Guia completo de avaliação de inventário CS2

How CS2 prices are actually formed

Every Counter-Strike 2 item has at least three prices at any given moment, and they almost never agree. The first is the Steam Market median — the rolling 24-hour average of the lowest accepted asks on the Steam Community Market. The second is the third-party listing price, what sellers on Buff163, Skinport, DMarket, or CS.Money are asking. The third is the third-party cashout price, what a buyer-side bot or instant-sell desk will pay you in withdrawable funds. The gap between #2 and #3 is usually 10-25%; the gap between Steam and third-party is structural, not arbitrage you can capture — Steam wallet funds cannot leave Steam.

When the calculator on this homepage returns a number for an item, it reads the public Steam Market price feed for the exact (skin, exterior, StatTrak/Souvenir) tuple. That number is the most defensible single quote because Steam publishes it, but it is also the price at which you would list the item in Steam wallet — not the price at which you walk away with USD.

Why the price feed lags

Steam Market median is a 24-hour trailing window. For high-volume skins (AK-47 Redline, AWP Asiimov, M4A1-S Printstream) the lag does not matter — dozens of trades per hour smooth it out. For thin items (Souvenir AWP Dragon Lore in any exterior, Howl in Factory New, Katowice 2014 Holo Titan) a single sale can move the printed median by double digits, and the next listing might be 30% above or below it. When the calculator quotes a price for one of those, treat the number as a midpoint, not a quote.

What "price" means in this guide

Throughout this hub we distinguish three numbers: Steam list (lowest current ask on Steam Market), third-party list (what you would list it for on Buff163 or Skinport), and cashout (highest standing buy order across major buyer-side bots). Every aggregated figure in this pillar is sampled the same way: public Steam Market listings and Buff163 buy orders pulled during the first week of each calendar quarter, reported as ranges rather than point estimates because the spread itself is the story.

Float value: why a 0.001 FN sells for 10x a 0.06 FN

Float is the wear coordinate Valve assigns to every skin at drop. It is a 32-bit float between 0.000 and 1.000, and it never changes after the item is generated. Steam shows you only the bucket — Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, Battle-Scarred — but the underlying float is what the market actually trades on once you get above the $50 mark. Below $50, exterior bucket alone is fine; above $50, the exact float can swing the price by 2-10x.

Float buckets and exterior tiers

The mapping is fixed by Valve and identical for every skin:

Some skins clip — their float range is restricted by the wear-mapping in items_game.txt. An AK-47 Case Hardened maxes out around 0.70, never reaching the upper Battle-Scarred range, while an AK-47 Redline starts at 0.10 and never appears Factory New. The calculator handles clipping automatically; if you see a skin that "doesn't exist in FN", that is why.

Why low-float FN commands a premium

Within Factory New, a 0.001 float looks measurably cleaner in-game than a 0.069 float on most skins, but the premium is mostly collector-driven. Three things stack:

1. Visual rarity at the extremes. A sub-0.005 AWP Asiimov barely shows the scuffs the artist baked into the texture; the gun reads as pristine.
2. Float ranking. Sites like CSFloat.com publish global rank — "the 7th-lowest float AWP Asiimov ever recorded" is a marketable claim.
3. Pattern stack. Low-float items often command an additional premium when they also hit a desirable pattern index.

A worked range, sourced from public Buff163 listings sampled in early Q2 2026: an AK-47 Asiimov in mid Field-Tested (0.16-0.25) sits in the $25-35 band; the same skin at low FT (0.15-0.16) lifts to roughly $40-55; a Factory New copy under 0.04 float jumps into the $80-130 band. Same skin, same exterior tier — the float coordinate alone moves the price 3-4x. For how the wear system maps to visible damage, see our explainer on CS2 skin conditions and how float drives appearance.

Pattern index: blue gem, fade %, doppler phases, crimson web

Pattern index is a separate 32-bit value Valve assigns at drop alongside float. It controls which slice of the source texture the skin samples from. For most skins the pattern is cosmetic noise. For a small list of patterns — the ones the community has named — it is the dominant value driver.

The four pattern collectibles that matter in 2026

• Case Hardened "blue gem". AK-47, Five-SeveN, and Karambit Case Hardened sample a stained-blue Damascus texture. A handful of pattern seeds (seed 661, 670, 955 on the AK) produce nearly all-blue playside finishes. Tier-1 blue gem AK-47s trade in five-figure USD ranges as of 2026; tier-3 (mostly-blue) copies still command 5-10x an off-pattern Case Hardened.
• Fade percentage. Karambit Fade, Glock-18 Fade, Bayonet Fade are graded by the percentage of rainbow gradient visible. 100% / 90% / 80% are the public tiers; 100% commands a 30-50% premium over a baseline 80% Fade in the same condition.
• Doppler phases. Doppler knives split into Phase 1 / Phase 2 / Phase 3 / Phase 4, plus the rare Ruby (red), Sapphire (blue), and Black Pearl finishes. Black Pearl and Ruby are the headline phases; Phase 2 is usually cheapest. Full breakdown in our Doppler guide for CS2; the post-Gamma reissue is covered in the Gamma Doppler guide.
• Crimson Web "full web". M9 Bayonet and Karambit Crimson Web sample a webbed texture; copies showing a complete uncrossed spider web on the playside trade at 3-8x the price of a "half-web" copy in the same exterior.

