Factory New Minimal Wear Field Tested: CS2's Three Main Wear Tiers Compared

Every CS2 skin carries an "Exterior" label — one of five wear tiers — that summarizes its float value, a decimal between 0.00 and 1.00 rolled the instant the item is created. Lower float means less painted-on wear. The label is a shorthand: instead of asking buyers to interpret "0.23," Valve buckets floats into named ranges. When people compare factory new minimal wear field tested listings, what they're really asking is how much visual cleanliness each step up the ladder buys, and how much of the price gap is cosmetics versus pure scarcity.

Here is how the five tiers divide the float scale, and the role each one plays in day-to-day trading. Notice how lopsided the slices are — that asymmetry drives almost everything about supply.

Tier	Float range	Slice of the 0–1 scale	Typical market role
Factory New (FN)	0.00 – 0.07	7%	Showcase tier; thinnest supply, largest premiums
Minimal Wear (MW)	0.07 – 0.15	8%	Near-new looks at a discount; the compromise tier
Field-Tested (FT)	0.15 – 0.38	23%	Volume king; the most listings and most stable prices
Well-Worn (WW)	0.38 – 0.45	7%	Thin, awkward band; often barely cheaper than FT
Battle-Scarred (BS)	0.45 – 1.00	55%	Bargain bin, with occasional collector niches

Because unboxing rolls cluster toward the lower-middle of the scale, Field-Tested ends up as the natural home of most drops, while true Factory New copies stay scarce. Our float value hub digs into the decimal itself; this page focuses on how the three big labels translate into dollars.

The boundaries are hard cutoffs, not gradients. A skin at 0.0699 is Factory New; at 0.0701 it's Minimal Wear, forever. Float is fixed at the moment of unboxing or trade-up and never changes afterward — no amount of matches, inspects, or trades wears a skin down. BLAST's explainer on float value and wear levels is a solid neutral reference if you want the mechanics from a second source.

The complication: many skins don't span the full 0.00–1.00 scale. Each finish has its own float cap and floor set by Valve, and the five tier labels still apply inside that window. Three examples worth memorizing:

• AK-47 Redline has a floor of 0.10, so Factory New Redlines simply don't exist, and its Minimal Wear band is squeezed into 0.10–0.15.
• AWP Asiimov has a floor of 0.18 — no FN, no MW. Field-Tested is the cleanest Asiimov you can ever own, which quietly changes the value math for the entire skin.
• Doppler knives cap at 0.08, so essentially every copy is Factory New or clean Minimal Wear.

Before assuming a tier exists for the skin you want, check its specific range on our CS2 float chart. Chasing a Factory New version of a skin that can't roll one is a surprisingly common beginner mistake — and sellers occasionally exploit that confusion.

Wear in CS2 isn't a uniform dirt layer. The paint erodes first at pattern edges and high-contact geometry: the barrel tip, magazine edges, the top of the receiver, stock corners. That means the visual difference between tiers depends heavily on what the skin looks like in those zones.

High-contrast and light-colored finishes suffer most. The white panels on an M4A4 Asiimov turn grey and scuffed as float climbs; a USP-S Cortex shows peppered scratches across its pale body by the mid-0.20s; anything in the Printstream family loses its mirror-clean look fast. Dark, matte finishes hide wear brilliantly — an AK-47 Slate or Redline at 0.30 float reads nearly identical to a 0.16 copy in an actual match because the black base color barely changes, and only the red accents dull slightly.

Viewing distance is the other half of the story. In first-person gameplay you see the left rear quarter of the weapon at arm's length, often while moving. Scratches that look dramatic in the inspect screen's zoom simply don't render at that distance. This is why experienced buyers talk about "inspect-screen wear" versus "in-game wear" — and why paying a large premium to fix wear you'll never actually see is the most common way budget players waste money on skins.

