Definition
Wear tier — equivalently exterior in Steam's UI — is the categorical bucket every CS2 weapon skin, knife, glove, and a small set of stickers fall into based on the underlying float value. There are five tiers. The boundaries between them are global: identical for every skin in the game, identical to the CS:GO boundaries that shipped in 2013, and unchanged since.
The five tiers
| Tier | Abbreviation | Float range | Width |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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% |
The asymmetry is intentional. Factory New occupies the narrowest band because Valve wanted the cleanest skins to be rare. Battle-Scarred owns the upper half of the float space because most case-opened skins on an unclipped paint kit pull a uniform random float, which puts them above 0.45 the majority of the time.
What determines which tier a skin lands in
Only one thing: the float value. Float is written at drop and immutable. The tier is a deterministic function of the float — round-down to the bucket whose range contains the value. There is no interaction with skin name, rarity, StatTrak status, Souvenir status, applied stickers, name tags, or charms. All of those are independent fields.
Per-skin clipping restricts the reachable tiers
While the wear tier boundaries are global, the per-skin float clip restricts which tiers a given skin can actually reach. A clip with min 0.18 means the skin cannot exist in FN or MW. A clip with max 0.40 means the skin cannot exist in Well-Worn or Battle-Scarred. The clip values live in items_game.txt and are set when the skin ships:
- AWP Asiimov clips at 0.18–1.00 → no FN, no MW, FT starts at 0.18.
- M4A4 Howl clips at 0.00–0.40 → no WW, no BS.
- Karambit Fade clips at 0.00–0.08 → effectively FN-only with a 1% MW sliver.
- AK-47 Vulcan clips at 0.00–1.00 → full range.
The clip is the reason marketplaces list some skins with "no FN available" or "MW is the cleanest". The patterns, floats and wear pillar covers the mechanism end to end.
How wear tier maps to price
The exterior bucket alone drives most pricing below ~$50. Above $50, the exact float inside the bucket starts to matter and the sub-bucket gradation (FN-look MW, low-float FT, high-float BS, etc.) opens up.
The order of price impact within the same skin:
- FN > MW > FT > WW > BS on textures with visible wear (Asiimov, Hyper Beast, Vulcan, Hellfire). Price gaps are 1.5–4× between adjacent tiers on the clean side.
- FN ≈ MW > FT > WW ≈ BS on uniform-color textures (Dopplers, Fades, Marble Fades). The clean tiers compress because the wear is invisible; the worn tiers compress for the same reason.
- Independent of tier on the few skins where pattern dominates entirely — a tier-1 blue gem AK in BS outprices a generic FN by 50×, and the wear tier becomes a secondary modifier.
How to read the wear tier of a skin
The tier is shown directly in Steam Market listings, in the Steam inventory side panel, and in third-party marketplace listings (Buff163, Skinport, DMarket, CS.Money, CSFloat Market). The four-decimal float underneath is hidden in Steam itself and requires a float checker — see how to check a skin's float in CS2. For collector decisions, the float matters more than the tier label.