How pattern interacts with float

A blue gem AK-47 in Battle-Scarred is still a blue gem, and the pattern premium dominates the float discount — buyers care about the playside visual far more than the float coordinate. A Doppler Phase 4 in Field-Tested vs Factory New, on the other hand, is mostly priced on float, because the phase determines which color, not how clean the metal looks. The rule of thumb: the further the pattern is from "normal", the less float matters.

For a broader reference on which knife patterns the market currently treats as collectibles, see our complete CS2 knife patterns guide.

Stickers: Katowice 2014, holos, paper stickers, position

Stickers can quietly multiply a gun's price by 100x or destroy it by 30%, depending on which sticker, what condition, and where it landed. The mechanics every owner needs to understand:

Sticker tiers, briefly

• Paper stickers (matte, no foil): typically priced at a few cents each unscraped; on a gun, they add either nothing or a small premium for "clean four" applications on aesthetic skins.
• Holo stickers: holographic foil. Most modern holos trade between $1-20 unapplied; rare ones (early Major holos) range much higher.
• Foil stickers: gold foil capsule rares. Cleanly four-of on the right gun adds meaningful premium.
• Gold stickers: champion-team-only autographs. Always carry a premium when applied cleanly.

Why Katowice 2014 dominates

The Katowice 2014 capsule was the first major sticker capsule Valve produced, sold for 99 cents for a few weeks in early 2014. Supply is finite — no new copies have ever been printed and the capsule cannot be reissued — and a decade of unboxing, scraping, and applying has burned through most of it. As of mid-2026, public Buff163 listings show unscraped Katowice 2014 Holo Titan stickers sitting in the $5,000-9,000 band, with foils and golds running higher. A clean four-of-a-kind Katowice 2014 Holo Titan application on an AK-47 Vulcan or AWP Asiimov can lift the gun into five-figure territory — sometimes six — depending on float and the exact teams.

Position and scrape

Sticker position matters because Valve fixed the four slots per gun and some slots show better than others. For rifles, the third slot (above the magazine well) is the most photogenic on most AK-47 and M4 skins; the fourth (stock) is the least visible. We mapped the per-slot value impact across the rifle pool in our rifle sticker placement heatmap.

Scrape level is the other lever. CS2 stickers degrade in 25% increments (100% / 75% / 50% / 25%) as you scrape them in-game. For paper stickers, scraped is usually a discount. For Katowice 2014 holos, every scrape level below 100% caps the resale ceiling — collectors want unscraped, full-position application, period.

StatTrak vs Souvenir: two different premium mechanics

StatTrak and Souvenir are both "premium" versions of an existing skin, but they are produced by completely different mechanics and price differently. Confusing them is the most common pricing mistake new traders make.

StatTrak

StatTrak items carry a kill counter on inspect. Any rare-quality skin can drop StatTrak from a regular case opening at roughly 1-in-10 odds within that case. The premium is a flat percentage on top of the non-StatTrak price — typically 15-40% for common skins, scaling to 50-100% for desirable knives and rifles where the kill-count flex is part of the appeal. A StatTrak AK-47 Asiimov in Field-Tested sits at roughly 1.4-1.6x the non-StatTrak price across the same exterior (Steam Market listings sampled Q1 2026).

StatTrak supply grows as long as the case is in active circulation. Once the case retires, StatTrak supply stops growing and the premium expands.

Souvenir

Souvenir items have a different origin entirely. They drop only from Souvenir Packages awarded to viewers watching a CS2 Major. Each Souvenir item carries autographs from the Major's MVP-decisive map plus the team and tournament logos — baked into the item, cannot be scraped, cannot be applied elsewhere.

Only certain skins exist in Souvenir form. The Souvenir collection for a Major is a curated subset of weapon collections from the maps in rotation. A Souvenir AWP Dragon Lore from Cobblestone is not "a Dragon Lore that happened to drop at a Major" — it is the only way the Dragon Lore exists, since the Cobblestone collection only ever produced Souvenir-marked items. The Souvenir mechanic is the supply.

Souvenir premiums are dominated by three things: which player's autographs landed on the playside, the Major year, and (still) float. A Souvenir AWP Dragon Lore from Cologne 2014 with a famous player's gold sticker on the playside has cleared seven figures in private trades; a Souvenir Negev from a 2022 Major with no notable autographs trades in line with the base skin.

