CS2 Skin Wear Grades Explained

Every CS2 skin comes with a wear grade that describes how visually degraded it appears in-game. These grades range from pristine Factory New at one end to heavily worn Battle-Scarred at the other. Wear grade is one of the most important factors in a skin's price — understanding it properly helps you navigate the market more effectively.

The Five Wear Grades

CS2 uses five wear grades: Factory New (FN), Minimal Wear (MW), Field-Tested (FT), Well-Worn (WW), and Battle-Scarred (BS). These labels map to specific float value ranges. Float is a number between 0 and 1 assigned when a skin drops from a case — lower floats look cleaner.

Factory New covers floats from 0 to 0.07, Minimal Wear from 0.07 to 0.15, Field-Tested from 0.15 to 0.38, Well-Worn from 0.38 to 0.45, and Battle-Scarred from 0.45 upward. Not every skin can drop in every wear grade — the possible range depends on the skin's design. Some skins don't exist in FN at all.

How Float Affects Appearance

The float value controls how much wear texture is overlaid on the skin's artwork. A 0.001 float Factory New skin looks almost perfectly clean. A 0.45 Well-Worn skin shows noticeable scratches, fading, and grime layered over the design. For simple, bold designs the visual difference between FN and FT is subtle. For detailed or dark-coloured skins, wear can significantly obscure the artwork.

Some skins actually look better at higher floats. The AK-47 Slate, for example, is almost entirely grey in Factory New condition — the wear reveals colour underneath, making higher-float versions more visually interesting to some players. These exceptions are unusual but they do affect pricing in the expected direction.

Pricing by Wear Grade

Factory New skins are almost always the most expensive, often by a significant margin. The cleaner look appeals to players who want their loadout to look as sharp as possible. Minimal Wear is a popular middle ground — visually very close to FN but often substantially cheaper, making it good value.

Field-Tested is typically the cheapest widely-traded grade because it has the broadest float range (over half of all possible floats land here), meaning lots of supply. Well-Worn and Battle-Scarred skins are cheaper still, but the market for them is thinner — fewer buyers, fewer listings, wider bid-ask spreads.

Float Within a Grade

Within a wear grade, float still matters — especially at the boundaries. A Field-Tested skin with a float of 0.151 (just barely FT) looks almost identical to a Minimal Wear skin and can command a small premium from buyers who know this. Specialist float-trading platforms like CSFloat allow buyers to filter by exact float range, creating micro-markets within each grade.

For most casual buyers, the difference between a 0.20 FT and a 0.37 FT is invisible in normal gameplay. The float premium matters most for high-value skins where collectors are willing to pay extra for a particularly clean example of a technically FT item.

Wear Grades on CS2 Skin Predictor

Each wear grade of a skin is tracked and predicted as an independent item on this site, because they trade independently on the Steam Market. The price history, volume, and forecasts for an AK-47 Redline Factory New are entirely separate from those for the same skin in Field-Tested.

In practice, wear grades for the same skin tend to move in the same direction — if demand for the Redline rises, all grades tend to rise. But the magnitude varies. FN prices are more sensitive to sentiment swings because the collector buyer base is more speculative, while FT prices can be more stable due to higher liquidity and more pragmatic buyers.