CS2 Float and Wear Guide: Ranges, Float Caps, and What Wear Costs

Two copies of the same skin can differ in price by a factor of nine, and the only difference between them is a decimal number you cannot see in the inventory grid. That number is the float value, and it is the single most mispriced attribute in CS2 trading. Buyers overpay for wear labels, sellers underprice good floats, and both mistakes come from treating the five exterior names as the whole story. This guide covers what float actually is, why some skins can never be Factory New, and what the wear gap costs in real dollars, computed from our July 2026 pricing snapshot across more than 30 tracked marketplaces.

What a float value actually is

Every skin instance in CS2 carries a wear rating: a number between 0 and 1, assigned the moment the item is created (unboxed, dropped, or produced by a trade-up) and never changed afterward. Playing with a skin does not degrade it. A 0.03 float stays 0.03 forever.

Lower means cleaner. A float near 0 renders almost untouched, a float near 1 renders scratched, faded, and grimy. The number itself is continuous, so two “Field-Tested” copies of the same skin can look meaningfully different: one at 0.16 looks close to Minimal Wear, one at 0.37 looks nearly Battle-Scarred. The exterior label on the item is just a bucket the float falls into.

The five exteriors and their exact ranges

The bucket boundaries are fixed and identical for every weapon skin in the game:

Exterior	Float range	Share of the 0-1 scale
Factory New (FN)	0.00 - 0.07	7%
Minimal Wear (MW)	0.07 - 0.15	8%
Field-Tested (FT)	0.15 - 0.38	23%
Well-Worn (WW)	0.38 - 0.45	7%
Battle-Scarred (BS)	0.45 - 1.00	55%

Two things in this table drive most of the market behavior. First, FN and MW together cover only 15% of the scale, which is why clean copies are structurally scarcer. Second, Battle-Scarred alone covers more than half the scale, so “BS” tells you almost nothing: a 0.46 and a 0.98 wear the same label and look like different skins.

The boundaries are hard cutoffs. A 0.0699 float is Factory New and a 0.0701 is Minimal Wear, even though no human could tell them apart in-game. Markets price the label first and the number second, which creates the edge cases this guide comes back to below.

Float caps: why some skins can never be Factory New

Here is the part most players learn only after an expensive mistake: each skin has its own allowed float window, defined by a min float and max float in the item schema. When the game generates a skin, it rolls a value and rescales it into that window. A skin with a window of 0.18 to 1.00 can never roll below 0.18, so Factory New and Minimal Wear copies of it do not exist and never will.

Real examples from the game data:

Skin	Float window	Exteriors that exist
AK-47 Redline	0.10 - 0.70	MW, FT, WW, BS (no FN)
AWP Asiimov	0.18 - 1.00	FT, WW, BS only
Glock-18 Fade	0.00 - 0.08	FN plus a thin MW slice
Desert Eagle Blaze	0.00 - 0.08	FN plus a thin MW slice
SSG 08 Acid Fade	0.00 - 0.03	FN only
M4A4 Howl	0.00 - 0.40	FN through WW (no BS)
AK-47 Fire Serpent	0.06 - 0.76	All five, but FN only from a 0.06-0.07 sliver
MP7 Fade	0.00 - 0.25	FN, MW, FT (capped mid-FT)

The consequences cut both ways. An FN Fire Serpent is a genuine rarity because only a 0.01-wide window produces it. A Minimal Wear Redline is the best condition that skin can exist in, and the market prices it accordingly: in our July 2026 snapshot the cheapest MW Redline listing sits around $145 while FT starts near $29, a 5x jump between adjacent tiers because MW copies only spawn in the narrow 0.10-0.15 window. And nobody should ever pay a “will upgrade to FN someday” premium on an Asiimov, because there is no FN Asiimov to upgrade to.

Float windows also matter for trade-up contracts: the average float of your ten inputs is rescaled into the output skin’s window, so low-float inputs are how people manufacture clean-looking outputs on purpose.

Same float, different look

A 0.15 float does not look equally worn on every finish. Wear is applied per finish style, so the visible damage a given float produces depends on how the skin was painted.

Painted-over finishes with large light areas show wear early and loudly. AWP Printstream and other Printstreams accumulate visible scuffs on the white body almost immediately; the gap between a 0.01 and a 0.07 Printstream is obvious from across the room. The Asiimov family behaves the same way, its white panels turning grey and chipped.

Patina and hydrographic finishes hide wear. An AK-47 Case Hardened at 0.4 looks broadly similar to one at 0.2 because the blue-and-gold patina texture swallows scratches; with Case Hardened the pattern seed (which parts of the gun are blue) moves price far more than float does, which is the entire blue gem market. Anodized finishes like Doppler barely display wear at all, and Valve caps the knife versions at 0.08 anyway, so every Doppler knife is FN or MW; on those knives the phase determines the price, not the float.

The practical rule: before paying a float premium, look at screenshots of the specific finish at different floats. On some skins FN versus FT is night and day. On others you are paying triple for pixels you will never notice.

