CS2 Skin Rarity Tiers: Every Color in Order

The colored bar next to an item name is its rarity tier. It tells you how often the item appears, but it does not set the price directly: a cheap "red" and an expensive "blue" are entirely normal. Here is the ladder, and how it connects to money.

AK-47 | RedlineAWP | AsiimovM4A4 | AsiimovUSP-S | Kill ConfirmedAK-47 | Slate

The rarity ladder

Knives and gloves sit outside the normal ladder: they have their own gold tier and their own drop chance. One update rewrote that sentence, though — since 23 October 2025 a trade-up contract on five Covert items can output a knife or gloves, so gold is no longer a case-only tier. The market repriced it within two days, and knives and gloves fell harder than any other category. Contraband is a category of one — a skin pulled from circulation after a copyright dispute, with no new copies entering the market.

M4A4 | Howl (Field-Tested)best price: $4443.55 · lis

Unboxing odds

Inside a weapon case the odds break down as follows, and the values are the same for every weapon case (souvenir packages, sticker capsules and collection drops use their own distributions):

So roughly four openings out of five give a blue item, and a knife comes less often than once per 384 cases. StatTrak works on top of that: roughly one in ten unboxed items comes with a counter.

What that means for your money is covered in the article on whether cases are worth opening.

Why rarity is not price

Price comes from supply and demand, and rarity is only one part of supply. In practice these matter more:

• How popular the weapon is. A red skin on a rarely used gun can cost less than a blue one on an AK-47 or an AWP.
• Collection status. Items from cases that no longer drop get more expensive, because the inflow has stopped while consumption continues.
• Condition and float. The same skin in Factory New and in Battle-Scarred are different prices, sometimes by multiples.
• Pattern. On Case Hardened, Fade and Marble Fade the pattern placement can multiply the price several times over. Details in the article on float and pattern.
• Stickers and StatTrak. Both premiums sit on top of the base price.

AK-47 | Case Hardened (Field-Tested)best price: $218.89 · lis

You can check this right here rather than taking our word for it. Below are the cheapest Covert items trading right now. They carry the same red tier as the Howl and the Asiimov, at two orders of magnitude less money. One tier, a spread of hundreds of times — that is exactly what "rarity is not price" means.

AK-47 | Aphrodite (Battle-Scarred)$9.22StatTrak™ MP7 | Bloodsport (Field-Tested)$17.99StatTrak™ AWP | Chromatic Aberration (Battle-Scarred)$20.38StatTrak™ AK-47 | Head Shot (Battle-Scarred)$20.80M4A4 | Full Throttle (Battle-Scarred)$21.96StatTrak™ M4A4 | Temukau (Battle-Scarred)$22.25AWP | Chrome Cannon (Field-Tested)$22.29AK-47 | The Oligarch (Battle-Scarred)$22.59AK-47 | Head Shot (Battle-Scarred)$22.63M4A4 | Temukau (Battle-Scarred)$23.04AWP | Chromatic Aberration (Battle-Scarred)$23.50StatTrak™ M4A4 | Neo-Noir (Battle-Scarred)$23.51

Live prices: the list is built when the page opens

The list is live and built when the page opens, so the prices are today's rather than whatever they were when this was written.

Rarity in collections and on maps

Items from collections rather than cases use the same color ladder, but the lower tiers appear far more often and the top ones may not exist at all. Souvenir versions drop only during tournaments, inside souvenir packages — their release is bounded by the event, which is why top Souvenir items end up as collector-grade rarities.

Why rare items can be harder to sell

Rarity has a flip side that odds tables never mention: the rarer the item, the fewer people are willing to buy it. Consumer and Mil-Spec skins sell instantly and always, simply because any player buys them. Coverts and knives are bought by a narrow circle, and waiting for your buyer can take weeks.

In practice this means rarity and liquidity move in OPPOSITE directions. A "rare and expensive" position almost always means "slow to sell", while a "cheap and common" one means "sells immediately, but harder to earn on".

The beginner's mistake looks like this: build a portfolio of reds and golds, assuming that is the most valuable set, then discover at the moment of need that turning it into money within a day is impossible at any price. That is exactly why a portfolio keeps a liquid share — it is the part you will actually sell.

Rarity and wear are two different dimensions

Rarity sets the colour and the drop probability; wear describes the condition of one specific copy. They are independent, and confusing them is expensive.

The same Covert in Factory New and in Battle-Scarred is two items at different prices, sometimes several times apart. And the other way round: a Mil-Spec in pristine condition can be cheaper than a worn Classified. So an item's colour tells you almost nothing about its price until you know the condition.

On top of that sits a third dimension — StatTrak and Souvenir versions, which also shift the price, and in different directions: StatTrak is usually above the plain version, while a Souvenir can be either above or below it depending on the tournament and the stickers inside.

How to use this

• Judge tier and weapon popularity together, never the color on its own.
• For investment logic, supply status matters more than tier: a closed release beats rarity inside a case.
• Compare the price across marketplaces before buying: on a liquid item the spread is usually 5–20%.

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