Steam Inventory Value: How to Check What Your Items Are Worth

Summary: A Steam inventory has three values: what sellers are asking, what buyers are offering through buy orders, and what you would actually receive after Steam's fees. Only marketable items count. You keep about 95% of the buyer's price after Steam's 5% Steam Transaction Fee, and less for Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, which add a 10% game fee. The $2000 Steam Wallet cap also limits how much you can sell at once.

"What is my Steam inventory worth?" sounds like it should have one number for an answer. In practice there are three. There's what sellers are asking, what buyers are offering, and what you'd actually receive after Steam's fees. This guide explains how to read each one from the Steam Community Market, which items count at all, and how to estimate a realistic total without trusting a number you can't check.

Steam rules and fees in this guide come from Steam's own support pages:

• Steam Community Market FAQ
• Trading and Market Restrictions FAQ
• Trade Protected Items FAQ

Step 1: Work out which items have a Market value

Only marketable items have a Market price. Some items in your inventory will never be worth anything on the Market:

• Unmarketable items. The Market FAQ says some items can't be sold at all. Its examples are Dota 2 timed drops, which are "permanently not marketable", and some third-party game items after purchase.
• Temporarily locked items. Newly bought Dota 2 treasures, and items bought in-game or on the Market, can't be sold until the date shown on the item. The Market FAQ says you can "select the item in your Steam inventory and read its description to see when it can be marketable".
• Trade Protected CS2 items. For 7 days after a trade, CS2 items you receive can't be "consumed, modified, or transferred". They still have a value, but you can't sell them until the protection ends.
• Games that aren't on the Market. It's "up to the game developer to decide whether or not they want to participate in the Community Market."

When you choose an item to sell, Steam only shows eligible ones. The Market FAQ says "only items that are eligible to be sold will be visible". That's a quick way to see what actually counts.

Step 2: Read the three prices on each listing page

Every marketable item has a listing page on the Community Market. For commodity items, such as cases, crates, keys, stickers, trading cards and most Rust skins, the page shows:

The Market FAQ describes buy orders as a way to "see what other users are willing to pay for an item". For valuing an inventory, the highest buy order is the most honest single number. It's a price someone has committed to, and you can sell at it without waiting.

Items that aren't commodities, such as CS2 weapon skins with their own wear and pattern, are listed one by one. For those, compare the cheapest listings that match your item's details, and use the price history as a check.

Step 3: Subtract the fees

The listing price is what the buyer pays, not what you get. The Market FAQ lists:

• the Steam Transaction Fee: 5%, with a minimum of $0.01, paid by the buyer, and
• a game fee: currently 10% for Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and Artifact, "determined and collected by the game publisher".

Both are added on top of the item's price. So if you only know the buyer's price, your share is roughly:

Hypothetical example: a CS2 case with a buyer price of $1.15 brings in about $1.00 for the seller. The $0.01 minimum fee makes cheap items worse. On a $0.03 item, a $0.01 fee is a third of the price. Steam's sell page shows the exact split, and the fees and holds explainer has more on how the minimum works.

Step 4: Apply the limits that cap a "total"

Even a carefully added-up inventory value isn't money you can take out in one go:

• It's wallet credit, not cash. The Market FAQ says funds "cannot be withdrawn or transferred to another Steam account or to a bank/3rd party account".
• The $2000 wallet cap. Steam Wallet balances are limited to $2000, or a similar amount in other currencies. You can't create a listing if your balance plus the sale price would go over the cap. If your inventory is worth more than that, you can't cash it all into your wallet at once.
• The $1800 listing maximum. No single listing can be priced above about $1800 USD in your currency.
• Selling moves the price. If you own many copies of one item, listing them all at once may push you past the current buy orders. The total you can realistically get may be lower than the number of copies times one price.

Step 5: Put it together

A realistic estimate looks like this:

1. List your marketable items for each game, and leave out locked and unmarketable ones. For commodity items, Steam Bulk Sell's game pages load what you hold for a game and how many of each item you own. Your inventory needs to be set to public first.
2. For each item, note the highest buy order (realistic) and the lowest listing (optimistic).
3. Multiply by the quantity you own. Be cautious with big stacks.
4. Apply the fee share for that game: about 87% or about 95%.
5. Compare the total with how much room you have under the $2000 wallet cap.

You'll end up with a range, not a single figure. That's normal, and more useful than one number, because it shows how much you'd get by selling fast versus waiting.

A word on inventory value websites

Third-party sites and extensions that show an "inventory value" are usually doing the same thing, multiplying your items by a price from somewhere. Before you trust one, check:

• Which price it uses: lowest listing, buy order, median, or prices from another marketplace.
• Whether fees are taken off.
• What it asks for. Checking value only needs a public inventory. You never need to give a site your Steam password, and Steam's own restrictions FAQ is a good place to read about account security before trading.

Steam Bulk Sell doesn't need your password, API key or a browser extension. It reads your public inventory and hands you a link to Steam's own Multisell page, where you set the prices yourself.

Turning the value into wallet funds

Once you know what's worth selling, commodity items are the easiest to clear in bulk. Steam's Multisell page lets you list many copies of identical items together. Pick your game from the game list, for example CS2, Rust, Team Fortress 2 or PUBG, and load your public inventory. Then follow the Multisell guide. For cards and other Steam items, see how to sell Steam trading cards.