pay
Cash per 1,000 for sorted commons and uncommons. Every line below was read off the shop's own live page, not from a summary or a comparison table, because the cross store comparison charts that circulate for this were wrong in both directions on the day we checked. QuickFlips was re-read on September 7, 2026; the other eight were read on September 4, 2026.
- Kruk Cards pays $30, and it is the outlier here: they do not run a rarity ladder at all. One flat 3 cents a card covers the whole box, no more than 10 percent of it energy, submitted in 3,200 or 5,000 count boxes. Best rate in this list for a box of pure junk and the worst by far for a box with ultra rares in it (their buy prices).
- Troll and Toad pays $20, or $27 if you submit by their 1,000 count lot item rather than per card. Theirs is the most granular ladder anyone publishes, 27 Pokemon bulk categories, and the top of it is unmatched: $5.00 for Hyper Rare VMAX and Gold Rare VSTAR, $1.50 for VMAX, $1.00 for VSTAR and for Trainer Gallery and Illustration Rare (their buylist).
- Full Grip Games pays $20 with no sorting required, and adds 30 percent for store credit, which is the most interesting offer in this list. Their per card lines are modest: 50 cents for ex, GX, V, VMAX and VSTAR alike, 50 cents for Illustration Rares, 25 cents for full art Pokemon (their bulk buylist).
- Meta TCG pays $20 out of Arlington, Texas, cash by PayPal in 3 to 5 business days. Their reverse holo and holo rare lines are 3.5 cents, their EX, V and GX lines 50 cents, VMAX and VSTAR 75 cents, and Illustration Rares 25 cents. They also pay the highest basic energy rate we found, $5 per 1,000, on a card most shops refuse (their bulk page).
- QuickFlips pays $20 sorted and $10 unsorted, with a per card ladder from 3 cents for non holo rares up to $2.00 for rainbow foils. Our board was built off theirs and still matches it on commons, non holo rares, holos, Amazing Rares, baby shinies, full arts and Pikachu ultra rares. It is above them on three lines as of September 7: 75 cents against their 60 on the GX, EX and V class, $1.00 against their 60 cents on VMAX and VSTAR, and $1.25 against their $1.00 on gold foil secret rares. Our Trainer Gallery, Illustration Rare and rainbow foil lines are a percentage of market rather than their flat $1.00 and $2.00, and our cosmos holo line has no equivalent on their board at all (their cards page).
- Untapped Games pays $15, and warns of a 50 percent sorting fee if the box arrives sorted wrong. Their ultra rare lines run 35 cents across GX, V, VSTAR, VMAX and the EX class (their buylist).
- Cape Fear Games pays $15 in Wilmington, North Carolina, plus 30 percent for store credit. They ask for neat rows in a box and no bags or wrap, and they reserve the right to pay half if the box is not mostly Near Mint. Secret rares are their strong line at $1.00 (their bulk buylist).
- Gray Gauntlet Games pays $10 sorted and $5 unsorted, and charges $20 a box if you skip the sort. Their top tiers are wide: Illustration Rares at 20 cents, the ex, EX and GX class at 30 cents, VMAX and VSTAR at 45 cents, hyper and rainbow and secret rares at 50 cents (their submission page).
- Card Cavern publishes no plain commons rate at all; they buy only the foil and ultra rare categories, and their hyper rainbow rare line at $2.25 is the second highest we found. Their buy requests were paused on the day we read them (their bulk buylist).
Two caveats before you pick a shop. Several of these are in store rates, so the gas or the postage comes out of your side. And the spread on the top tiers is far wider than on commons: a rainbow foil pays 50 cents at Gray Gauntlet, $2.00 at QuickFlips, $2.25 at Card Cavern, and $5.00 at Troll and Toad, while ours is 80 percent of whatever that particular card is worth. Reading two or three buylists before shipping a big collection is an hour that pays for itself several times over.
Why the same card pays different amounts
The usual mechanism is sorting labor, and the shops split into two camps about it. One camp pays less for an unsorted box because somebody there has to do the sort: Gray Gauntlet is $5 against $10, QuickFlips is $10 against $20. The other camp prices the sort into one number and stops talking about it, which is what Kruk Cards does at a flat 3 cents and what Full Grip Games does by asking for no sort at all and still paying $20.
We are in a third position now: one published rate per category and no unsorted line, so a box has to arrive sorted. That is not a discount mechanism, it is a condition of sale, and it is worth being plain about which one you are looking at when you compare two buylists.
The bigger number is not on the commons line at all. A holo pays two and a half times a common and a rainbow foil pays a hundred times one, and those cards only reach their own lines when they are in their own piles. We wrote up how our categories work on the buylist page with example cards for each tier, and how to sort a box into them in one pass.
Store credit is the other lever. Most shops pay 10 to 30 percent more in credit than cash, and we pay 20 percent. Credit only makes sense if the shop sells something you want, which is why ours spends on singles and whole stacks of the same card rather than sitting as a gift card.
Buying bulk quantities of one card
Our own shop sits on the retail side a little differently: we sort every purchased box by card and sell bulk quantities of the exact card you pick, not blind assortments. Every card page carries a price break table, and the per card rate steps down at 4, 10, 25, and 100 copies, ending 40 percent under the base price, so a $0.99 common runs $0.59 a copy when you take 100. One sorted monster box really can put 200 copies of the same common on one page, which is what makes buying bulk Pokemon cards by the exact card possible at all. If you are stocking a classroom, building playsets, or speculating on one artwork, the deepest stacks and their as low as rates live on the bulk quantities page.
What to do with this in the next week
Pull anything with a V, ex, VMAX, VSTAR, full art, Trainer Gallery, Illustration Rare, gold or rainbow frame out of your pile first. At 50 cents to $2.00 each with us, and up to $5.00 for the right frame elsewhere, a dozen of those cards outweigh several thousand commons. Then sort the rest into the categories above, because every buylist on this page pays by category and the pile a card sits in is the price it gets. Either way, price your pile against at least two published buylists, ours included, and ship to whichever pays best for your actual mix. Our portal gives you an instant estimate before you commit to anything.
FAQ
How much is Pokemon bulk worth in 2026?
Sorted commons and uncommons bring $10 to $30 per 1,000 in cash at shops with published rates as of September 7, 2026. Holos and reverses bring $10 to $60 per 1,000, and the ultra rare tiers spread from 20 cents to $5.00 a card depending on the shop and the frame.
Is Pokemon bulk worth more sorted or unsorted?
Sorted, everywhere it is priced both ways, and at some shops there is no unsorted option to choose. The commons line is only the visible half of it. Sorting also lifts the holos, rares and special frames onto their own lines, and those are worth two and a half to a hundred times a common, so the pile you pull out of the box is usually worth more than the box it came from. The one exception in this guide is Kruk Cards, whose single flat rate pays the same whatever is in the box, which is generous on junk and painful on hits.
Do bulk prices change over time?
Yes, which is why this guide carries dates on every number and gets refreshed at this same address. When our own rates move, the old figure stays in this guide's history so you can compare what bulk paid then and now. The August 28, August 30, August 31 and September 4 editions are all above, including the September 4 edition that brought most of our per card lines down.
