Factory New CS2 Skins: The 0.00–0.07 Tier, and When It Is Worth Paying For

Every skin in Counter-Strike 2 is stamped with a float value the instant it is created — unboxed from a case, pulled from a trade-up contract, or awarded as a drop. That number is a decimal between 0 and 1, it is fixed forever, and it drives the texture wear the game renders on the model. The five named tiers are simply labelled buckets over that continuous number:

Factory New is joint-narrowest with Well-Worn at 0.07 of range. That matters: the narrower the band, the fewer unboxings land inside it, all else equal. The full ladder and the price consequences of each rung are laid out on our CS2 float chart, and the neighbouring tier is covered on minimal wear CS2 skins.

One correction to a myth I still see repeated: playing with a skin does not wear it down. The float is set at creation and never moves. A Factory New AK you have carried through 4,000 matches is exactly as Factory New as the day it dropped.

If float were drawn uniformly from 0 to 1, roughly 7% of every skin would arrive Factory New. It is not uniform, and it is not 7%. Valve draws the raw float from a distribution weighted heavily toward the low end, which pushes more copies into the clean tiers than a flat draw would — and then applies a per-skin cap that can move the whole distribution somewhere else entirely.

The practical result on the market is that FN supply varies enormously by skin. For a modern Covert from a current case, Factory New copies are plentiful enough that the premium over Minimal Wear is often under 30%. For an item from a discontinued collection whose supply froze years ago, every FN copy that exists already exists, and the premium balloons.

This is why quoting a single "Factory New premium" number for CS2 is meaningless. The right question is always: how many FN copies of this specific skin can exist, and how many are still in circulation?

Here is the part most guides skip. Every skin has a float cap — a minimum and maximum float defined by its creator. If a skin's minimum float is above 0.07, a Factory New copy is not rare; it is impossible. No amount of unboxing will produce one, because the game will not generate a float in that range for that item.

Well-known examples of skins whose minimum float sits above the Factory New ceiling include the AWP | Worm God's stablemates in several older collections, a number of the Operation Bravo–era pieces, and — the one that catches new buyers most often — several popular "battle-worn look" designs where the artist deliberately set a high floor so the skin always shows grime.

The reason this matters commercially: if you see a listing claiming Factory New for a skin you believe is capped above 0.07, you are looking at either a mislabelled third-party listing or a scam. Before paying an FN premium on anything unfamiliar, check the skin's float cap. The method is in our guide to how to check CS2 float, and the free tooling is covered on the CS2 float checker page.

The inverse also exists: some skins have a maximum float below 0.45, meaning Battle-Scarred copies cannot exist for them either. Wear caps run in both directions.

I pull the lowest live listing for five skins across the wears they trade in, on the same refresh (31 August 2026), and divide the Factory New price by the price of the cheapest tier I track for that skin. These are real numbers from that snapshot, refreshed automatically, not estimates:

Two patterns fall out of that table immediately. First, the multiple is largest on cheap skins — the Glock costs 4.08× more Factory New, and in absolute terms that is a two-figure decision, not a life-changing one. Second, the multiple shrinks as the item gets more expensive, because at four figures the buyer pool is thin and price is set by the handful of people who can afford any copy at all.

The dollar-per-float-point maths is brutal on the cheap end and gentle at the top. That is the opposite of what most beginners assume.

There are four situations where I pay it without hesitating.

The skin is light-bodied or gloss-finished. Wear shows dramatically on pale bases and high-gloss finishes — Printstream, Neo-Noir, anything with large flat white or chrome areas. On these, Field-Tested genuinely looks scuffed at conversational distance, and the premium buys a visibly different item.

The absolute dollar gap is small. A two-figure step up on a Glock is a coffee-and-lunch decision. A four-figure step up on a Dragon Lore is not. Judge the gap in dollars you would actually miss, not in multiples.

You are buying to hold rather than to play. FN copies of discontinued skins have historically been the most liquid tier in a downturn, because the buyer who wants the item at all usually wants the best copy. That is not a guarantee — see our honest take on why CS2 skin prices drop — but it is a consistent pattern.

The float is near the bottom of the band. Which brings us to the sub-tier nobody advertises.

Within Factory New there is a second, unlabelled hierarchy. A 0.0699 float and a 0.0012 float both display as Factory New in your inventory, and on most skins they look identical in-game. The market does not treat them identically at all.

Floats below roughly 0.01 attract a collector premium that can run anywhere from 10% to several hundred percent over a mid-band FN, depending on how contested the skin is. Floats below 0.001 are chased obsessively, and the very lowest known float of a given skin becomes a named item that trades privately. Our page on lowest float CS2 skins covers that end of the market in detail.

For a normal buyer the takeaway is defensive rather than aspirational: if you are paying an FN premium, spend the extra thirty seconds to check where in the 0.00–0.07 band your specific copy sits. Two listings at the same price can be meaningfully different items, and the cheaper-looking one is sometimes the better buy.

Three checks, in order, none of which take more than a minute.

1. Read the float, not the label. On CSFloat, Skinport and most third-party markets the exact float is displayed on the listing. On the Steam Community Market it is not, so use the inspect link with a float-reading tool before committing.

2. Confirm the skin can be Factory New. Check the item's float cap. If the minimum float for that skin is above 0.07, walk away.

3. Compare against the tier below. Pull up the Minimal Wear price on the same market. If the FN premium is above about 2× on a skin that is neither pale nor gloss-finished, you are usually paying for the word rather than the appearance.

That third check has saved me more money than the other two combined, and it is the one people skip.

Trade-up contracts output a float derived from the average float of the ten inputs, scaled to the output skin's own float cap. This produces a counter-intuitive rule that catches people out constantly: ten Factory New inputs do not guarantee a Factory New output. If the output skin's float range starts at 0.10, your pristine inputs will still produce a Minimal Wear result at best.

Conversely, if the output skin has a wide float range starting at 0.00, low-float inputs are the whole game — and that is where trade-up profitability lives. The arithmetic, with a worked example, is on our CS2 knife trade-up page, which also explains why the knife version of this dream does not exist.

If you want the head-to-head on the three middle tiers, our comparison of factory new vs minimal wear vs field-tested puts them side by side with images. The bottom of the ladder gets the same treatment on battle scarred CS2 skins.

I buy Factory New when three things are true at once: the skin is pale or glossy, the dollar gap over Minimal Wear is under roughly a quarter of the FN price, and the float sits in the lower half of the band. When any one of those fails, Minimal Wear is almost always the better purchase, and on dark or busy patterns Field-Tested is better still.

The thing to internalise is that "Factory New" is a label describing a range, not a guarantee of a specific appearance or a specific value. Two Factory New copies of the same skin can differ by 0.069 of float and by a three-figure sum. Read the number, not the word — that habit is worth more than any single buying tip on this site. Start from the live CS2 skin price checker on our homepage if you want to see current spreads across wears before you decide.