CS2 Trade-Up Contracts: How They Work in 2026

TL;DR: a trade-up contract swaps 10 skins of the same rarity for one skin of the next rarity up, chosen from the collections your inputs came from. Since Valve’s October 2025 update, you can also trade 5 Covert skins for a knife or gloves. Your odds depend only on how many inputs come from each collection, and your output float is set by a normalized average of your input floats.

What Is a Trade-Up Contract?

It’s an in-game crafting screen. You put in skins you own, the skins are consumed, and you get one skin back at a higher rarity. Players use it to turn piles of cheap skins into one better skin, and traders use it to chase outcomes worth more than the inputs.

The Two Contract Types

The Covert contract arrived in the October 2025 update and briefly knocked close to $2 billion off the total value of the CS2 skin market, because it opened a new path to knives and gloves that didn’t require a case roll.

The Rules You Can’t Break

• All inputs must be the same rarity.
• StatTrak and non-StatTrak can’t be mixed. A StatTrak contract gives a StatTrak result.
• For Covert contracts, StatTrak inputs can only produce a StatTrak knife. Gloves only come from regular Covert inputs, because StatTrak gloves don’t exist.
• Souvenir skins and contraband items (like the M4A4 | Howl) can’t be used.
• Every input needs a collection with a higher tier to trade into, otherwise there’s nothing to produce.
• Items that are still Trade Protected can’t go into a contract until the 7-day window ends.

How Trade-Up Odds Are Calculated

Your chance of landing in each collection equals that collection’s share of your inputs. Put in 7 skins from Collection A and 3 from Collection B, and you have a 70% chance of an A result and 30% of a B result. The result is then picked from that collection’s skins one tier up.

This replaced the older system, where a collection with more possible outcomes got extra weight. Under the old rules, traders padded contracts with cheap “filler” skins to steer the odds. Since the October 2025 update, that trick no longer works: only the count of inputs per collection matters.

Planning around the odds

If one collection has a single valuable outcome and another has several cheap ones, the more of your inputs you take from the first, the better your shot at it. List every possible outcome, its probability and its current price before you sign anything.

How Output Float Is Calculated

Float decides wear, and wear can move a skin’s price a lot (see our float and wear guide). Trade-ups now use normalized floats, which means each input is measured against its own float range first:

1. For each input: (float − skin min) ÷ (skin max − skin min).
2. Average those 10 (or 5) normalized values.
3. Output float = output min + average × (output max − output min).

A worked example

Say every input has a range of 0.00 to 0.80 and a float of 0.08. Each normalizes to 0.10, so the average is 0.10. If the output skin’s range is 0.06 to 0.80, the result is 0.06 + 0.10 × 0.74 = 0.134. That lands in Minimal Wear (0.07 to 0.15), not Factory New, even though your inputs were low.

Two lessons from that example. First, the output skin’s float cap matters as much as your inputs. Second, an input with a narrow range is penalized: a 0.08 on a skin capped at 0.00 to 0.40 counts as 0.20, not 0.08. Always check ranges before buying inputs.

How to Do a Trade-Up, Step by Step

1. Open your CS2 inventory and start a Trade Up Contract from an eligible skin.
2. Add 10 skins of one rarity (or 5 Coverts). The game only lets you add items that qualify, which is a handy sanity check.
3. Review the possible outcomes the contract screen shows for your inputs.
4. Sign the contract. The inputs are destroyed and the result lands in your inventory. There’s no undo.

Before step 4, write down three things: your input cost, each outcome’s probability, and each outcome’s likely float. If any of those is a guess, you’re gambling on the guess as well as on the roll.

Are Trade-Ups Profitable?

Sometimes, but most aren’t. The test is expected value: add up each outcome’s price multiplied by its probability, then compare that to what your inputs cost. Remember that selling on the Steam Community Market costs roughly 15% in fees, so an outcome “worth” a certain price returns less in cash. Contracts with clearly positive EV get found quickly and push input prices up, which is why good ones don’t stay good for long.

A trade-up calculator saves time, but it only knows the prices you feed it. Prices on skins move daily, so recheck right before you sign.

Trade-Ups vs Upgrading on a Case Site

A trade-up is a fixed recipe with odds you can calculate from public rules. An upgrader on a case site works differently: you stake one skin or balance and pick a target, and the site shows the exact win chance up front. Neither is a guaranteed profit. If you want to compare the two, our CS2 upgrader guide explains how upgrade odds are set.

Bottom Line

Trade-ups come down to three numbers: how many inputs you take from each collection, the normalized average of your floats, and the market price of every possible outcome. Get those right and you’ll know your odds before you click, which is more than most players do. If you’d rather chase a knife from a case, check the official CS2 case odds first.