Knives, gloves, and agents: the high-end multipliers

Above the rifle and pistol tier sits a small group of items where the model itself is a value driver, layered on top of skin demand. These are knives, gloves, and certain agents. The full taxonomy of every category, weapon, and finish — and how each axis maps to price — lives in our sister pillar, the CS2 items encyclopedia.

Knives

There are roughly 20 knife models in CS2 as of 2026 (Karambit, M9 Bayonet, Butterfly, Talon, Kukri, Skeleton, Nomad, Stiletto, Paracord, Navaja, Falchion, Gut, Shadow Daggers, Bowie, Flip, Huntsman, Bayonet, Classic, Ursus, Survival). Within each model, each knife skin produces a different price tier. The same Doppler skin on a Karambit trades 2-3x higher than the same Doppler on a Gut, even though the underlying texture is identical, because the model's animations and silhouette are the actual product. Our running list of the top of the market lives in the most expensive knives in CS2.

Representative example: as of Q1 2026, public Steam listings show M9 Bayonet Doppler Phase 2 Factory New in the $700-900 band, while the same finish on a Bayonet (the cheaper model) sits in the $300-450 band. Same finish, same float bucket — the model alone is doing the work.

Gloves

Glove cases produce extremely rare drops (the only "extraordinary" rarity tier). Specific skins — Sport Gloves Pandora's Box, Specialist Gloves Crimson Kimono, Driver Gloves King Snake, Sport Gloves Vice, Hand Wraps CAUTION! — sit at the top, with low-float copies clearing four to five figures. Glove float matters more than knife float because glove textures wear visibly on the cloth.

Agents

Agents are the newest model-level item type. Most have no premium tier, but a handful — Sir Bloody Darryl Royale, Sir Bloody Loudmouth Darryl, certain Operation Riptide character variants — have closed supply and trade at meaningful premiums. The agent market is thinner than knives or gloves and the listed-vs-cashout spread is wider, often 30%+.

Discontinued, contraband, and unobtainable items

Float, pattern, and stickers are all gradient mechanics — they widen or compress a price within a population. Supply scarcity is different. When Valve removes an item or stops producing it, the population is fixed forever, and the price depends entirely on demand against that finite pool.

The contraband tier

The M4A4 Howl is the canonical contraband. Its original artwork was found to be plagiarized in 2014, Valve removed it from the active drop pool, and the rarity was changed to "Contraband" with a distinctive red label. No new Howls have entered circulation since. Howls in Factory New now sit in the four-figure range and have crossed five figures at the top of the market. There is exactly one contraband skin in CS2.

Discontinued cases and capsules

When Valve "retires" a case, it stops dropping at end-of-match. Existing copies can still be opened and traded, but the supply of newly-unboxed skins from that case stops growing. Operation Bravo, Operation Phoenix, CS:GO Weapon Case, eSports 2013 — early examples whose skins now sit at structural premiums over comparable post-2016 skins. The same applies to retired sticker capsules: Katowice 2014 is the famous one, but Katowice 2015, Cologne 2014, DreamHack 2014, and the early ESL One capsules are all retired and supply-constrained. The earlier the Major, the steeper the curve.

Genuinely unobtainable items

Some items cannot be obtained at all anymore. Certain pre-launch beta skins, items removed for legal reasons, and a few promotional drops have closed pools that can only shrink (people delete inventories, accounts get banned, items are crafted into other items). We track the moving list in the dedicated unobtainable CS2 items reference.

The pricing rule for the entire scarcity tier is the same: when supply is fixed, every price move is a demand move. A bull cycle in CS2 inflates Howls and Katowice 2014 stickers harder than it inflates AK Redlines, because the latter has effectively unlimited supply.

Wear, sticker, and pattern: putting it all together

Here is one specific item priced from scratch, the way the calculator does it internally. The item: an AK-47 Asiimov, Field-Tested, with four Katowice 2014 Holo Titan stickers applied at 75% scrape, on a non-StatTrak base, in an unremarkable pattern index.

Step 1 — base skin price

AK-47 Asiimov Field-Tested at the time of this refresh (Q2 2026, sampled from Steam Market public listings) sits in the $25-35 band. Call this the floor.

Step 2 — float adjustment

The item is mid-bucket Field-Tested (float around 0.22, nothing special). No float adjustment. If the same item were 0.150-0.155 float, we would lift the base by roughly 30-50% to reflect the "low-FT" premium that a sticker-collector buyer typically demands. Still no contribution from float here.

Step 3 — sticker contribution

Katowice 2014 Holo Titans unapplied currently trade in the $5,000-9,000 band each (Buff163 listings, Q2 2026). Applied stickers are not summed at face value. The market discounts applied stickers because they cannot be moved to another gun, they are at a known scrape level (here, 75%) that can only decrease, and they are tied to the gun's float.

