Steam counts the time a game is running on your account while Steam knows about it. It does not check whether anyone is at the keyboard. The number on your profile is what reached Steam's servers, so time the servers never heard about may never show up there. Refunds work the other way round: for the two-hour limit, Valve counts offline play as well.
Below is what we measured about when hours appear, since Valve does not say; what Valve has actually written about offline play, refunds and private games; and where nobody outside Valve has documented anything.
What Does Steam Actually Count?
The counter follows a game reported as running, not a person. In our sessions from August 2026, our own software reported a game as running with no keyboard, mouse or even a game window involved, and 45 of 45, 87 of 88 and 180 of 182 minutes made it onto the counter. Players report the same from the other side: a game left open while they were away or minimised still added hours. Valve does not describe the counter in any help article we could find, so the behaviour is observed, not documented.
What you see on a profile is a running total per game and a figure for recent play.
How Often Does Steam Update Your Hours?
Valve does not say. So we read the counter from inside a running session, one reading per minute, on 14 August 2026, counting what the session had added to the game's total.
- Minute 28: nothing added yet.
- Minute 58: 58 minutes added.
- Minute 91: 90 minutes added.
- Minute 125: 123 minutes added.
Three updates, roughly 33 minutes apart, and each one carried the full elapsed time within a minute or two. Note when the first one came, though: not at the half-hour mark but close to minute 58, so the session's count sat at zero for almost an hour. Nothing between updates was lost: each update covered every minute elapsed so far. An earlier run in August, sampled every two minutes, got its first update sooner: nothing until minute 32, then 30 minutes, then 60 at minute 62. Once updates had started they came roughly every half hour; how long the first one took varied between our runs.
Two more sessions tell you what happens at the edges. A 45-minute session closed cleanly: the last update had landed at minute 35, and the remaining 15 minutes arrived within about 90 seconds of the session closing, 45 of 45. A 20-minute session ended by killing the process instead: nothing was added, and a second reading 13 minutes later still showed nothing. One more detail for free-to-play games: in our sessions, a free title launched for the first time did not appear in the account's game data at all until that first update came through.
What this means in practice.“I played twenty minutes and my hours did not move” is normal; close the game properly and the minutes follow. If the Steam session itself is cut off, as when we killed ours, or by a power cut, whatever had not been published yet can be lost: in our readings up to about half an hour once updates were running, and close to an hour before the first one arrived. And if you want to know whether a session counted, compare the total before and after it, not two readings a few minutes apart.
How we measured.Sessions ran on accounts we control, with nobody playing and no game actually running, in August 2026. The sessions were started by our own software, which tells Steam that a game is running. We read the account's own game data from inside the session rather than looking at a profile page. Three caveats: the Steam client on your PC may show a local figure that differs from the account's counter; Valve publishes no interval, so the half-hour rhythm is an observation, not a rule; and Valve can change it without telling anyone.
Does Steam Count Playtime in Offline Mode?
There are two answers: one for refunds and one for the counter on your profile. For refunds, Valve's own FAQ on common refund questions says the two-hour limit “includes online, offline and shared library playtime”. Offline hours count against you there.
For the counter on your profile, the picture is different. On Valve's public issue tracker for the Linux Steam client there is an open feature request titled “Update playtime while Steam client is in offline mode”. It was filed in October 2021, a Valve account labelled it as a feature request rather than a bug, and people were still adding to it in September 2026. A request to add something is a fair sign that the thing does not happen today: time played in offline mode does not seem to reach the profile counter. A separate report from a Steam Deck user in October 2025 was closed as a duplicate of the same request.
That is as far as the official record goes. Steam Community threads disagree with each other, some saying offline hours sync when you reconnect and others saying they vanish, and we have not measured it ourselves, so treat the open request as the best evidence there is, not as proof.
Offline Mode vs. Losing Your Connection
Choosing offline mode and losing your connection mid-session are not the same case. The Steam Deck report mentioned above describes a session started online and cut off halfway. In that report the time before the drop survived only if Steam had already synced it, and reconnecting before quitting kept the whole session. That fits our own killed session, which had published nothing and kept nothing. It is still a single user's report, though, not a measurement of ours.
