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Modern coin collectors love coins in PR70. Modern sovereign collectors are no exception. With the significant increases in value of PR70 sovereigns in recent years, I took an afternoon to answer a question I have been asked more than once: Is an NGC PF70UCAM just as good as a PCGS PR70DC?

Rather than guess or tell unverifiable anecdotes, I examined the number of coins both services have graded in PR/PF70 grades and compared it to the number of all coins they have graded for each year. This information is freely available on the PCGS Population Report and the NGC Coin Census, and the numbers can be very easily parsed into spreadsheet software for analysis.

A 2017 sovereign in PCGS PR70DC.

A 2017 sovereign in NGC PF70UCAM.

I performed this analysis on the 28^th November 2022, and the results are clear: While NGC has graded almost triple the number of proof Queen Elizabeth II sovereigns from 1979 to 2022 than PCGS, only about half the number of coins submitted to PCGS made 70 compared to those submitted to NGC. This result shows that NGC is the preferred grading service in the United Kingdom; however, it also shows that it is much harder to obtain a 70 grade on a proof sovereign with PCGS than with NGC.

The bottom line is that proof 70 sovereigns are considerably harder to obtain with PCGS than with NGC. Even if collectors submitted thousands of more coins to PCGS, NGC 70s would still be about twice as easy to locate on the market. This is why we pay more for proof sovereigns in PCGS PR70DC holders. Quite simply, they’re rarer and harder to find.