Steam Market Fees Explained: Why You Get 86.96%, Not 85%

You list a skin for $10.00. Steam takes 15%. So you get $8.50.

Except you don't. You get $8.70.

That extra 20 cents is not a rounding error or a promotion. It is the result of how Steam actually calculates the fee—and a common shortcut gets the direction of the math backwards.

The short version: Steam's 15% is not subtracted from the buyer's price. It is added on top of the seller's price. That means you keep 1 divided by 1.15, or about 86.96%—not 85%.

There are two fees, not one

A CS2 sale on the Steam Community Market carries two separate charges:

• The Steam transaction fee: 5%.
• The game fee: 10%, which goes to the game's publisher—Valve, in CS2's case.

Together they are the 15% everyone quotes. The number is right. The way people apply it is wrong.

This is not the 30% you have read about

The 10% is easy to misread, because Valve calls it a game-specific fee that is “determined and collected by the game publisher.” That wording sounds like the revenue split developers talk about, and the two get confused constantly.

They are unrelated:

• The Steam Community Market fee—5% plus 10%—applies when a player sells an item to another player. It is what this article is about.
• The Steamworks distribution fee—the well-known 30%, dropping to 25% and 20% at revenue milestones—applies when a developer sells a game or DLC on the Steam store. It has nothing to do with skins.

If you sell a CS2 skin, no part of the 30% figure touches your sale. Your fee is 15% of what you receive. The 10% share happens to go to Valve because Valve publishes CS2, but it is charged as a market transaction fee on your sale, not as a storefront revenue split.

The fee is built up, not taken out

When you set a price on the Steam Market, you are really setting one of two numbers, and Steam shows you both: what the buyer pays, and what lands in your Steam Wallet.

Steam starts from the amount you receive and builds the buyer price up from there. The buyer pays your amount, plus 5% of your amount, plus 10% of your amount—your amount multiplied by 1.15.

Run it backwards and you get the seller’s share: the buyer price divided by 1.15, or the buyer price multiplied by 0.8696.

So the fee is 15% of your proceeds, which works out to roughly 13.04% of the buyer’s price. Same transaction, two different denominators, and the gap is where the confusion lives.

If you want a clean number in your wallet, multiply. To receive $100.00, list so the buyer pays $115.00. To receive $50.00, the buyer pays $57.50.

The worked table

Every row below comes from Valve's fee calculation, including its floor-to-the-cent behavior.

Two things are worth noticing.

Your take rate is never exactly 86.96%—it drifts. Both fees are floored to whole cents, and flooring always rounds in the seller’s favor. On a $1.00 sale that quirk hands you 88%. As prices climb, the rounding advantage shrinks toward nothing and the rate converges on 86.96%. On anything expensive, treat 86.96% as the number.

Cheap items are a different game entirely. Each fee has a 1-cent minimum, which means a 3-cent sale costs you 2 cents in fees. You keep 33%. At 5 cents you keep 60%. At 10 cents you keep 80%. The percentage only becomes normal somewhere north of about 20 cents.

Sometimes Steam rounds its own fee up

Look closely at the $250.00 row. Five percent of $217.39 is $10.87, and flooring that gives $10.86—but the table shows a Steam fee of $10.88. That is not a mistake.

Because both fees are floored to whole cents, some buyer prices have no clean split. At $250.00 there is no seller amount that lands exactly on target: $217.39 produces a buyer price of $249.98, and $217.40 jumps to $250.01. Nothing hits $250.00.

Valve resolves this by taking the lower seller amount and adding the leftover cents to its own transaction fee. You still receive $217.39. Steam collects two cents more than a clean 5% would suggest, and the buyer pays the round number they expected.

This is more common than it sounds—roughly 13% of all prices between $0.03 and $1,000 need that adjustment. It never costs you more than a couple of cents, and it never changes the amount you receive. It just means the Steam fee column will not always survive a calculator check.

Steam Wallet funds are not cash

The fee math tells you what arrives in your wallet. It does not tell you what that value is worth to you.

Steam Wallet funds cannot be withdrawn. They buy games, and they buy more CS2 items. That is it. So an $869.58 sale is $869.58 of Steam spending power—worth full price if you were going to reinvest anyway, and worth considerably less if you were hoping to see money in a bank account.

This is the part a fee calculator cannot answer for you. Third-party marketplaces have their own fee structures, withdrawal rules, and buyer pools. Comparing them honestly means comparing net proceeds and the form those proceeds arrive in.

How to use this when you price an item

Before you list something, run three numbers instead of one:

• What the item is currently worth—the market estimate.
• What you would actually receive after fees—roughly 86.96% of the buyer price.
• What you paid for it—your cost basis.

Only the third number tells you whether the sale is a win. An item valued at $500 that you bought for $420 looks like an $80 gain. After Steam’s cut you receive about $434.79, and the real gain is closer to $15. Fees do not just shave a profit. On thin margins they can erase it.

That is the same trap we covered in Your CS2 Inventory Value Is Not Your Profit: a displayed price is not a sale price, and a sale price is not money earned.

If you would rather not do the arithmetic by hand, the CS2 Profit Calculator handles the fee math and cost basis together.

The CS2 Price Checker covers the current market side of the equation.

Quick answers

How much does Steam take from a sale? 15% of the amount you receive—a 5% Steam fee plus a 10% game fee. That equals about 13.04% of the buyer’s price, leaving you 86.96%.

Why do I get 86.96% instead of 85%? Because the fee is added on top of your proceeds rather than subtracted from the buyer’s price. Dividing by 1.15 is not the same as multiplying by 0.85.

If I want exactly $100, what should the buyer pay? $115.00.

Why did I only get 1 cent for a 3-cent item? Each fee has a 1-cent minimum. On very cheap items those minimums dominate, and your effective fee rate can exceed 60%.

Are the fees different for CS2 than other games? The 5% Steam fee is universal. The game fee varies by title; for CS2 it is 10%.

Can I avoid Steam’s market fee? Not on the Steam Community Market. Third-party marketplaces and direct trades have different fee structures, but they come with their own tradeoffs around trust, withdrawal, and liquidity.

One note on the numbers: the table is generated by reproducing the fee routine Steam runs on the market listing page—5% and 10% floored to whole cents with a 1-cent minimum each, plus the adjustment described above—so it should match what Steam quotes you at listing time. Currency conversion and regional rounding can shift the last cent on non-USD wallets, and Valve can change either fee at any time.