Boxes of old cards
Card Sorting Time Calculator
Sorting is the labour that turns a bulk box into sellable inventory, and nobody costs it before starting. This tells you the hours, the calendar weeks at your actual pace, and the hourly rate the extra money works out to.
Measured rates, not optimistic ones
The pace people quote is the pace of the first fifty cards. Sustained over an evening, with breaks and lookups, throughput is roughly half that. The rates here assume a table, a system and a box already open — not a floor covered in piles.
The last line is the one that surprises people. Photographing, describing, pricing and posting a single card takes ten to fifteen minutes, so a thousand-card box that would take eleven hours to sort by set takes two hundred hours to list. That is a part-time job, not a weekend.
When sorting genuinely pays
- Pre-1980 boxes. Commons carry value, so every card sorted is money found. Sort these.
- Anything with unidentified stars. Triage alone — an hour or two — captures most of the upside.
- Junk wax. Triage and stop. Sorting 1990 commons by set converts hours into a lot worth a few dollars.
- Modern boxes. The value is in parallels and numbering, so scanning for serial numbers beats sorting by set.
Questions people ask about this
How long does it take to sort 5,000 cards?
About 20 hours to sort by sport and year, 55 hours to sort by set in number order, or roughly 20 hours if you only triage — pulling recognisable names and leaving the rest. Individually listing them for sale is a different order of magnitude: at 10–15 minutes a card, 5,000 cards is over a thousand hours.
Is it worth sorting cards before selling?
Divide the extra money sorting unlocks by the hours it takes. Triage almost always pays, because two hours of pulling names captures most of the value in a typical box. Deep sorting pays on pre-1980 collections where commons have value, and rarely pays on junk wax, where the sorted lot is worth barely more than the unsorted one.
What is the fastest way to sort a card collection?
Triage in one pass: anything with a recognisable name, anything with a serial number, autograph or fabric swatch, and anything printed before 1980 goes into a keep pile; the rest goes into a bulk box you never open again. That single pass captures most of the value at about 250 cards an hour.
Where these numbers come from
Rates on this page were last checked against the published price lists on . Grading companies change fees and pause tiers without notice — confirm the total on the submission form before you pay.