How much cheaper are CS2 skins outside Steam?

The same skin costs one price on the Steam Community Market and another on third-party markets. Everyone knows this, but nobody measures how big the gap actually is — people check one skin at a time, never the whole catalogue.

We did. As of 5 August 2026 our data covers 28,259 priced skins, 26,069 of which have at least one third-party listing, plus 11.4 million daily price records.

The answer: a median of 41.9%

For every skin we took the cheapest market listing at that moment and compared it to the Steam price. The median skin was listed 41.9% below Steam somewhere.

We used the median rather than the mean on purpose: a handful of outliers skews an average badly, while the median describes the typical skin.

Per market, median difference against the Steam price:

The ranking is unsurprising; the magnitude is. Even the narrowest spread is over 27%.

Where the gap comes from

Steam's 15% fee. The price you see on the Community Market is what the buyer pays; the seller receives 15% less (10% game fee plus 5% Steam fee). Steam prices are structurally inflated by that wedge.

Steam wallet funds cannot leave Steam. Sell on Steam and the money lands in your wallet, spendable only on Steam. Third-party markets pay real money, so they can afford to undercut. Most of the gap sits in this single fact.

Market depth. Steam has millions of users; third-party markets have far fewer. Fewer buyers push sellers to cut prices.

Cheaper is not automatically better — three warnings

1. Trade lock. A skin bought on Steam cannot be traded for 7 days. The same rule applies when a skin reaches you from a third-party market; there is no buy-now-flip-now.

2. Counterparty risk. Steam is Valve. A third-party market is a company: it can shut down, freeze your account, or delay a payout. Is a 30% saving worth your money sitting in limbo for a week? That is an arithmetic question, and the answer is not printed on the price tag.

3. Price and float are different things. Two skins in the same wear tier can have very different float values, and collectors pay for that. A cheap-looking listing may sit at the worst end of its tier.

How to check your own skin

This measurement is catalogue-wide. For any single skin the gap can look completely different — on an illiquid knife Steam can even be the cheaper venue.

Every skin page on csviews carries a "where it's cheaper" table: every tracked market's price, the percentage against Steam, and the listing count beside it. Browse the catalogue here: csviews.com/en/katalog

For history, each skin page holds a daily chart going back to 2013; the advanced chart adds RSI, MACD and Bollinger bands.

This article is informational and is not investment advice. The figures were measured on 5 August 2026 and prices change constantly. Skin values depend on in-game decisions and can fall to nothing.