CS2 Float Values Explained: Why Two Identical Skins Have Wildly Different Prices

Two identical Redlines, one costs 40% more

Search any marketplace for a Field-Tested AK-47 Redline and sort by price. The listings at the top and the bottom carry the same name, the same wear label, often the same stickers: nothing on the surface explains why one seller wants 40% more. The explanation is one number in the item's guts.

Every CS2 skin is born with a float value: a number between 0.00 and 1.00, generated the moment the item is created, from a case, a drop, or a trade-up. Low float means pristine paint; high float means scratches, faded color, and worn edges. The float is fixed forever. Playing ten thousand matches with a knife changes nothing, because CS2 skins do not age.

The wear label everyone knows, Factory New through Battle-Scarred, is just a bucket the float falls into. Two skins can share a bucket and sit at its opposite ends, which is exactly what separates the cheap Redline from the expensive one. Prices for named skins follow the float everywhere it matters, so learning to read one number turns a wall of confusing listings into an ordered list.

The five wear brackets

The float ranges behind the labels are fixed and identical for every skin in the game:

Notice how narrow the top brackets are and how wide the bottom ones run. Factory New spans seven hundredths of the scale; Battle-Scarred spans more than half of it. That asymmetry is why "Field-Tested" tells you so little: a 0.15 float Field-Tested skin borders Minimal Wear and can look nearly clean, while a 0.37 float with the same label sits one hair from Well-Worn.

Every skin has its own cap

Here is the part most buyers learn the expensive way: the 0.00 to 1.00 scale is the theoretical range, and each skin rolls its float inside its own narrower window. Some famous examples, with their actual limits:

The consequences are very practical. Anyone offering you a Factory New AWP Asiimov is describing an item Valve's own rules cannot produce, the same category of impossible as the no-trade-hold promises we covered in our trade hold guide. And a Minimal Wear Redline is not slightly better than Field-Tested, it is a rarity squeezed into a 0.05-wide window, priced accordingly.

Why a digit in the third decimal moves prices

Within a bracket, floats near the good edge sell at a premium and floats near the bad edge sell at a discount. But at the extremes, float turns from a quality measure into a collectible in its own right:

• Low-float collecting. For popular skins, floats like 0.0004 trade at multiples of an ordinary Factory New price. The skin looks barely better; the number itself is the trophy, and there are ranking sites tracking the lowest known float of each skin.
• The Blackiimov exception. High float usually means discount, but a Battle-Scarred AWP Asiimov near the 1.00 ceiling turns almost fully black and collectors pay extra for it. The rule "lower is better" has exceptions wherever a high float looks distinctive.
• Bracket edges are bargains or traps. A 0.151 float Field-Tested skin is visually a Minimal Wear skin at a Field-Tested price. A 0.379 float is a Well-Worn skin wearing a nicer label. Same label, opposite deals.

The skins where float games matter most are the liquid, heavily traded ones, because deep markets price every hundredth. These four are textbook cases:

AWP

Asiimov

CovertST™$74.9

AK-47

Redline

ClassifiedST™$25.53

Glock-18

Fade

Restricted$1,841.61

AK-47

Case Hardened

ClassifiedST™$196.23

Float windows, wear-by-wear prices, and case sources for all 2,000+ skins are in our CS2 skins database, and the ceiling of this whole game is visible in our list of the most expensive CS2 skins, where float records help set the record price tags.

Floats in trade-up contracts

Trade-up contracts are where float knowledge stops being trivia and starts printing or burning money. The float of the skin you receive is not random. It is computed from your inputs:

1. Take the floats of your ten input skins and normalize each within its own float window.
2. Average the ten normalized values.
3. Map that average onto the output skin's float window.

The consequence: ten low-float inputs guarantee a low-float output, every time. Traders exploit this by feeding cheap Factory New inputs into contracts targeting skins whose Factory New versions sell at a premium. It also bites the careless: ten Battle-Scarred inputs cannot roll a clean outcome, no matter how lucky you feel.

Before running any contract, check the float windows of every possible outcome, because a "Factory New" result mapped onto a skin whose window starts at 0.18 will come out Field-Tested. Our trade-up calculator does the mapping for each possible result so you can see the realistic wear before you burn ten skins finding out.

How to check a float before you buy

Never buy on the wear label alone. Checking the real number takes seconds:

1. On the marketplace. Serious platforms print the exact float on the listing and let you filter searches by float range. CSFloat literally grew out of a float-checking browser extension before it became a marketplace, and float-range search is standard on most major sites now.
2. In game. Inspect the item, and the wear meter under the skin shows where the float sits. It is coarser than the raw number but catches label-edge surprises.
3. Inspect link plus a checker. Any listing exposes an inspect link. Paste it into a float checker to get the precise value, the paint seed, and screenshots from every angle. Do this for anything expensive, always.

Where you do the buying matters as much as the checking. Float filters, inspect links, and honest wear previews are table stakes on good platforms and mysteriously missing on bad ones, and our guide to choosing a marketplace covers which is which.

What float does not tell you

Float is one of four inputs into a skin's price, and on some skins it is not even the loudest one:

• Pattern index. Each skin also rolls a pattern number that decides how the texture is placed. On an AK-47 Case Hardened, the pattern decides how much of the body is blue, and a top "blue gem" pattern is worth hundreds of times a plain one at the same float. Fade percentages and Doppler phases are the same idea wearing different names.
• Stickers and charms. Applied stickers can add real value, especially rare tournament stickers from old majors, and they are invisible to the float.
• StatTrak. The kill counter is a separate attribute with its own price ladder per wear bracket.

So read a listing in this order: skin, wear label, float, pattern, extras. The label sorts the market, the float prices the item, and the pattern is where the freak outliers live. Miss the last step and you might sell a blue gem for the price of its float.

Does the float change as I use a skin?

No. The float is generated once, when the item is created, and never changes afterward. No amount of matches, inspects, or years in an inventory wears a skin down. The "wear" in the label describes how the skin was painted at birth, not what has happened to it since.

Is a lower float always worth more?

Usually, within the same skin, but with two exceptions worth knowing. Some skins look distinctive at high floats, like the near-black Battle-Scarred Asiimov, and collectors pay premiums there. And on pattern-driven skins like the Case Hardened family, the pattern can matter so much more than the float that a Battle-Scarred blue gem outprices a Factory New plain roll many times over.

Why can I never find a Factory New AWP Asiimov?

Because it cannot exist. The Asiimov's float window starts at 0.18, which is already inside Field-Tested territory, so Factory New and Minimal Wear versions were never possible. Many skins have narrowed windows like this. When a wear bracket for a specific skin shows zero listings everywhere, the float window, not scarcity, is usually the reason.

Do knives and gloves use the same float system?

Yes, the same 0.00 to 1.00 scale with the same five brackets, and the same per-item float windows on top. Gloves in particular tend to have narrow windows that rule out true Factory New on many finishes, which is why clean-looking gloves carry such premiums. Check the specific item's float window before assuming a wear bracket exists for it.