Most float guides hand you a wear tier table and call it done, which is kind of like explaining money by listing the denominations. The table is the easy part. Where float gets interesting, and where most players start losing money on trades without realizing it, is in the details underneath that table: why two skins in the same wear tier can be worth completely different amounts, why some Battle-Scarred skins sell for more than their Factory New versions, and why a single decimal place can swing a price by hundreds of dollars.
We wanted to write something that actually gets into those details because the surface-level stuff is already everywhere. If you already know that float goes from 0.00 to 1.00 and lower means cleaner, you are past the part most guides spend all their time on, and this is where the rest of it starts.
What CS2 Float Value Actually Does
Every skin in CS2 gets stamped with a float value the moment it enters the game, and that number never changes. You can trade it, rename it, slap stickers on it, play with it for ten thousand hours. The decimal stays exactly where it was when the skin was created, whether that was from a case, a trade-up contract, or a random drop.
The game engine reads that float to decide how much visual wear to show on the weapon. A 0.01 looks almost untouched, and something up around 0.85 looks like it has been through a few hundred deathmatches face-down on the pavement.
Your AK hits the same whether it is a 0.001 or a 0.99, so this is 100% a cosmetic and economic system.
The Five Wear Tiers
CS2 splits the full 0.00 to 1.00 range into five conditions.
| Wear Condition | Float Range | What It Looks Like |
| Factory New (FN) | 0.00 to 0.07 | Clean, basically no visible wear |
| Minimal Wear (MW) | 0.07 to 0.15 | Light scratches, still looks good |
| Field-Tested (FT) | 0.15 to 0.38 | Visible wear, varies a lot by skin |
| Well-Worn (WW) | 0.38 to 0.45 | Obvious paint chipping |
| Battle-Scarred (BS) | 0.45 to 1.00 | Heavy wear, faded colors, metal showing |
These ranges are not equally sized, which is the part people tend to overlook. Field-Tested covers a huge band from 0.15 all the way to 0.38, while Well-Worn is crammed into 0.38 to 0.45.
That means a 0.16 FT can look almost as clean as Minimal Wear, and a 0.37 FT can look nearly as rough as Well-Worn. If you are buying anything worth real money and only checking the condition tag, you are guessing at what you will get.
Why the Exact Decimal Changes the Price
Tier Boundaries and the Price Jump
An AK-47 Redline at 0.16 costs whatever the current FT rate is. Drop that to 0.15 and it crosses into Minimal Wear, and the price jumps even though visually you would struggle to tell them apart.
The tier boundary is doing the heavy lifting there, not the appearance. This is something a lot of newer traders do not fully appreciate until they see it happen on a skin they are trying to sell.
The Collector End: Triple Zeros and Record Floats
At the extreme low end, skins in the 0.000x range (what traders call “triple zeros”) get tracked on global float databases and leaderboards. We have seen triple-zero Karambit Fades sell for multiples of what a regular 0.01 goes for, which sounds absurd until you realize that to a collector those are, in fact, different items entirely.
Having the #1 lowest float on a popular skin is a genuine status symbol in the community. The highest float ever recorded on any CS2 skin is a P250 Sand Dune sitting at 0.9999863283634186, which is about as close to 1.00 as the system allows.
Float Caps: Why Some Skins Can Never Be Factory New
Not every skin has the full 0.00 to 1.00 range available. A lot of skins are float-capped, meaning Valve hardcoded a restricted range into the game files.
Some examples you have probably run into:
- AK-47 Redline: 0.10 to 0.70, can never be FN
- AWP Asiimov: starts at 0.18, no FN or MW versions exist
- Desert Eagle Blaze: 0.00 to 0.08, basically FN only
- Doppler knives: capped at 0.08, almost all Factory New
What Float Caps Do to Pricing
A Field-Tested AWP Asiimov at 0.18 (the absolute floor for that skin) is the cleanest Asiimov you can get. Traders price it as the “Factory New equivalent” even though the FT label would normally suggest mid-tier wear.
We have noticed that newer traders sometimes pass on low-float capped skins because the wear tag looks underwhelming. That is a missed opportunity if you understand what you are looking at.