Tier pricing runs on two engines: visual delta (how much better does the next tier actually look?) and scarcity (how many copies exist in that band?). When both engines pull together — a bright skin with few clean drops — the FN premium gets enormous. When both are weak — a dark skin with plentiful supply — tiers compress until MW costs barely 15% more than FT. There is no universal multiplier, which is exactly why per-skin comparison matters. Here's the same-skin ladder for two of the most traded rifles, from my price log, with rough Steam Community Market figures as of mid-2026:

Wear tier	AK-47 Redline	AWP Asiimov
Factory New	Doesn't exist (0.10 floor)	Doesn't exist (0.18 floor)
Minimal Wear	Around $80	Doesn't exist (0.18 floor)
Field-Tested	Around $40	Around $110
Well-Worn	Around $30	Around $95
Battle-Scarred	Around $22	Around $80

Read the two columns side by side and the logic jumps out. Redline FT sells for roughly half its MW price — a huge step — because MW Redlines are squeezed into a tiny 0.10–0.15 window and stay scarce. Asiimov's ladder is flat by comparison: with FT as its ceiling tier, there's no cleaner version pulling prices upward, so WW trails FT by only 15% or so. In May 2025, when the whole market pulled back by double digits inside two weeks, I watched Redline FT dip about $6 while the MW copies barely moved — thin premium bands often ride out sell-offs better than the volume tier does.

My one-line buying rule: pay for the wear you can see at arm's length in a match — not the wear the tooltip brags about.

Field-Tested is the right call more often than its reputation suggests. Buy FT when the skin's base is dark or busy (Redline, Slate, most camo-style finishes), when the skin's float floor makes FT the best available tier anyway (Asiimov), or when you're stretching a fixed budget across a whole loadout rather than one showpiece. A $100 budget buys one Minimal Wear rifle — or a Field-Tested rifle, pistol, and knife-adjacent glove upgrade with change left over. You can browse current tier-by-tier examples across the market on CS2 Skin Prices to sanity-check any gap before paying it.

The elite version of this move is low-float FT hunting: copies in the 0.15–0.18 window carry the Field-Tested label and something close to the Field-Tested price, but look nearly Minimal Wear on the model. Sellers list them only modestly above the tier average, and they're the single best value pocket in the entire wear system. We've written a dedicated guide to the tier — see Field-Tested in CS2 — including which skins hide their wear best and which give it away.

Minimal Wear earns its premium in specific situations. Bright, reflective, or white-heavy finishes — Printstream, Asiimov-style whites, chrome and pearl effects — degrade visibly through the FT band, so stepping up to MW buys a difference you'll genuinely notice in game. Sticker crafters should also default to MW or better: a clean canvas makes a $30 sticker investment look intentional instead of grimy. And if resale matters to you, MW copies of popular skins sell faster and hold their percentage value better than high-float FT copies of the same skin, because the pool of "clean copy" buyers is deep and constant.

The premium math is friendlier than most people assume. On plenty of mid-priced skins, MW runs only 10–25% above FT — a modest toll for near-new looks. The trap is paying that toll on a dark skin where the tiers are visually identical, or paying way past it on skins where FN supply is healthy and drags MW's ceiling down. Our Minimal Wear guide breaks down the sweet-spot floats and the best-value MW picks by price bracket.

Because labels bucket a continuous decimal, the edges of every band hide traps. The classic one is the high-float Minimal Wear copy: a 0.145 float wears the MW label and the MW price, but sits a hair from the FT boundary and looks like a mid-range Field-Tested skin on the model. You pay the clean-tier premium for volume-tier looks. The mirror image — 0.151 FT that looks like MW — is the bargain version of the same math, and it's the reason serious buyers filter by decimal, not by label.

A few habits neutralize every trap in this category:

1. Never buy on the label alone; check the actual decimal first. Our walkthrough on how to check CS2 float covers the in-game inspect method and third-party tools.
2. Know the skin's personal float window before judging a number — a "high" float on a capped skin can be its best available version.
3. Inspect in-game whenever real money is involved. Screenshots flatter; the 3D model doesn't.
4. Compare against the same tier only. A FT listing "cheap versus MW prices" isn't cheap, it's mislabeled marketing.

None of this requires paid tools — just thirty seconds of checking before you commit.

StatTrak and Souvenir versions follow exactly the same float bands, but they multiply the scarcity engine. StatTrak drops are far rarer than normal ones, so the tier ladder gets steeper: a StatTrak FN copy of a popular skin can run several times its normal-FN price, while StatTrak FT often carries a much gentler markup. If you want the orange counter on a budget, StatTrak Field-Tested is usually the rational entry point — the counter looks identical at every float.

Souvenir items — dropped around Majors and stamped with event stickers — sit in their own pool with no StatTrak variant, and their tier gaps swing on event nostalgia as much as wear. A clean-float Souvenir from a beloved Major can outprice logic entirely, which is collector territory rather than value shopping. For most budget players the takeaway is simple: master the plain factory new minimal wear field tested ladder first, and treat StatTrak and Souvenir premiums as separate purchases layered on top — ones that only hold their value when the underlying skin does.