CS2 trade-up contracts: how they work after the 2025 update

A trade-up contract swaps a set of skins of one grade for a single random skin one grade higher, taken from the collections you put in. Valve has changed it twice since October 2025: five Covert skins can now become a knife or gloves, and Souvenir skins can now go in alongside normal ones.

The basic rule

The contract's own text says that in exchange for 10 items of identical quality you receive "a single item of a quality one higher, from a collection of one of the items you provided". The recipes in Valve's item file spell out the ladder:

Inputs must be weapon skins of the same grade. Knives, gloves and the Contraband M4A4 Howl can't go in, and neither can a skin whose collection has nothing one grade higher, because the result has to come from one of the inputs' collections. Valve's contract text warns that the exchange is permanent and that the exterior of the item you receive will vary. Grades and floats are explained in CS2 skin rarities and float values.

The October 2025 change: knives and gloves

Covert used to be the end of the ladder. Valve's update of 22 October 2025 added a contract for five Covert skins: five normal Coverts give one normal knife or one pair of gloves, and five StatTrak Coverts give one StatTrak knife, in both cases "from a collection of one of the items provided". HLTV led its report on the update with the change.

That phrase sets a hard limit. Valve's item file gives a knife or glove pool to 43 collections: the 42 that came in weapon cases, plus the Dead Hand Collection. A Covert from anywhere else, such as the AWP Dragon Lore from the Cobblestone map collection, has nothing to turn into. Eight of those collections hold only gloves: Glove, Operation Hydra, Clutch, Operation Broken Fang, Snakebite, Recoil, Revolution and Dead Hand. Gloves don't exist in StatTrak, so StatTrak Coverts from those eight have no StatTrak result to give.

How collections weight the odds

Valve has never published how inputs from different collections are weighted. Its text only says the result comes from a collection of one of the items you provided, so what's known comes from players recording their contracts.

Since the October 2025 update, those records point to a simple rule. Each input gives its own collection an equal share of the chance, one in ten (one in five in a Covert contract), and that share is split evenly between the collection's possible results. Put in 7 skins from a collection with two possible results and 3 from one with three: the first collection gets 70%, or 35% for each of its results, and the second gets 30%, or 10% each.

A Steam Community guide written after the update gives a sharper example: nine inputs from nine different collections plus one M4A1-S Knight. The Knight's collection, Cobblestone, has a single Covert, the AWP Dragon Lore, so the contract gives it 10% of the time. Under the "pool" reading players used before, where every possible result of every input counted as one ticket, the same contract worked out at 1 in 19, about 5.3%. Treat the current rule as the community's best reading, not Valve's word.

How the output float is computed

The result's float is worked out from the inputs too, and Valve hasn't published that formula either. For years players used: output float = minimum + average input float × (maximum − minimum), where minimum and maximum are the result's own float range.

Since October 2025, player tests show an extra step. Each input's float is first rescaled to its own range, (float − its minimum) ÷ (its maximum − its minimum), and the average of those rescaled values goes into the same formula. The day after the update, a player posted a real contract on Reddit: ten UMP-45 Carbon Fibers, a finish capped at 0.00–0.12, averaging 0.01759, traded up into a Desert Eagle Meteorite, capped at 0.00–0.18. Both ranges match Valve's item file.

| Formula | Working | Predicted float | |---|---|--:| | Old | 0.01759 × 0.18 | 0.0032 | | Rescaled | (0.01759 ÷ 0.12) × 0.18 | 0.0264 |

The contract produced 0.02638, the rescaled prediction. In practice, a low float on a tightly capped finish no longer pulls the result down by itself; what counts is where each input sits within its own range.

StatTrak and Souvenir inputs

StatTrak contracts are separate recipes in Valve's file. Every input must be StatTrak, and the result is StatTrak, so StatTrak and normal skins can't be mixed.

Souvenir skins couldn't be used in contracts until Valve's update of May 2026. Now they can go in alongside normal skins, all their Souvenir attributes are removed, and the result is a normal item. The game asks you to confirm before it strips them. Because Souvenirs sit in the normal recipe, they can't be mixed with StatTrak skins either. StatTrak and Souvenir skins explains both qualities.

Before you sign a contract

A trade-up is a random draw. You give up the inputs for one result picked by chance, and that result can be worth less than what you put in. Working out the odds and the float tells you what can come out and how worn it will be, not what it will be worth. Where the inputs themselves come from, and how rare each grade is in a case, is covered in CS2 case odds.

Sources

• Counter-Strike 2 Update, 22 October 2025 — Steam News
• Knife trade-ups and return of retakes headline CS2 update — HLTV.org
• Counter-Strike 2 Update, May 2026 — Steam News
• items_game.txt (Valve item definitions) — GameTracking-CS2 on GitHub
• csgo_english.txt (Valve English strings) — GameTracking-CS2 on GitHub
• Trade ups and Floats Guide for CS2 — Steam Community
• How trade-ups work now — Reddit r/csgomarketforum
• Trade Up Contract — Counter-Strike Wiki