CS2 Float Values Explained

A float value is a decimal between 0 and 1 that sets how scratched and faded a CS2 skin looks, and it's rolled once when the item is created. Lower is cleaner, cleaner usually costs more, and the number never changes however much you use the weapon.

Valve's name for it is wear. Traders say float, after the floating point number underneath.

The wear table

The game sorts every float into one of five brackets. These are the exact boundaries, and this site uses the same ones to label every recorded sale:

Look at the widths. Field-Tested covers 0.23 of the scale and Well-Worn covers 0.07, so "Field-Tested" on a listing tells you surprisingly little. A 0.16 can look almost clean. A 0.37 of the same skin looks like it's been dragged behind a car.

How much wear moves the price

More than most people expect, even on rare seeds. I assumed going in that a top-tier pattern would shrug off wear. The sales say otherwise.

Here's the AK-47 Aphrodite Pink Gems group, which is Tier 1 on that skin:

Same tier. The median sticker-free Factory New sale was $3,259.85 and the median sticker-free Minimal Wear sale was $120.94, a gap of about 27x for one step down the wear table. The live numbers, split by wear, are here:

The Five-SeveN Heat Treated Tier 1 group shows the same cliff at a lower price point. Sticker-free Factory New sales had a median of $153, and sticker-free Minimal Wear sales sat around $30.

Case Hardened is gentler, but the gap is still there. In AK-47 Case Hardened Tier 3 Blue Gems, Battle-Scarred copies traded between $222.99 and $327.11, and the cheapest Factory New sale was $1,130.60.

So the useful rule: the pattern decides which market you're in, and the float decides where you sit in it.

Why cleaner costs more

Some of it is looks. Wear eats into the texture and washes out the colour, and on a pattern skin the colour is what the buyer is paying for.

Scarcity does the rest. Low floats at the very bottom of a bracket turn up rarely, and collectors will pay for the number itself. A 0.0003 sells above what anyone could see with their eyes.

Float versus pattern index

People mix these up all the time. Float is how worn the skin looks. The pattern index is where the finish sits on the weapon. They're rolled independently, and knowing one tells you nothing about the other.

Steam's price history ignores the seed and averages across floats, so it can't separate a clean 0.16 from a filthy 0.37. Every sale here comes from a completed CSFloat cash transaction and is stored with its exact float and seed, which means you can compare against sales near your float instead of the whole bracket.

Reading floats on a group page

Every sale on a group or pattern page lists the float it sold at. If you hold a 0.16 Field-Tested, look for sales near 0.16 and ignore the 0.35s.

More definitions live in the CS2 pattern glossary, and how it works covers where the data comes from.