CS2 Premier Ranks: CS Rating Colours, Seasons and All 18 Skill Groups

CS2 Premier ranks are seven colours, from grey to gold, set by your CS Rating: the colour changes every 5,000 points. That's one of CS2's two ranking systems. Premier gives you one number, your CS Rating, for all maps. Competitive gives you one of 18 classic skill groups, from Silver I to Global Elite, separately for every map. Here's how both work, from Valve's own release notes and support pages.

Premier ranks by CS Rating

Premier is CS2's main ranked mode, played on the Active Duty maps. Valve calls the CS Rating "a visible measurement of your Counter-Strike performance". It's one number for all maps, it decides where you stand on the leaderboards, and its colour is your Premier rank:

CS Rating	Colour
0 to 4,999	Grey
5,000 to 9,999	Light blue
10,000 to 14,999	Blue
15,000 to 19,999	Purple
20,000 to 24,999	Pink
25,000 to 29,999	Red
30,000 and up	Gold

Promotion and relegation. Since October 2023, promotion and relegation matches only happen at those colour boundaries, every 5,000 points. So you play a promotion match to move up a colour, and a relegation match before you drop one.

Gold, from 30,000, is the highest colour. Valve hasn't published a maximum rating.

How your CS Rating goes up and down

You gain rating for a win and lose it for a loss. Valve doesn't publish the formula, but its release notes say a fair amount about how it behaves:

• Wins to show a rating. At the start of Season Two, Valve recalibrated every player's rating from their Season One results, and everyone had to win 10 matches to show it again. Valve hasn't published the number for new accounts.
• Bigger swings after calibration. In October 2023 Valve increased how much rating a win or loss can move, "to move players faster after calibration". The same update made matchmaking pick teams with smaller rating differences, at the cost of longer queues.
• Kicked or abandoned matches. If you're kicked, your rating follows the final result of the match. Since November 2023 CS2 shows a notice when your rating was adjusted after a match, for example for a match you were kicked from or abandoned, or when you get back points lost to a cheater.
• Inactivity. If you stop playing Premier for a while, you have to re-establish your rating. Valve adjusted how that works in November 2023 but doesn't say how long the break has to be.
• Cheating bans hit the party. When a party member is convicted of cheating and permanently banned, Valve says "all their associates" lose CS Rating and Profile Rank (your XP level) too. It doesn't define who counts as an associate.
• Who you can party with. Players with a very high established rating can't queue with accounts that don't have a rating yet, and there's a limit on how far apart party members' ratings can be. Valve adjusted that range in February 2024 and again in February 2025, without giving the numbers. Parties of four have been able to queue for Premier since November 2023.

How Premier picks the map

Since 22 September 2026 there's no ban phase in Premier. Per the release notes, team 1 picks one map, team 2 picks two, team 1 picks a fourth, and then one of the four is chosen at random. (Valve's blog post for the same update says each team picks two.) Valve's reason: players who spend time learning a map should get more chances to play it. Before that, teams banned maps down to one.

Premier seasons

Premier runs in seasons, and Seasons Two to Five each started with a change to the map pool. These are all the seasons so far, with dates from Valve's release notes:

Season	Started	Ended	Active Duty change
Season One	27 September 2023 (CS2 launch)	28 January 2025	Dust II in, Overpass out (25 April 2024, mid-season)
Season Two	28 January 2025	14 July 2025	Train in, Vertigo out
Season Three	16 July 2025	When Season Four began	Overpass in, Anubis out
Season Four	21 January 2026	When Season Five began	Anubis in, Train out
Season Five	8 July 2026	Not announced	Cache in, Overpass out

Valve's full notes for each of these updates are on our CS2 updates page.

The current season is Season Five, which started on 8 July 2026. Valve hasn't announced when it ends. For Season Two, Valve announced the end ahead of time: it ran until the Austin Major and ended on 14 July 2025.

Season medals. Every player who earned a CS Rating in Season One got a Premier Season One Medal, with graphs of their season. From Season Two to Season Four, Valve set the same rules: the medal's colour matches the highest CS Rating you reached that season, and it has one bar for every 25 wins, up to five. To get one you need an account in good standing, 25 Premier wins in the season and a visible rating when it ends. Valve's Season Five notes don't mention a medal.

Leaderboards

There are nine: Friends, World (the top 1,000 players) and seven regions: Africa, Asia, Australia, China, Europe, North America and South America. You need Prime status (CS2's paid upgrade), and you show up on a public leaderboard once you're in the top 1,000 of your region. You can't pick your region: it's set by the servers you play on most.

They aren't always filled when a season starts. In Season Two, Valve announced the world and regional leaderboards were populated on 13 May 2025, more than three months in.

Is there an official Premier rank distribution?

No. Valve shows the top 1,000 players per leaderboard in the game, but it doesn't publish how many players hold each colour or what percentile a rating is. The colour bands are fixed at 5,000 points each; they say nothing about the share of players in them. Valve's leaderboard method in the Steam Web API (ICSGOServers_730/GetLeaderboardEntries) no longer answers at all: when we checked on 24 October 2026, every request got "410 Gone".

So any Premier rank distribution chart you find online was built by a third party from the matches it collects, not by Valve. We don't publish one here because we can't source it to Valve.

Competitive: the 18 skill groups

Competitive mode keeps the skill groups CS:GO players know, but each map has its own. You can be Gold Nova on Nuke and Master Guardian on Mirage. A map shows its skill group once you've won enough matches on it.

#	Skill group
1	Silver I
2	Silver II
3	Silver III
4	Silver IV
5	Silver Elite
6	Silver Elite Master
7	Gold Nova I
8	Gold Nova II
9	Gold Nova III
10	Gold Nova Master
11	Master Guardian I
12	Master Guardian II
13	Master Guardian Elite
14	Distinguished Master Guardian
15	Legendary Eagle
16	Legendary Eagle Master
17	Supreme Master First Class
18	Global Elite

In January 2026 Valve adjusted the hidden rank values behind these skill groups and expired everyone's existing per-map skill groups. They come back once you win enough matches on that map again. Wingman has its own skill groups with the same 18 names.

Premier or Competitive?

• Premier if you want one number that follows you across maps, a spot on the leaderboards and a colour to show off. Matches start with each team picking maps, then one is drawn at random.
• Competitive if you want to play one map you choose, or learn a new one without risking your rating.

Both play up to 24 rounds in regulation time, with overtime on a tie.

Who you get matched with also depends on Trust Factor, a score CS2 keeps hidden. Valve says your CS2 rank is one of the things it counts: see our Trust Factor guide.

Is there an official CS Rating to skill group chart?

No. Valve doesn't publish one, and the two systems measure different things: one rating across all maps against one skill group per map. Charts you see online that say "15,000 equals Legendary Eagle" are players' estimates, not Valve's numbers.

Get the setup right first

Rank is mostly practice, but settings help. Copy a pro's crosshair from our CS2 crosshair codes page, and find the commands for practice servers on our console commands list.