CS2 Float Values Explained: Wear Ranges, Float Caps and Why a 0.00x Float Is Rare

A float is the number between 0 and 1 that every CS2 skin is given when it is created. It sets how worn the paint looks, and it never changes. The wear name you see, from Factory New to Battle-Scarred, is just the band that number falls in: the lower the float, the cleaner the skin.

That makes float the most precise rarity measure in the game, and the least understood. This file draws the scale to size, lists the skins that can never reach the clean end of it, and shows in dated prices why a few hundredths of a point can multiply what a skin is worth.

What float is

Float (also called wear value or wear rating) is a decimal stored on the item. Two copies of the same skin with floats of 0.16 and 0.37 are both Field-Tested, yet the first will look close to Minimal Wear and the second close to Well-Worn. The wear name is the label; the float is the measurement, and serious buyers price the measurement.

Float is separate from the pattern, which is a second number (the paint seed) that decides how the design sits on the weapon. A Case Hardened blue gem or a Doppler phase is a pattern question, not a float question. Both are explained in the rarest CS2 skins; this page is about wear alone.

The five wear bands, drawn to scale

Drawn to scale, the scale looks nothing like the five equal boxes most guides print. Battle-Scarred takes more than half of it. Factory New and Well-Worn are the two thinnest slices at 7% each. Valve does not publish these boundaries; they are the values every major marketplace and game-data project uses, and they match the wears each skin is listed in.

One detail nobody can settle from a public source is which side of a boundary a float of exactly 0.07 or 0.15 lands on. Valve has never stated it, and a float sitting precisely on a boundary is so unlikely that it hardly matters in practice. What matters is that a float of 0.0699 and one of 0.0701 sit in different wear tiers and can sell for very different money.

Float caps: skins that can't be Factory New

Most skins cannot use the whole scale. Each finish has its own minimum and maximum float, set when it was added to the game. In the community export of the game files we read on 10 October 2026, 423 of 1,954 finishes span the full 0.00-1.00, and 61 have a minimum of 0.07 or higher, which means no Factory New copy can exist.

The cap is why the Redline's best wear costs so much more than the next one down. Its Minimal Wear window runs from 0.10 to 0.15, only 8.3% of its range, and on 13 October 2026 the cheapest Minimal Wear copy on the Steam Market was $172.73 against $32.59 for Field-Tested, about five times as much for the same rifle.

At the other end, 125 finishes top out at 0.08 or lower, mostly Fades, Dopplers and similar finishes, so they only ever appear as Factory New or a thin slice of Minimal Wear. Three never leave Factory New at all: the SSG 08 | Acid Fade (0.00-0.03) and the Galil AR and Tec-9 | Blue Titanium (0.00-0.04).

How rare is a 0.00x float?

Valve does not publish how floats are distributed when skins drop, so nobody can honestly quote the odds of a 0.00x float. What can be measured is how much of a skin's range a target occupies. On a full 0.00-1.00 skin, every float below 0.01 sits in 1% of the range. On gloves, the entire Factory New slice from 0.06 to 0.07 is 1.35% of their 0.74-wide range, which is why Factory New gloves are among the hardest items to find.

The market prices that scarcity directly. The AK-47 | Vulcan can roll every wear, which makes it a clean example: on 13 October 2026 its cheapest Factory New listing on Steam was $625.00, against $126.85 for Battle-Scarred.

Within a single wear the premium keeps going. Collectors pay extra for the lowest float in a tier and for "rank" floats such as 0.000x, and they pay for a float just inside a boundary because it looks like the better tier. Steam listings show the wear name rather than ranking by float, so these premiums are set on marketplaces that show the number on every listing, such as CSFloat and DMarket. The record-tier result of float scarcity is on the most expensive CS2 skins board.

Keeper's note: a low float is only rare if the skin can roll it. A 0.18 AWP | Asiimov is the best possible copy, not a poor one, because 0.18 is the floor of its range.

How trade-up contracts set output float

A Trade Up Contract turns ten skins of one grade into one skin of the next, and since 22 October 2025 five Coverts into a knife or gloves. The output's float is not random: it is calculated from the inputs. Valve has never published the formula, and community sources describe two versions.

The older description averages the raw input floats and maps that average onto the output skin's range. The version some newer trade-up calculators use first converts each input into its position within its own range, averages those, and maps the result. The difference is large. Ten inputs at 0.15 from a 0.00-0.50 skin give an AWP | Asiimov (0.18-1.00) a float of 0.303 under the first model, which is Field-Tested, and 0.426 under the second, which is Well-Worn.

So if a contract depends on the output landing in a particular wear, check it in a calculator that states which model it uses, and leave a margin either side of the boundary. A trade-up is a craft, not a guarantee: the item you get is drawn at random from the eligible collections, and only its float is predictable.

Does float change? Common myths

• Playing with a skin wears it down. It does not. The float is fixed when the item is created and stays with it through every trade and every match.
• Factory New always looks flawless. Not quite. Wear shows differently on each finish, so a 0.06 can show marks on one skin and look perfect on another.
• StatTrak or Souvenir changes the float. Neither does. They are separate attributes on the same item.
• Stickers wear with the skin. Stickers have their own scrape level, which you can change by scraping, independent of the weapon's float.

The practical point is that float is a permanent fact about an item, which is exactly why it can carry a permanent premium. What the market pays for that fact can change, as the October 2025 crash showed for knives, but the number itself cannot.

Edge cases

A few situations catch buyers out. Gloves start at 0.06, so a "Factory New" glove listing with a float of 0.069 is at the very worst end of its tier and may price accordingly. Skins with a raised minimum, such as the Asiimov, make low floats look worse than they are, so compare a float against the skin's own range rather than the 0-1 scale. And a pattern can outweigh float entirely: a well-placed Doppler phase or blue gem pattern on a mid float can be worth more than a perfect float on an ordinary pattern, which is the story told on the most expensive CS2 gloves and knife pages.