I noticed that my recent submission to NGC is still "Scheduled for Grading" after 21 business days for Economy tier. So, I looked up the turnaround times to make sure I wasn't off by a day or two. To my dismay, it's 34 business days for World submissions (!), while US submissions are at or about the same. 13 whole business days or 2.5 calendar weeks more for World than US... that must've been a recent change since I could have sworn it was in the 20s. For the Standard tier, it increased for World coins. It appears that if you want the old Economy turnaround times, then you have to pay for Standard tier grading. This means that NGC is either more busy in terms of volume, or have fewer graders, right? Is this just a summer vacation thing for the graders, or did they just slip that in on the sly due to greater demand? I hope this doesn't mean that grading prices will increase if these changes are due to an increase in submissions... Thanks in advance!
My NGC submission took over a month from scan in to ship out. I think they had a quality control issue with it though.
Remember, it's 21 business days. Toss in weekends and you're up in the 25-30 day range. And I agree with the "vacation time" observation. Although I don't think it applies at this particular time big shows put more coins into the pipeline. Shows like the ANA, Whitman, Long Beach and FUN have an impact.
Yeah at first I had to do a double take on the business days; unfortunately though, it increased by 13 or so business days! 34 total business days for World submissions and that makes it nearly 7 calendar weeks or 48 calendar days!
My last submission got caught up in the ANA break. Finished promptly the next week though. I have one down there now, monitoring for the status. My experience with the last submission was the time from "Scheduled for Grading" to "Shipped" was excessive, which may indicate there was a backlog.
I've got an NGC Ancients submission I mailed off on Saturday, 8/12, so I fully expect it'll almost be fall by the time it gets back to me.
I wonder if it's due to a larger influx of counterfeits so they might want more time investigating. There was a time when a huge influx of high grade counterfeits were submitted around the same time. This fortunately allowed the major TPGs to raise a flag and do some homework.
With what I saw being shipped back to NGC from Denver, it wouldn't surprise me if "all hands on deck" are doing nothing but 2017 Enhanced Uncirculated sets for a couple of weeks.
As I mentioned in my other thread, I got my EU set grades yesterday, and they only left Denver on August 5.
I've actually found it quite handy to slow down my NGC submissions by having submissions I especially care about flagged to ship with slower submissions. This gives you a window after the coins have gone to Quality Control but before they have Finalized and Shipped with which you can take a look at the final records online (which is what will appear on the labels) and catch any errors before they go out. I catch probably 2-3 errors on every batch of submissions this way and it saves me time and frustration in the long run. I've even caught coins that were going to come back unslabbed as unattributable and been able to email them supplemental information that resulted in the types being added.
Yeah, I called NGC and they told me that the 34 day World economy submission time is temporary, because they had received a huge order. Thank goodness!
