CS2 Trade Up Contracts: How They Actually Work

The rules of the standard contract

Open the Trade Up Contract from your inventory and the game enforces four things:

• Exactly ten items. Not nine, not eleven. The contract will not submit until all ten slots are filled.
• All the same rarity grade. Ten Mil-Spec, or ten Restricted, or ten Classified. You cannot pad a contract with a lower grade.
• All StatTrak or all normal. The two do not mix. Ten StatTrak inputs return a StatTrak output.
• The output is one grade up. Always exactly one — there is no skipping tiers.

Collections can be mixed freely, and that is the whole game. Ten inputs from ten different collections is a legal contract; so is ten from one. What you choose there decides your odds, which is the next section.

The rarity ladder

Every weapon finish sits on a fixed grade, shown by the colour bar behind the item. The ladder the contract climbs is:

Two things fall off the ladder. Contraband — the grade the M4A4 Howl was moved to after its artwork was pulled — is not produced by any contract and cannot be used in one. And knives and gloves, which sit in their own Extraordinary tier, were unreachable by any contract at all until the October 2025 change below. The grades themselves are covered in more depth in our skin quality guide.

A collection only offers outputs at grades it actually contains. If a collection has no Classified skins, ten Restricted inputs from it cannot produce anything, and the game will not let you build that contract.

How the output is chosen

Two draws happen, in order.

First, the collection.Each input contributes an equal share of the decision. Six inputs from the Fracture Collection and four from Dreams & Nightmares gives a 60/40 split between those two collections. Ten inputs from one collection makes the collection draw a formality.

Then, the skin.Once a collection is picked, the specific output is drawn evenly from that collection's finishes at the target grade. A collection with two Covert skins gives each a 50% shot; a collection with one gives it 100%.

Multiply the two and you have the real probability of any single outcome. This is why collection size matters so much: one input from a collection whose target tier holds a single famous skin is a far sharper lottery ticket than one input from a collection with six outputs, even though both cost you one slot. Our trade-up calculator builds the full outcome table for you and simulates a thousand contracts so you can see the spread rather than just the average.

Float, and the part that changed

The output's wear is not rolled fresh. It is computed from your inputs, and this is where most of the skill in trade-ups lives.

Start from the fact that finishes have float caps. Each finish has a minimum and maximum float baked into the game files, and only conditions inside that window can exist. In the csdb skin database, only about one gun finish in five spans the full 0.00 to 1.00 range — the rest are capped somewhere. The AWP and M4A4 Asiimov both run 0.18 to 1.00, so neither can ever be Factory New or Minimal Wear. The AWP Lightning Strike stops at 0.08, so it only exists Factory New or Minimal Wear. The wear bands themselves are fixed: Factory New up to 0.07, Minimal Wear to 0.15, Field-Tested to 0.38, Well-Worn to 0.45, Battle-Scarred above that. Our float guide covers the ranges properly, and the float checker pulls the exact number off any listed item.

The contract works in three steps:

1. Adjust each input. Every input float is converted into its position inside that finish's own cap — 0 meaning the cleanest that finish can be, 1 meaning the most worn.
2. Average those positions. All ten adjusted values are averaged into a single number.
3. Map it onto the output. That average position is rescaled into the output finish's own float range, respecting its caps.

The consequence is simple to state and easy to forget: clean inputs give a clean output, but only as clean as the output finish is allowed to be. Feeding ten Factory New inputs into a contract whose only outcome starts at 0.18 will not produce a Factory New anything.

The change worth knowing about: before the October 2025 update, the contract averaged the raw float numbers without adjusting them for each finish's cap. That let people use heavily capped inputs as artificial low-float fuel, and a lot of contracts that were profitable on that basis stopped working overnight. Valve did not spell the change out in the patch notes — it was established by players testing contracts afterwards — so treat any guide written before late 2025 as describing a system that no longer exists.

The five-Covert route to a knife

On 22 October 2025, the same update that brought Retakes back as an official mode extended the contract. Valve's patch notes describe it as extending the Trade Up Contract to allow exchanging five items of Covert quality: five StatTrak Covert items for one StatTrak knife, or five regular Covert items for one regular knife or one pair of gloves — in both cases from the collection of one of the items provided.

Everything you already know carries over. Each of the five inputs gives its collection a one-in-five share of deciding which pool you draw from, the item is then drawn from that case's special-item roster, and the float is computed the same way. Five Coverts from one case locks the pool to that case's knives or gloves. You still cannot choose the model or the finish.

One quirk catches people out. Several cases have special-item pools made entirely of gloves — in the csdb case database that includes the Glove Case, Operation Hydra Case, Operation Broken Fang Case, Clutch Case, Snakebite Case, Recoil Case and Revolution Case. Because StatTrak gloves do not exist, the StatTrak Coverts from those cases have nowhere to go and cannot be used in a contract at all. Their normal versions are fine.

Whether the contract is worth running is a separate question from whether it works, and the answer moved a lot in the weeks after the update. That is the subject of our knife trade-ups guide.

Things the contract will not do

• It cannot be undone. The ten inputs are consumed the instant you confirm. There is no refund and no preview of the actual result.
• It cannot target a specific skin. You can narrow a pool to one outcome by choosing collections carefully, but that is the limit of control.
• It does not happen outside the game. The only real trade-up interface is the one in your CS2 inventory. Any third-party site offering to run a contract for you is running something else.
• It does not care what you paid. Expected value is decided by the outcome pool, not by your inputs' cost, which is exactly why pricing the pool first is the whole discipline.

Where to go from here

With the mechanics straight, the next two questions are which contracts are worth running and how to price them. The best CS2 trade ups guide covers the expected-value framework and the contract structures that keep working; the trade-up finder scans current market prices for contracts that clear their input cost right now; and the trade-up calculator lets you build a specific contract and see every outcome with its odds. If you are still assembling inputs, the skin database sorts by collection and grade, which is the view you need and the Steam Market does not give you.