CS:GO trade up contracts 2013–2018: how it was, and what still applies in CS2
I ran my first trade up contracts on the old CS:GO contract screen, years before CS2 existed, and have traded skins through every rule change since. This is a short history of the contract and of the 2016–2018 skin market as it looked from the trading side, with the dates checked against the update notes and news of the time, and what each of those years still teaches about contracts today.
Where the contract came from (2013–2015)
- September 12, 2013: the Arms Deal update. Skins, weapon cases and a contract that exchanged 10 skins of one grade from the Arms Deal collection for one skin of the next grade.
- September 19, 2013: Operation Bravo. Renamed the Trade Up Contract and opened to every collection.
- May 14, 2014: mixed collections. Inputs no longer had to come from one collection: any 10 skins of a grade, with the outcome drawn from the collection of one of the inputs. This is the rule that turned contracts into a market: a few cheap inputs from one collection buy a share of the outcomes of an expensive one.
- March 31, 2015: StatTrak™ inputs. Ten StatTrak skins in, a StatTrak skin out.
The float formula of that era was simple, and the community worked it out rather than Valve publishing it: the outcome's float was the plain average of the input floats mapped onto the outcome's float range. That is no longer how it works. Since the CS2 update of October 2025 each input float is first normalised against its own skin's range and only then averaged, which is the maths the calculator uses today. What did not exist yet was tooling. Prices came from the Steam Market page of each skin, contracts were planned in spreadsheets and Steam guides, and the float of every input was checked by hand.
2016: trade holds, Gamma and the gambling crackdown
March 9, 2016: 15-day trade holds. Steam extended the hold on trades to 15 days for accounts without the Mobile Authenticator (one day between long-time friends, and the same wait for Market listings). From that day every serious trader had the authenticator on the phone, because a two-week hold on every trade kills a business that lives on turnover.
June and August 2016: Gamma and Gamma 2. Two cases in one summer, each a new pool of cheap Mil-Spec and Restricted inputs and a new set of Classified and Covert outcomes.
July 13, 2016: the gambling crackdown. Valve announced that it would send notices to the skin gambling sites telling them to cease operations, and that the automated Steam accounts those sites ran broke its API terms. PC Gamer sampled 20 high-volume skins that evening and found them down 13.7% on average; an AWP | BOOM in Minimal Wear went from $21.75 to $18.56 within twelve hours. Many of them returned to their earlier prices soon after. If you were holding inputs that week the lesson was cheap: a scare sells off in an evening and recovers in days, while the contract maths does not move at all. The odds and the float are the same on a bad-news day.
November 28, 2016: the Glove Case. Gloves arrived. For contracts they changed nothing: gloves could not be crafted until the CS2 knife contract of October 2025.
2017: new cases, same rules
The Spectrum Case (March 2017), Operation Hydra (May 2017) and Spectrum 2 (September 2017) brought the same event three times. In my experience a new case is the best window a contract trader gets: for a few weeks its blue and purple skins are the cheapest inputs in the game because everyone is opening it, while its pink and red skins are still expensive because few have been crafted. The rules did not change at all in 2017, which is exactly why it was a good year for contracts.
2018: the year trading itself changed
February 2018: the Clutch Case. Another input pool.
March 29, 2018: the seven-day trade cooldown. CS:GO items received in a trade could not be traded again for seven days, the wait that Steam Market purchases already carried. Valve's stated reason was fraud through automated accounts that trade far more often than real players. Gambling sites and marketplaces that moved items through bots were hit hardest. For contracts it changed less than people feared: a trade-locked skin can still go into a contract, and the result simply carries the longest remaining lock among the inputs (how that works today).
June 2018: OPSkins. The largest cash marketplace of the era launched ExpressTrade on June 6 to get around the cooldown. On June 21, after a cease-and-desist notice, Valve cut off its Steam bots: an estimated 2,843 accounts holding more than 1.5 million items worth close to $2 million. The biggest marketplace in CS:GO was gone from the game in two weeks. Anyone who kept inventory on marketplace bots learned the rule I still follow: what is not in your own inventory is not yours.
August 2, 2018: Panorama. The new UI became the default and the Scaleform interface I learned contracts on was kept only as a launch option for a transition period. The Horizon Case came out the same day.
December 6, 2018: free to play. CS:GO became free, every existing owner was upgraded to Prime, and Danger Zone arrived with its own case. A free game means more players, more cases opened and more cheap inputs, and that is the market CS2 inherited.
What those years taught me about contracts
- Rules change overnight, and never in your favour. Trade holds (2016), the cooldown (2018) and the OPSkins cut-off (2018) each arrived with a day's notice or none. Keep the share of your money that sits in skins at a level you can afford to have locked for a month, or halved overnight. I have woken up to an inventory worth half of what it was the night before more than once; the ones who survive that are the ones who did not need the money that week.
- News moves prices for an evening; supply moves them for months. The gambling crackdown recovered within days. A new case changes what inputs cost for a season.
- The listed price is not the price. An outcome with three listings at $300 is worth whatever the fourth buyer pays. That is why the market price on this site is a listing-weighted median across marketplaces rather than a single lowest listing, and why the calculator shows several markets for every outcome.
- Fees decide the contract. Steam's cut on a sale is the same today as it was then. A contract that is a few percent up before fees is a losing contract; the calculator takes the sale fee off before it shows ROI.
- Floats were the edge then and are the edge now. The formula has changed since then, but the point has not: checking ten floats by hand was where most mistakes happened. Today the calculator does it from the inputs you pick.
Then and now: what is different in CS2
| CS:GO, 2016–2018 | CS2, 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Standard contract | 10 skins of one grade → 1 of the next grade, from the input collections | Same |
| Knives and gloves | Not craftable | 5 Covert skins → 1 knife or gloves since October 22, 2025 (knife calculator) |
| Souvenir skins | Not allowed as inputs | Allowed since May 22, 2026; the result is a normal skin (rules) |
| Output float | Plain average of the input floats, mapped onto the outcome's range | Each input normalised to its own skin's range first, then averaged (since October 2025) |
| StatTrak™ | Allowed since March 31, 2015 | Same; StatTrak inputs cannot return gloves |
| Trade lock | 7-day cooldown from March 29, 2018 | Same 7 days; locked inputs are allowed |
| Contract screen | Scaleform until August 2, 2018, then Panorama | The CS2 inventory |
| Where prices came from | The Steam Market and a few cash marketplaces, OPSkins the largest | Steam plus nine marketplaces, refreshed every 30–60 minutes (sources) |
| Tools | Spreadsheets and Steam guides | Calculators with live prices and a finder for +EV contracts |
Open the free CS2 trade up calculator
Related questions
When was the trade up contract added to CS:GO?
With the Arms Deal update of September 12, 2013, limited to the Arms Deal collection; one week later, on September 19, 2013, it was renamed the Trade Up Contract and opened to every collection. Mixed-collection contracts followed on May 14, 2014.
Could you trade up to a knife in CS:GO?
No. Knives and gloves were never contract outcomes in CS:GO. The knife contract (5 Covert skins for a knife or gloves from the inputs' case) arrived in CS2 on October 22, 2025.
Has the float formula changed since CS:GO?
Yes. In CS:GO the outcome's float was the plain average of the input floats mapped onto the outcome's range. Since the CS2 update of October 2025 each input float is first normalised against its own skin's float range and then averaged; that is the formula the calculator uses.