Float premium: why low-float AK Redlines sell for 30% more
Counter-Strike wear tiers are just five coarse buckets over a continuous 0-1 float value. Collectors pay real money for floats close to the tier's lower bound. A practical guide to spotting float premium and trading it.
Two identical AK-47 | Redlines, both tagged Field-Tested on Skinport. One is €28. The other is €37. Nothing else visibly differs. What is the buyer paying €9 extra for?
The answer is the float value — a continuous 0–1 number that Valve attaches to every skin and the Steam UI hides behind a coarse five-tier label (Factory New, Minimal Wear, Field-Tested, Well-Worn, Battle-Scarred). Within each tier the float spans a wide range, and at the tier’s lower bound the skin looks meaningfully cleaner than at the upper bound. Collectors pay for it. Understanding the premium is the single biggest edge a new trader can develop.
The wear tiers are a lie
Here is what CS2 shows you:
- Factory New: 0.00 – 0.07
- Minimal Wear: 0.07 – 0.15
- Field-Tested: 0.15 – 0.38
- Well-Worn: 0.38 – 0.45
- Battle-Scarred: 0.45 – 1.00
Factory New spans 0.00–0.07. A “low-float”FN with value 0.005 looks like it came off a CGI render. A“high-float” FN with value 0.069 is visually almost indistinguishable from a Minimal Wear skin, because it is literally two decimal places away from the boundary.
Same story for Field-Tested: 0.15–0.38 is a 23-point range. An FT at 0.15 looks nearly unused. An FT at 0.37 looks like it’s been through a warzone. Steam puts the same sticker on both. Collectors do not.
What “float premium” actually measures
When SkinScope says a skin has float premium +28% it means: on this skin, the Q1 float (lowest-25%) listings sell for 28% more than the median-float listings. The premium is measured per skin because it varies wildly:
- High-demand collector skins (AK Redline FT, AWP Dragon Lore FN, Karambit Doppler) see 20–40% float premium.
- Pattern-agnostic skins (most Consumer/Industrial tier) see ~0–5% premium. The float basically doesn’t matter at low value.
- Knives and gloves are extreme outliers: float premium can exceed 100% in edge cases because collectors fetishise sub-0.01 knife floats.
We compute this from the live CSFloat listings for each skin. CSFloat publishes per-listing floats, which lets us build the distribution without guessing.
Where the inefficiency lives
Skinport, Waxpeer, BitSkins and most competitor-platform listings do not let buyers filter by float. They show one price per tier. A Skinport seller who has a low-float AK Redline FT often lists at the median tier price because the platform’s UI doesn’t surface their float advantage to buyers.
The inefficiency is this: buy low-float listings on the platform that ignores float, sell them on the platform where collectors shop for float. CSFloat is where collectors shop. Skinport is where most listings go unfiltered.
The headline flip becomes: “AK Redline FT, 0.163 float, Skinport €26 → CSFloat €32 after fees”. Margin comes not from cross-platform spread on the tier average, but from the float premium being present on one venue and invisible on the other.
Worked example — AK Redline Field-Tested
Over the last 30 days on CSFloat, the Redline FT distribution looked roughly like:
| Float range | Median listing price | Premium vs median |
|---|---|---|
| 0.150 – 0.180 (Q1) | €31.40 | +11.3% |
| 0.180 – 0.220 (Q2) | €29.80 | +5.7% |
| 0.220 – 0.280 (median) | €28.20 | — baseline |
| 0.280 – 0.340 (Q3) | €26.40 | −6.4% |
| 0.340 – 0.380 (Q4) | €24.90 | −11.7% |
A single Redline FT at 0.16 float sells for €6.50 more than the same skin at 0.36 float. CSFloat’s float-aware buyers push the price. Skinport’s listings blur them all into“€28 Field-Tested.”
How SkinScope surfaces it
On every Skin Detail page you get:
- Float distribution chart with Q1 vs median vs Q4 medians, plus the current CSFloat listings plotted on the distribution.
- Float premium % on the hero header. A single number: how much extra Q1-floats fetch over the median.
- Deal score boost for arbitrage where the buy venue hides float and the sell venue rewards it. The
floatEdgePctfield in our Deal table makes this explicit. - PRO-tier exact-float chip overlays the precise float on each listing from CSFloat — so you can decide instantly whether a specific listing is worth the premium chase.
Three rules to trade float premium
1. Liquidity first, float premium second. An AK Redline will trade. A Galil Ar Shattered will not, regardless of float. Only chase float on Liquidity Tier A–B skins where you know you can close the exit.
2. The premium is per-skin, not universal. Don’t assume 20% on Redline means 20% on everything. Check the distribution chart on SkinScope for the specific skin you’re buying. Some skins have near-zero float premium even in FT tier.
3. Mean-reversion exists. If a skin’s float premium is historically 10% and suddenly spikes to 25%, it will usually revert. Buy when the premium is stretched, sell when it compresses. The SkinScope hypothesis engine tracks this.
Float-aware pricing is the single feature most competitor tools ignore. Pricempire publishes aggregate tier prices. SteamAnalyst shows one number per FN/MW/FT/WW/BS. Neither captures the internal distribution. SkinScope pulls every CSFloat listing and surfaces the premium you’re trading against — because for any skin worth flipping, the float is where the edge lives.
Try the Redline FT detail page and look at the Float Distribution chart under the hero. The shaded Q1–Q4 bands are the premium you trade against.