We Ranked 31 CS2 Marketplaces by How Much They Overcharge. Steam Came Last.
Market Insights
We checked live prices for the 100 most-traded CS2 items on 38 marketplaces. CSFloat sat a median 3.2% above the cheapest listing. Steam sat 50% above it, and was never the cheapest place for a single item.
Same skin, same wear, same minute. On one marketplace it costs $3.04. On another it costs $9.99. Both listings are live, and both have buyers.
That is not a rare glitch. It is how the CS2 market works every day, and most people never see it because they only check one site. So on October 20, 2026 we took the 100 most-traded CS2 items, pulled every live price CSMarketCap tracks for them across 38 marketplaces, and measured one thing: how far each marketplace sits above the cheapest price available for the same item.
In September we measured how wide the price gap is across 36 marketplaces. This time we went one step further and ranked every marketplace on its own.
How we measured it
For every item, we took the lowest live ask on any marketplace as the baseline. Then we compared every other marketplace's ask for that item to the baseline. A marketplace selling an item at the baseline price scores 0%. One selling it 20% higher scores +20%.
Each marketplace gets a median score across all the items it lists. We only ranked marketplaces that list at least 50 of the 100 items, which left 31. The basket is mostly what people actually trade: 31 cases and terminals, 55 skins and 14 capsules, stickers and charms.
Two caveats. These are list prices, not the final price after each site's deposit or withdrawal fees. And the cheapest listing for an item can sometimes be a single offer, which is exactly why we use medians instead of best cases.
The cheapest marketplaces
Five marketplaces stayed within a few percent of the lowest price almost everywhere:
Rank | Marketplace | Items listed | Median markup | Times cheapest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | CSFloat | 100 | +3.2% | 20 |
2 | Skinswap | 84 | +3.4% | 17 |
3 | SkinsMonkey | 57 | +5.6% | 1 |
4 | ECOSteam | 100 | +5.7% | 6 |
5 | Tradeit | 96 | +5.8% | 20 |
CSFloat is the standout. It listed all 100 items, had the single lowest price on 20 of them, and its typical price was only 3.2% above the floor. Tradeit tied it for the most "cheapest" finishes with 20, but its typical markup was a bit higher at 5.8%.
If you want the full picture for one item, every CSMarketCap item page shows these same live prices side by side.
The crowded middle
Most of the market sits in a tight band. Seventeen of the 31 ranked marketplaces had a median markup between 5% and 10%, including BUFF163 (+6.3%), Lis-Skins (+6.4%), CS.MONEY (+7.1%), Youpin (+8.9%), White.Market (+9.0%) and Skinflow (+9.5%).
Another seven sat between 10% and 12.5%, with Skinport at +11.2% and ShadowPay at +12.3%.
For a $5 skin, the gap between the top and the middle is a few cents. For a $300 knife, a 7% difference is $21. The percentages stay the same, the dollars do not.
The most expensive marketplaces
Then the gaps get big.
Rank | Marketplace | Items listed | Median markup | Times most expensive |
|---|---|---|---|---|
27 | Market.CSGO | 100 | +17.3% | 0 |
28 | DMarket | 100 | +17.4% | 13 |
29 | Mannco | 95 | +28.8% | 18 |
30 | NTSkins | 78 | +42.2% | 9 |
31 | Steam Community Market | 100 | +50.0% | 36 |
DMarket had the most expensive price on 13 items, and its prices can swing far from the rest of the market. The $9.99 listing from the opening of this article is DMarket's price for M4A1-S | Black Lotus (Field-Tested). The same skin was $3.17 on CSFloat with more than 1,500 listings.
Steam: last place, by a lot
The Steam Community Market listed all 100 items. It was the cheapest place for none of them. It was the most expensive place for 36 of them. Its median price sat 50% above the cheapest available listing.
To put that in money: buying one of each of the 100 items at Steam prices would cost $583.25. Buying each one at its lowest available price would cost $421.18. That is $162.07 more, or 38.5% extra, for the same 100 items.
A few examples from the same snapshot:
Glove Case: $8.67 at the lowest, $11.86 on Steam
AK-47 | Redline (Battle-Scarred): $19.32 at the lowest, $24.16 on Steam
USP-S | Printstream (Battle-Scarred): $26.97 at the lowest, $35.37 on Steam
Steam has real advantages: it is built into the game and purchases land in your inventory instantly. But as a place to buy, it is consistently the most expensive option in the market.
What this means for you
Across all 100 items, the median gap between the cheapest and the most expensive listing for the same item was 68.9%. For cases and terminals it was 59.9%. For skins it was 63.0%.
In other words, for a typical popular item, the most expensive marketplace asks about two-thirds more than the cheapest one. The item is identical. Only the price tag changes.
The cheapest marketplace changes from item to item. CSFloat and Tradeit each had the lowest price on 20 items, but the rest of the wins were spread across more than a dozen other sites. Loyalty to one marketplace costs money, and on Steam it costs the most.
Before you buy, check the price on every marketplace at once. That is exactly what CSMarketCap does: one search, every live price, sorted from cheapest to most expensive.