The community rule of thumb — and what the calculator uses as a starting heuristic — is that a clean four-of application of high-tier holos at 100% scrape recovers roughly 50-70% of the unapplied total; at 75% scrape, roughly 30-50%. Four Titans nominally worth $20,000-36,000 unapplied at 30-50% recovery puts the sticker contribution in the $6,000-18,000 range. That spread accurately reflects how thin the actual market is for this specific item.

Step 4 — pattern adjustment

Unremarkable pattern index. No adjustment. If this were a centered-position application on a Vulcan or a particularly desirable Asiimov pattern, we would add a model-aesthetic premium on top. Still none here.

Step 5 — total

The realistic market price is dominated entirely by the stickers. The AK-47 Asiimov base skin is rounding error. A motivated seller could list this in the $7,000-15,000 band on Buff163 and probably move it within a few weeks; an instant-cashout offer would land closer to $5,000-10,000. The 30-40% spread is not arbitrage you can capture — it is the cost of liquidity.

This worked example is the entire valuation logic of the site, applied to one item. Every quote from the calculator is doing some version of this stack underneath.

Steam Market vs third-party: why your inventory is worth two different numbers

When someone asks "how much is my CS2 inventory worth", the honest answer is two numbers. Steam wallet value is what your inventory is worth if you list every item on the Steam Market and let it sell. Cashout value is what your inventory is worth if you sell everything for withdrawable USD via third-party markets and instant-sell desks. The first number is consistently 20-35% higher than the second.

Why the gap exists

Steam wallet funds cannot leave Steam. They can only buy more Steam content. Steam Market prices therefore reflect what buyers will pay in Steam wallet — worth less than the same nominal USD because the buyer cannot convert it back. Steam also takes a 13% fee per transaction (roughly 5% Steam + 8% game fee), baked into the prices buyers offer.

Third-party markets like Buff163 and Skinport accept real currency in and out, but they take their own fees (typically 2-5% on listings, plus payment-processor costs) and run on regional liquidity that varies — Buff163 dominates Asia, Skinport dominates Europe, DMarket and CS.Money split smaller pools. List price and instant-cashout price on the same site can differ by 15-25% on liquid items and 30%+ on illiquid ones.

We unpack the market structure in much more detail in Steam Market vs third-party markets: where price discovery really happens, and the sister pillar the complete CS2 marketplaces guide walks through fees, payout times, and risk on each platform.

What number to trust

For valuation — knowing what your inventory is worth on paper — Steam Market is the most defensible single source because it is public, audited, and continuous. For selling — turning the inventory into withdrawable money — third-party cashout is the only number that matters. The calculator on this site reports the Steam Market view by default; if you are selling, mentally apply a 25-30% discount before you decide whether to liquidate.

If you are thinking about holding rather than selling, the framing is different again — see our companion pillar on CS2 skin investing for how to think about the time dimension. Examples of inventories priced at the top of the market — and how their owners value them — are catalogued in the most expensive CS2 inventories of 2024, which is the closest public benchmark we have for high-end portfolio composition.

How to read this site's calculator output

If you landed on this guide from the calculator, here is the short version of what each field on the result means and how to use it.

The headline number

The big number at the top of the calculator output is the sum of Steam Market prices for every tradeable item in your inventory, item-by-item, exterior-by-exterior, StatTrak/Souvenir/non-premium variant matched. Non-tradeable items (trade-locked, untradeable, or items not on the Steam Market) are excluded. This is your Steam list value — what the inventory would clear at if you listed everything individually on the Steam Market.

The per-item breakdown

Each row shows the item name, its exterior, the StatTrak/Souvenir flag, and the unit price the calculator pulled. If a row's price looks wrong, the cause is usually one of three things:

1. Stickers and float are not priced. The calculator quotes the base skin at the listed exterior. If your AK-47 has four Katowice 2014 Holo Titans on it, the row prices the bare AK and misses the stickers. For sticker-heavy inventories, the headline number undercounts — sometimes massively.
2. The item is in a thin market. For Souvenir AWPs, contraband, and high-tier knives, the printed median can lag the real bid by 20%+. Cross-check against a recent Buff163 listing before treating the number as a quote.
3. Currency. All prices are USD, converted from Steam's per-region listings. If your Steam region shows EUR or GBP, expect a small conversion-driven mismatch with the in-client price.

What to do with the number

Treat the calculator total as the upper bound of your inventory's Steam wallet value today. The cashout number — what you walk away with after liquidating to USD — is roughly 70-80% of that, before any sticker or float premiums on a per-item basis. If a single item dominates your inventory (a knife, a Howl, a Souvenir Dragon Lore), price it separately on Buff163 and substitute the manual quote for the calculator's row. Everything else, the calculator handles.