CS2 Trade-Up Calculator

Since the October 2025 update you can craft a knife or glove: put five Covert (red) skins from a case into the contract and you get one gold item from that case's rare pool, every time. Five StatTrak Coverts give a StatTrak knife (gloves have no StatTrak). The output float is the normalised average of your five inputs, mapped into the knife or glove's own range. Type a Covert above, like AWP | Asiimov or AK-47 | Fire Serpent, and the calculator switches to the five-slot gold contract. Every case's pool, its odds and what the five cheapest Coverts cost sit side by side on the knife trade-up page.

Ten skins of one rarity produce one skin a rarity up, drawn from the collections your inputs came from. Each collection's share of the odds is its share of the ten, split evenly across that collection's next-grade pool. The output float is not the raw average of the inputs: each input is normalised to its own float range first, those values are averaged, and the average is mapped into the output's range, exactly as the game does. That is why the same average float can land in different wears depending on the skins you use. If the ladder and the normalising step are new to you, the CS2 trade up guide works through both with numbers you can follow. And if you know the skin you want out but not what goes in, the reverse trade-up calculator starts from the output instead: it names the ten feeders, the pool your target competes with, and the average float those inputs have to hit for the wear you are after.

A trade-up is a one-way bet, so this shows how often it loses, not just the expected return. Every output is valued at the best price you could actually cash out at, net of that market's selling fee, and what comes out is only ever shown when every leg is priced, never estimated over a gap. Sign in to build a contract from your own inventory, with per-copy floats and patterns and price alerts.

Every calculator tells you the odds. Almost none of them tell you what the contract is worth, so we ran the numbers on 6 September 2026: 36 single-collection contracts, six at each rung of the ladder, ten copies of one skin each and five for the gold craft, all of them priced through this page. 35 of the 36 came back worth less than they cost. The median contract returned 44 cents on the euro.

Here is the middle contract of the six we priced at each rung, so it is neither the kindest nor the cruellest example on that step:

Euro, net of the selling fee you would pay to cash the output out, on 6 September 2026. Prices move, so retype any row above and read today's number instead.

The bottom rung is the one worth staring at. Those ten CZ75s cost 0.02 each because 0.02 is the market minimum, and every skin in the Industrial pool above them is pinned to the same floor, so ten items buy you one item of exactly the same price. Our six Consumer contracts returned between 2 and 15 percent. That is arithmetic, not bad luck, and no amount of float discipline fixes it. If you are crafting at the bottom of the ladder, do it because you want the skin, not because you expect the value back.

One contract of the 36 came out ahead: ten Field-Tested Dual Berettas | Mystic Conjunction from Arabesque, 0.20 in and 0.30 expected back. Twenty cents, which one wide spread eats on the way out. The other end was the Bravo gold craft, five Field-Tested AK-47 | Fire Serpents at 3,058.15 for an expected 233.19, because a Fire Serpent is one of the priciest Coverts in the game while Bravo's rare pool is 60 items wide. Pool width is the thing people underrate: two outcomes and you roughly know what you are getting, 60 and you are buying a lottery ticket.

Recovery swings hard by collection even inside one rung, from 32 to 150 percent across our six Industrial contracts, so the rung tells you far less than the collection does. The odds behind those pool sizes are counted collection by collection, all 315 grade pairings of them, in the CS2 trade up guide, and the gold pools sit case by case on the knife trade-up page.