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McDonald's Pikachu pop report: no card has been graded more

Published September 7, 2026 ยท Pop figures refresh with every site build; the current pull is September 4, 2026

No Pokemon card on the census has been graded more than this one. At the September 4, 2026 pull the McDonald's Pikachu pop report reads 290,551 Gem Mint 10s from 331,879 submissions at a gem rate of 87.5 percent, and PSA returned another 8,576 in the last reporting period. The card was given away over three days.

Why is this census bigger than Base Set Charizard's?

The unlimited Base Set Charizard has been eligible for grading since 1999 and stands at 105,288 grades. Pikachu 020/M-P passed it inside its first year on shelves. The runner up across the whole dataset is the felt hat Pikachu, at 117,361 grades on this same pull, and 020/M-P is close to three times that.

Supply explains all of it. McDonald's Japan announced the Happy Set on August 4, 2025: nine toys rotating across three weeks, and on August 9, 10 and 11 a two card pack handed over with every Happy Set bought. One of the two was always this Pikachu, drawn for the occasion. The other was one of five, at random. Five sets per person, while quantities lasted.

Quantities did not last. On August 11 the company published a notice headed "Important information regarding Happy Set sales and our response," confirming bulk purchases made for resale, congestion in and around stores, and ordered food left behind and thrown out. It stated that McDonald's does not condone buying Happy Sets in order to resell them, or the abandonment and disposal of food, and it closed the app accounts of customers who had obstructed store operations.

Three days of Happy Meals, and a third of a million slabs.

The other five came out of the same packs

Five cards shared that second slot, and the census counted them separately: Sprigatito 017 at 10,228 grades, Fuecoco 018 at 10,636, Quaxly 019 at 10,114, Ralts 021 at 10,097 and Riolu 022 at 10,596, all at the September 4, 2026 pull. That is 51,671 between them. The Pikachu has been graded more than six times as often as all five put together.

Adjust for the print and it stays lopsided. Pikachu went into every pack and each of the others into roughly one pack in five, so about five Pikachu were printed for every Riolu. It has been graded thirty two times as often. Per copy off the press, it reaches PSA more than six times as readily as the card it was packed with.

The odds are not the difference. All six gem inside a band 1.60 points wide, from Fuecoco at 86.47 percent to Sprigatito at 88.07, with Pikachu's 87.5 percent in the middle of it. Same paper, same pack, same August weekend, same result at the grader. What changed between the rows is who wanted the card afterwards, and the gap is still opening: PSA returned 8,576 Pikachu last period against 188 to 233 for each of the other five.

Nishida's burger, and the arches inside the frame

The credit line reads Illus. Yuu Nishida. Pikachu stands at a restaurant table with one paw out toward a burger on a paper wrapper, an orange drink and a side of corn beside it, chairs and a potted plant behind. The McDonald's arches sit on a red tile printed inside the illustration window at lower right rather than out in the border, and that tile is the only thing on the card face marking it as a tie in. Below: 70 HP Basic, one attack for 10 damage, regulation mark H, 020/M-P, a 2025 copyright.

Nothing there explains a hundred dollar slab. What the layout does explain is part of the gem rate. The frame is yellow from the outer edge inward, and yellow forgives a soft edge in a way the black bordered promos of the same era never do, so whitening has to be real before it shows.

The bigger reason is duller. This card spent no time in a binder. It came sealed, went into a sleeve within minutes of the counter, and much of the print run was in a submission envelope before the end of 2025. Handling is what destroys grades, and almost nobody handled these.

The price is what a census this size does

PriceCharting's monthly series starts the month the card was given away and runs one shape: a spike and a long slide. The PSA 10 read $199.76 in August 2025 and $295.01 in September, then fell every month to $67.13 in February 2026 before recovering to $100.00 at the September 7, 2026 read. That is 66 percent off the peak and 49 percent up off the floor. The raw card ran the same route, $62.19 in September 2025 down to $25.80 now.

Set that against Moonbreon, whose price never flinched at its own census. Population and price do not have to move against each other. Here they did, because this supply arrived all at once and then kept arriving.

What the volume did buy is a market you can get out of. Reading the sold tape on September 7, 2026, thirty PSA 10 sales fit inside three days, September 4 to September 6, at a $95.44 median. Thirty PSA 9 sales took eight days and cleared at $41.00. Thirty raw sales took fifteen and cleared at $24.70. Depth like that is worth more than most collectors credit.

Nippon TV filmed the queues and the abandoned trays in August 2025. Every slab counted above came out of that weekend.

Running the fee against a hundred dollar ceiling

Grading mathAmount
Raw copy (as of September 7, 2026)$25
PSA grading, Regular service$80
PSA 10 sale (as of September 7, 2026, PriceCharting sold tape)$95
PSA 9 sale (as of September 7, 2026, PriceCharting sold tape)$41
Margin if it gems-$9
Margin at PSA 9-$64

A raw copy and the fee cost more than the best outcome sells for. PSA listed Regular service at $79.99 on September 7, 2026, with Value tiers still paused and an estimated 70 to 80 business day turnaround. PSA's Japanese arm lists its own Regular at 11,980 yen including tax at a 60 business day estimate, and adds on the same page that a parcel takes roughly two to two and a half months after arrival just to be issued an order number. Neither door is a cheap one.

Then there is the sale. eBay and shipping take something near 15 percent off a slab, which turns a $95.44 median into about $81 against roughly $105 of cost. A guaranteed 10 loses money here, so no gem rate rescues it, and the 30,474 copies sitting at PSA 9 make the miss worse than the hit is good.

And PSA still returned 8,576 of them last period. That number is a rear view mirror. At a Japanese round trip near five months, this batch was mailed in the spring, when the 10 was trading around $103. Whether those submitters were pricing the recovery or working through stock they had already bought, the census cannot say.

If one is sitting in a binder

Leave it there. A finished PSA 10 costs less than making one, arrives this week, and has 290,551 identical siblings to choose from, so nothing about the transaction is urgent. If you want it slabbed for the page rather than the spread, buy the slab.

If you are grading anyway, screen the cut before the surface. A yellow border makes an off center print hard to catch by eye, and centering separates the 30,474 nines from the tens far more often than damage does. At 87.5 percent, though, the odds were never the problem here, which is the point our guide to reading a pop report keeps making: a population answers how many, never how much. Sort every row by gem rate, census and price in the BetterPop gallery.

Sources

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