If the hours on your profile matter to you, play online. Nothing official says offline time will be added later, and the two-hour refund limit counts it anyway.
Idle, AFK, Minimised, Asleep: What Counts?
Away from the keyboard, alt-tabbed or minimised: by every account we found, it counts. Our sessions with no input at all are the cleanest evidence we have, and players report the same thing; a Stardew Valley forum thread is full of people whose totals include hours the game spent open while they did something else.
A sleeping computer is the unclear case. Some players say a game left running through sleep kept adding hours; others say that on the Steam Deck the time asleep is usually taken off again once the game is closed. We have not measured it, the reports contradict each other, and we found nothing from Valve about it, so treat any firm answer you read as somebody's experience rather than the rule.
Do Two Games at Once Both Count?
Yes. When several titles were reported as running at the same time in our August 2026 sessions, every title that counted received the same minutes as the clock. In our sessions, two games reported for an hour meant two hours on the profile, not one split between them.
That has a visible side effect. Add up the recent-play figures on such a profile and they can come to more hours than have actually passed, and anyone looking at a public profile can see it.
How Do Refunds Treat Playtime?
Valve's refund policy is the one place where playtime has a hard consequence: a refund is available for any reason within 14 days of purchase if the game has been played for less than two hours. The FAQ adds the detail people miss, that the two hours include online, offline and shared library play. The policy page covers the edge cases:
- Early Access and Advance Access. Every minute counts towards the two hours, from the first launch. For a pre-purchase, the 14 days start on the release date, not the day you paid. Beta tests are not subject to the two-hour limit.
- DLC. Refundable within 14 days of buying the DLC if the base game has been played for less than two hours since that purchase and the DLC has not been consumed, modified or transferred. Some third-party DLC is marked non-refundable on its store page.
- Bundles. A bundle can be refunded if none of its items has been transferred and the combined usage time across them is under two hours.
- Outside the rules.Valve's wording is that you can ask for a refund anyway and they will take a look. A VAC ban on a game removes the right to refund it.
One worry you can drop: refunding a game does not erase its hours or its achievements from your profile. Steam Support answers that question directly, and the answer is no.
Who Can See Your Hours, and Can You Hide Them?
Anyone who can see your game details can usually see the hours next to each game. Steam gives you a per-game switch: marking a game as private, according to Steam Support's article on private games, hides your ownership of it, your in-game status, your playtime and your activity in it. The game drops out of your public game list and your recently played list, and friends do not see you as In-Game while you play it, unless you invite one of them to join.
Whether your game list is visible at all is a profile-wide privacy setting. What a public profile exposes beyond that is in Steam ID explained.
What This Means If You Want More Hours
Hours only arrive at the speed of the clock, one hour per hour per game, and nothing changes that. If you want them without leaving your own PC on, that is what our Steam Hour Boost does: one title at a time on your own account, signed in from Europe or North America on the free plan, or from the country you choose on Pro and Elite. How a session runs, and why your own login always takes over, is in how Steam Hour Boost works.
Quick Answers
Does Steam count playtime when you are AFK? Yes. It counts the game running, not you. In our sessions with nobody at the keyboard the minutes still arrived.
Does Steam count playtime in offline mode? For refunds, yes: Valve's FAQ says the two-hour limit includes offline play. On your profile, apparently not: updating playtime in offline mode is still an open feature request on Valve's own tracker.
Why are my hours not updating? In our measurements the first update came after roughly half an hour to an hour, then roughly every half hour, each time to the full elapsed total, and the remainder arrived when the session closed cleanly. Valve publishes no interval.
Does refunding a game remove its hours? No. Steam Support says playtime and achievements stay on your profile after a refund.
Can I hide my playtime? Per game, yes: mark the game as private and Steam Support says its playtime is hidden along with your ownership and in-game status. Your profile's privacy settings also control who sees your game details at all.
Imbaboost is not affiliated with Valve or Steam.
