CS2 Float Values Explained: Wear Tiers, Ranges, and How Float Affects Price

Every CS2 skin has a hidden number between 0.00 and 1.00 called the float value. That number, randomly generated when the skin is created, never changes for the rest of the skin's existence. It determines two things: how worn the skin looks in-game, and how much it's worth.

Lower float means a cleaner skin and, almost always, a higher price. The number gets bucketed into five wear tiers — Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, Battle-Scarred — but the float itself is the real attribute. The tier is just shorthand.

The five wear tiers

The boundaries are fixed across every skin in the game:

A skin with float 0.149 is Minimal Wear; one with 0.151 is Field-Tested. Two skins that look almost identical can sit in different tiers and command different prices because of a thousandth-of-a-point difference.

Not every skin can be Factory New

What complicates this is that each individual skin design has its own float range, set by Valve when the skin was designed. Some skins span the full 0.00 to 1.00; others are capped at one end or both.

AK-47 Asiimov, for instance, has a minimum float of 0.18 — which means there is no Factory New Asiimov, anywhere in the game, ever, and there can never be one. AWP Asiimov is the same. AK-47 Bloodsport caps at 0.50, meaning Battle-Scarred Bloodsports don't exist. AK-47 Case Hardened spans the full range.

This is why some "Factory New" skins are extraordinarily rare and valuable — for a skin like AK-47 Vulcan with a minimum float of around 0.06, getting one at 0.00x requires either an extremely lucky case opening or a contract trade-up with carefully selected low-float inputs. The supply is naturally tiny.

Float ranges for any skin are listed on its SkinsWave page, next to the price for each wear tier. Worth checking before assuming a particular wear tier exists.

How float maps to appearance

Float controls how much wear texture is layered onto the skin's underlying design. The relationship isn't linear, and how dramatic the change feels depends entirely on the skin. A Karambit Fade looks nearly identical across the full Factory New to Field-Tested range; an M4A1-S Hyper Beast goes from clean to obviously scuffed across the same range.

In general, floats under 0.05 are factory-fresh with almost no visible damage. From 0.10 to 0.20 you start seeing light texture if you look closely. By 0.30 there's clear wear on edges. Past 0.50, you're into "this skin looks beat up" territory. But the visual impact varies skin-to-skin, which is why people will pay premiums for low-float specimens of certain skins while ignoring float entirely on others.

How float affects price within a tier

Within the same skin and wear tier, lower floats sell at premiums, but the relationship is logarithmic — there are sharp price spikes at the extreme ends.

Take AK-47 Redline in Field-Tested (range 0.15 to 0.38). A high-FT specimen at 0.35 is the baseline. A mid-FT at 0.25 might sell for 5% more. A low-FT at 0.16, right at the boundary with Minimal Wear, can easily command 15 to 25% over baseline because it looks almost like an MW. And a 0.15001 — the absolute lowest FT float possible — gets collector premium, sometimes 30 to 50% over the rest of the tier.

The same logic applies inside Factory New. A 0.000x float on a popular skin can sell for 2 to 10 times the price of a 0.05 FN of the same skin. At extremes — 0.0000001-tier floats on AK Vulcans or AWP Lightning Strikes — you're in pure collector territory, where prices are whatever the rare-float trading community decides they are that month.

How to actually check a skin's float

Three ways, depending on what you have access to. The official source is in-game: right-click the skin in your inventory, hit Inspect, and the float appears on the skin info panel (sometimes labeled "Wear" instead of "Float"). On the Steam Market, hover over a listing and the float shows up alongside the wear tier. For items you don't own yet, the exact float and pattern of everything in the SkinsWave bot inventory is shown on the item before you confirm a trade.

What's a "good" float to buy?

Depends what you want. If you're optimizing for "best appearance at the best price," buy the lowest float you can afford in your target wear tier — a low-FT skin usually looks nearly identical to a high-MW at a meaningful discount. If you're optimizing for resale, floats at tier boundaries (a 0.151 that just barely crosses into Field-Tested) often command premiums because they "punch above" their tier label. If you're optimizing for collection — buying with the intent to hold rare specimens — extreme low floats on popular skins are the play, but they're illiquid and hard to resell quickly.

For most everyday traders, the tier-boundary low-float strategy is the most practical: visual quality close to the next tier up at the lower tier's price.

Patterns sometimes beat float

For most skins, float dominates pricing. But for a handful of pattern-sensitive designs, the pattern index — a separate hidden number from 0 to 1000 — matters more than float.

Case Hardened skins are the famous example: certain patterns ("blue gems") show large blue surfaces and can sell for 100 times the price of an ordinary Case Hardened in the same wear tier. Fade skins price on fade percentage — how much of the color gradient is visible, with 100% fades getting major premiums. Doppler knives price on phase, where the rare phases (Ruby, Sapphire, Black Pearl) command 3 to 10 times the price of regular Phase 1-4 Dopplers. Marble Fades have the "Fire and Ice" pattern that runs orders of magnitude over baseline.

For those skins, float is a footnote. For everything else, float is the main attribute besides the skin name itself.

A few questions worth answering

People sometimes ask whether using a skin in-game wears it down further. It doesn't — there's no in-game wear mechanic and float is fixed for the skin's lifetime. People ask why a Minimal Wear sometimes looks more worn than a Field-Tested. The answer is that float and visual appearance don't perfectly correlate; they depend on the underlying skin design. A 0.14 MW often looks more worn than a 0.16 FT of a different skin entirely.

Contract trade-ups deserve a mention. Combining ten skins of the same rarity gives you one of the next rarity tier, and the resulting float is the average of the input floats. This is how extreme low floats sometimes get minted: ten very-low-float inputs produce one with the lowest possible float for the output skin. Most rare 0.000x floats came from carefully assembled contracts, not raw case openings.

Looking for low-float skins? Browse SkinsWave's float-sorted inventory — every listing shows the exact float so you're not guessing.