CS2 Float Explained: What the Wear Number Means for Your Wallet

The moment any skin enters the game — out of a case, from a trade-up contract, or as a weekly drop — it is assigned a wear rating between 0.00 and 1.00. That number is permanent. It does not creep upward as you play matches, it does not reset when the skin is traded or sold, and there is no way to polish it lower. A skin that rolls 0.0421 at unboxing will read 0.0421 in ten years, whether it sits untouched in an inventory or fires a million rounds. BLAST's guide to wear levels covers the technical background; the practical takeaway is that the number is a birthmark, not a battery.

The rating controls how much wear the finish displays: scratches on the body, faded paint on edges, exposed metal along the barrel. Valve's five named tiers — Factory New down to Battle-Scarred — are simply labeled slices of that 0-to-1 scale. Inspecting a skin in-game shows you the visual wear and the tier name, but not the exact digits. For those you need a third-party lookup like the csfloat.com checker, and the whole process takes under a minute — I walk through every method in how to check a float before you buy.

One more quirk worth knowing: rolls are not spread evenly across the scale. Unboxing heavily favors the middle tiers, which is why Factory New copies of most skins are genuinely scarce even though the tier looks like an ordinary 7% slice on paper.

Here is the full scale in one table. The price column comes from my own tracking sheet — averages across dozens of popular skins as of mid-2026 — and it describes the typical premium or discount versus a Field-Tested copy of the same skin. Individual skins swing wider, but the shape of the curve holds remarkably well.

Notice how lopsided the slices are: Battle-Scarred covers more than half the scale, while Factory New and Well-Worn each get a sliver. That asymmetry is why a 0.45 and a 0.95 share a name but look nothing alike. The dedicated CS2 float chart page expands this table with visual descriptions and worked buying examples at specific numbers.

Abstract percentages only go so far, so here are three named examples showing how the wear number moves real listings.

AK-47 Redline. The Redline's float starts at 0.10, so Factory New copies do not exist and Minimal Wear is squeezed into a thin 0.10-0.15 band. That scarcity means MW Redlines routinely sell for two and a half to three times the Field-Tested price. When case prices spiked in July 2025, my spreadsheet showed FT Redline moving from around $28 to around $45 in about six weeks — and the MW copies climbed even faster in percentage terms.

AWP Dragon Lore. At the top of the market, wear multiplies already-huge numbers. A Battle-Scarred Dragon Lore sells for a fraction of what Factory New copies command, and the gap between the two tiers runs well into the tens of thousands of dollars as of mid-2026. Same finish, same rarity — the wear number does all of that work.

M4A1-S Printstream. The Printstream shows wear mostly as darkening on its white body, and Factory New copies typically list 60-80% above Field-Tested ones. Yet a low-float FT copy near 0.16 looks close to Minimal Wear in-game, which makes it one of the better value plays I know — the buyer who checks the exact number pays FT money for near-MW looks.

Not every finish uses the whole 0-to-1 scale. Many skins have capped ranges set by their designers, which means entire wear tiers simply never exist for them.

• AWP Asiimov is capped at 0.18 to 1.00. There has never been a Factory New or Minimal Wear Asiimov, and there never will be — the best possible copy is a low-float Field-Tested.
• AK-47 Redline runs 0.10 to 0.70. No Factory New exists, and you will also never see a truly beat-up 0.9-float copy.
• Glock-18 Fade caps at 0.00 to 0.08, so nearly every copy is Factory New with a tiny Minimal Wear sliver. "FN" is not a selling point here; it is the default.

Caps reshape prices in ways the generic curve cannot predict. On the Asiimov, floats just above 0.18 carry a hefty premium because they are the ceiling of what exists. On the Fade, a Minimal Wear copy is the oddity. Before you assume a wear tier is available for a skin you want, look up its actual range — a seller advertising the "best possible float" may be describing a cap, not a bargain.

Finding a skin's true range takes seconds: checker sites display the minimum and maximum alongside the exact number, and any database listing for the finish will show which tiers exist. I keep a caps column in my own spreadsheet for exactly this reason — in 2024 I nearly paid a 20% premium for a "rare low float" Asiimov before realizing 0.19 is simply what most of them look like.

If you are buying to use skins rather than collect them, the middle of the scale is where your money goes furthest. Field-Tested is the widest commonly traded tier at 0.15-0.38, and the difference between its two ends is dramatic: a 0.16 often looks one tier better than its label, while a 0.36 shows every scratch. Because most marketplaces price by tier name rather than by exact number, patient buyers can hunt low-float FT copies for essentially no premium. My guide to Field-Tested skins covers which finishes hide their wear best.

Minimal Wear plays a different role: it is the "looks clean in-game" tier at a fraction of Factory New money. In actual matches, viewed at gameplay distance, a 0.08 and a 0.02 are nearly indistinguishable — a point I test with my own inventory more often than I would like to admit. The Minimal Wear guide goes deeper on when MW is worth the step up, and the side-by-side Factory New vs Minimal Wear vs Field-Tested comparison shows the three tiers on the same skins so you can judge with your own eyes.

The wear system attracts folklore, and some of it gets expensive. Five myths I see constantly:

• "Skins wear down over time." They do not. The number is fixed at creation, full stop. Nobody needs to "preserve" a skin by keeping it unequipped.
• "Lower float always looks better." Usually, but not always. Some finishes barely change across their range, and a few — the AWP Asiimov's near-1.00 "Blackiimov" is the famous case — are prized at high floats because the wear creates a distinct all-black look that can cost more than cleaner copies.
• "Steam shows the exact float." The Steam client and Market show the tier name and the visual model, never the digits. Buyers who stop there routinely pay a 0.14 price for a 0.149.
• "Trade-ups can reroll a skin's wear." A trade-up produces a new skin whose number is derived from the average of the ten inputs, mapped into the output's range. You cannot re-spin an existing skin.
• "StatTrak changes the wear pool." StatTrak and souvenir status have no effect on the wear number or its range — they are separate attributes.

The wear number matters because the market around it is enormous: analysts put the skin economy at roughly $6.7-8 billion in 2026, spread across some 27.9 million item owners, according to SteamAnalyst's 2026 market report. At that scale, sellers who know their exact numbers price accordingly — and buyers who do not are the ones funding the difference.

The good news is that checking costs nothing. Inspecting in-game shows the visual wear; pasting a listing's inspect link into a checker like csfloat.com reveals the exact digits in seconds. On the Steam Community Market, remember that a 15% total fee comes out of every sale, so sellers there price it in — one more reason two listings of the same skin deserve a closer look before you commit. Third-party marketplaces such as CSFloat, Skinport, and Buff163 display exact wear numbers directly in their listings, which makes comparing copies easier, though each platform has its own fees and cash-out rules to weigh. For skin-by-skin price context across wear tiers, start from our CS2 skin prices homepage and drill into the tier guides from there.