Rust Coat knives go the opposite direction on purpose, with their range starting at 0.40 so they only come in Well-Worn and Battle-Scarred.
Finish Types and How They Change What Wear Means
The game has nine different finish styles, and float does not affect all of them the same way. This is probably the most overlooked aspect of float in CS2, and we think it matters more than most traders realize.
Custom Paint Job
Skins like the AK-47 Vulcan and M4A1-S Hyper Beast wear by scratching. Higher float means more silver metal showing through where paint has chipped away, and this is what most players picture when they think about skin wear.
Patina
The AK-47 Case Hardened, AWP Medusa, and Desert Eagle Kumicho Dragon are all patina finishes, and these skins do not scratch in the traditional sense at all. Instead they shift color and lose saturation as float increases, so a Battle-Scarred Case Hardened still has its full blue pattern intact but just looks darker.
That is why some blue gem patterns get collected in BS condition, although that rabbit hole goes deeper than we can get into here.
Gunsmith
Skins like the AK-47 Empress or M4A1-S Decimator mix both patina and custom paint behaviors. Parts of the skin scratch while other parts shift tone, which can be confusing until you know what finish type you are dealing with.
Why This Matters for Trading
A Battle-Scarred patina skin can genuinely look better than its Factory New version in certain cases. The AWP Asiimov above 0.95 float turns the scope completely black (the community calls this a “Blackiimov”), and these sell for several times the normal BS price.
Knowing what finish type a skin uses tells you whether high float is going to tank the value or create a premium.
Checking Float Values
In-game, you right-click a skin in your inventory and hit inspect. The float shows up along with the finish style and pattern template.
For trading though, you use a dedicated float checker like CSFloat or Tradeit where you paste an inspect link and pull the exact decimal, the paint seed, and the item ID. Steam only shows the wear label and not the actual number, which makes the Market kind of useless for serious buying on its own.
Most third-party marketplaces let you sort listings by float directly. That is how people find low-float skins to flip or collect, and once you start paying attention to the exact decimal it is honestly hard to go back.
Float in Trade-Up Contracts
The trade-up float formula got reworked with the Retakes Update in October 2025. The output float is still based on the average of your 10 input skins, but the game now normalizes each input to a universal 0 to 1 scale based on that skin’s own float cap range before averaging.
What Changed
Skins with narrow float ranges (like the M4A1-S Knight) no longer get an unfair advantage in the calculation. The old system averaged raw float values without adjusting for caps, which meant capped skins could skew the output in ways that felt pretty broken if you knew how to exploit it.
What It Means for You
Low-float inputs give you better condition outputs, and the price gap between a FN and a FT version of certain skins can be hundreds of dollars. Calculators on CSFloat, Pricempire, and TradeUpSpy handle all the math.
We would not recommend trying to work this out by hand with float caps and collection odds both in the mix.
The Collector Premium Market
At the extreme ends of the float scale, the market runs on a different kind of logic than normal skin trading.
Float Rankings
If your skin holds the #1 lowest float globally for that specific item, the premium can be many times the base price. Top-10 and top-50 rankings carry some extra value too, although the premium drops off fast after the first handful of spots.
These rankings get tracked on databases like CSFloat and they update in real time as new skins enter the market. A #1 ranking is not always permanent, which adds a slightly weird speculative element to the whole thing.
FN-Look Skins
A 0.0699 MW that looks indistinguishable from Factory New (people call these “FN-look” skins) sells for more than a standard MW. You get the visual quality of FN without paying FN prices.
We think this is one of the smarter moves in the float market for people who care about how their loadout looks but do not want to overpay for a label.
Sell Your CS2 Skins – CS.Deals
Max-Float and Threshold Collecting
The highest possible float on a given skin gets collected the same way the lowest does, in that a record-holding max-float item carries a premium because of its rarity status. That P250 Sand Dune at 0.9999 is not worth much in absolute dollar terms, but it is worth far more than a regular BS Sand Dune.
Then you have threshold skins like the Blackiimov (AWP Asiimov above 0.95) that create micro-markets around specific float breakpoints where the visual changes enough that players seek them out. Similar effects exist on other patina and gunsmith skins, although the Blackiimov is the most established example by a pretty wide margin.