What wear costs: real numbers

These are the lowest listed prices per exterior in our July 2026 snapshot, taken across the 30+ marketplaces our price comparison tracks:

Skin	FN low	BS low	FN/BS multiple
AK-47 Asiimov	$344	$38	9.0x
AWP Printstream	$220	$39	5.6x
USP-S Kill Confirmed	$267	$53	5.0x
Glock-18 Water Elemental	$65	$17	3.8x
M4A1-S Printstream	$459	$146	3.1x
AK-47 Case Hardened	$548	$179	3.1x
AWP Dragon Lore	$11,136	$4,691	2.4x
Desert Eagle Printstream	$79	$34	2.3x

The pattern worth noticing: the multiple is not constant. AK-47 Asiimov carries a 9x FN premium because its window starts at 0.05, making FN rolls rare, while its BS copies are plentiful. Dragon Lore compresses to 2.4x because at that price level buyers are paying for the skin itself and demand exists at every wear. Loud white finishes (Printstreams, Asiimovs) punish wear hardest; busy dark finishes compress the gap.

Capped skins produce their own distortions. M4A4 Howl has no BS tier at all, so its “worst” price is a Well-Worn at roughly $3,840 against $6,393 for FN, a spread of only 1.7x across its whole range. And the famous Battle-Scarred AWP Asiimov starts near $74 against $115 for FT: the BS Asiimov with a clean black scope (floats just above 0.45) is a deliberate collector pick, not a budget compromise.

When Minimal Wear costs more than Factory New

On skins capped at 0.08, the usual price ladder inverts. Glock-18 Fade spans 0.00 to 0.08, so almost every copy is FN; the MW tier exists only in the 0.07-0.08 sliver. In our snapshot an MW Glock Fade lists at about $1,921 while FN starts at $1,850. Desert Eagle Blaze shows the same inversion: roughly $728 MW against $696 FN. The “worse” exterior is the scarcer one, and scarcity wins.

These max-float oddities are their own collector niche. On low-capped Fade skins, a 0.079 float is a curiosity people pay extra for, the mirror image of the low-float game.

Low-float premiums

Inside the FN bucket, the market keeps subdividing. A 0.06 FN trades near the bucket floor price; a 0.001 trades well above it; floats with several leading zeros get auctioned rather than listed. This is pure collector demand layered on genuine rarity: unboxing rolls cluster toward the middle of the wear distribution, so extreme low floats are far rarer than the FN label alone implies. Our case odds breakdown covers how wear is assigned at unboxing.

Two cautions. First, low-float premiums are the least liquid part of a skin’s price: the label premium (FN over MW) is paid by everyone, the float premium (0.003 over 0.03) is paid by a thin group of rank chasers, so plan your exit before you pay it. If you may need to cash out quickly, the float premium is the first thing you will not get back. Second, the premium only makes sense on finishes where low float is visible or on items with public float leaderboards, mostly knives and high-tier rifles. A 0.0009 float on a $2 skin is a screenshot, not an asset. Our investment guide goes deeper on which premiums hold.

How to check a float

For items you own, inspect the skin from your CS2 inventory: the info panel shows the numeric wear rating alongside the exterior name.

For items you do not own, every Steam Market and third-party listing exposes an inspect link. Paste it into a float checker (CSFloat’s checker is the community standard) to get the exact float, paint seed, and paint index before you buy. Browser extensions can also inject float values directly into Steam Market listing pages, which turns wear-label shopping into float shopping.

Most third-party marketplaces now show the float on the listing itself, and the serious ones let you sort by it. That sort button is the whole game: it is how you find the 0.15 Field-Tested hiding among 0.35s at the same price. Our reviews of CSFloat and the Steam Market cover where float data is first-class and where you still need to check by hand.

Buying by budget: pay for pixels, not labels

The label boundaries are arbitrary; your eyes are not. This is the buying logic that follows from everything above:

Hunt bracket edges. A 0.15-0.18 Field-Tested looks almost identical to a mid Minimal Wear and costs FT money. On a skin like AK-47 Vulcan (FT from about $180 in our snapshot, MW from $380) sorting FT listings by float and taking the lowest one captures most of the MW look at half the price. The same logic works at the FN/MW boundary: a 0.07x MW is visually FN on most finishes.

Avoid the dead zones. The worst value per dollar is a high-float copy of a wear-loud finish: a 0.37 FT Printstream costs FT money and looks WW. On white skins, either pay up for the low bracket or drop to BS deliberately.

On a budget, spend the float premium only where it shows. Under $20 there is no shortage of skins whose FT copies look clean; our under-$20 picks are a reasonable starting pool. Glock-18 Water Elemental at a $17 FT is the classic example: the finish hides wear well, and the FN at $65 buys almost nothing visible.

Above a few hundred dollars, verify every float before buying. At that level you are no longer buying a label, you are buying a specific number, and the difference between 0.451 and 0.85 on the same BS listing page is the difference between a grail and a beater.

Sources

All prices are the lowest listed offers per exterior in the SteamDB.com price comparison snapshot generated July 2, 2026, aggregated across 30+ tracked marketplaces. Float windows are taken from the CS2 item schema data used on our skin pages.