Steam Points are the loyalty currency Valve hands you for spending money on Steam. Most of what is written about them is either copied from the shop banner or out of date by one change Valve made in January 2026 — the change that quietly ended the only way of collecting points without buying anything.
This is how points are earned, what they buy, what they can never do, and what actually changed. Every number below was read off Valve's own pages on 14 September 2026, and where we could not read one ourselves, we say so.
What Steam Points Are
Points are a running balance on your account that Valve credits when you buy something through the Steam store, and that you spend in the Points Shop on cosmetics: profile backgrounds, avatar frames, animated avatars, emoticons, chat effects and Community Awards. They have existed as a permanent feature since the Points Shop opened in June 2020, replacing the token systems of earlier seasonal sales.
The important thing to understand before anything else: points are a reward attached to purchases, not a form of money. That distinction runs through every rule below.
How Many Points a Purchase Earns
Valve's Points Shop page states the earn rate in the currency of the wallet you are signed in with. The figure every guide repeats is 100 points per US dollar — we have not seen Valve's banner in dollars from our side, so treat that as the guides' number, not ours. What we have read, signed in with a Polish wallet, is this:
“134 points for every 5,00 zł you spend.”
That is the part the guides skip. The rate outside the US is not a round number, and it is not fixed. Valve explains the mechanism in its own FAQ:
“Whenever you make a purchase on Steam, you'll be given Steam Points based on how much you spend. First, we convert this amount to USD, which then converts directly to the number of points you receive.”
So a purchase in euro, złoty or pounds is converted to dollars first, and the points follow the dollars. That is why the number of points per euro drifts with the exchange rate rather than sitting at one value — older guides quote 106, 112 and 118 points per euro depending on the year they were written, and none of them is wrong for its date. If you want to know what your purchase earns today, the banner on the Points Shop page, while signed in, is the only authoritative source.
Valve lists what counts as a qualifying purchase: “Buy any game, DLC, hardware, application, soundtrack, or in-game item, and get points.” In-game means items bought through Steam's own checkout, which is why a CS2 key bought in the game earns points while the same key bought elsewhere does not.
What Does Not Earn Points
Two things people expect to earn points and do not. Again, Valve's wording:
“You will not receive any points for funding your Steam Wallet or for any Steam Community Market purchases.”
Topping up your wallet earns nothing; spending the wallet on a game does. Buying a skin, a case or a key on the Community Market earns nothing, because the Market is a trade between two users and Valve only takes a fee. The same item sold by the game itself is a store purchase and earns normally. If you are counting on points, that is the one decision that changes the outcome.
What Points Buy
Cosmetics for your profile and chat, and nothing outside them. The Points Shop without a login, on the day we checked, priced an emoticon at 100 points, a profile background at 500, a tiled background at 1,000, an avatar frame at 2,000 and a game profile at 5,000. Exact items rotate with each seasonal sale, so treat those as bands rather than a catalogue. Two rules from Valve about what you get:
- Items are yours to keep, with unlimited use — the expiring, limited-use items of the early sale events are a thing of the past.
- “Items from the Points Shop are not marketable or tradeable.” Nothing you buy with points can be sold, traded or given away.
Points also buy Community Awards — the icons you pin on a review, a guide, a Workshop item or somebody's profile — which is where the January change comes in.
What Changed in January 2026
Under the original Community Awards, giving somebody an award transferred a few points to them. That was the one way to accumulate points without spending money: write reviews and guides that people award, and collect the transfers. Guides published as recently as mid-2025 still teach it as a strategy.
On 14 January 2026 Valve released the Second Edition of Community Awards, and the announcement explains why the transfer went:
“However, we found that this encouraged and rewarded a narrow set of attention-grabbing content and didn't allow the focus to be as much on a broader pool of thoughtful, well-considered creative content.”
The consequence is stated just as plainly: “The Second Edition of Steam Community Awards won't transfer points.” And for anybody mid-way through collecting: “Any pending point transfers will complete like normal, but new award applications will not convey points.”
Before and after, in two lines:
- Before: awards had different prices; giving one sent points to the recipient; reviews that attracted awards were a source of points.
- After: every award costs the same — Valve's announcement puts it at 500 points; the recipient receives the icon and nothing else; the only way to earn points is to buy things.
Valve also answered the question every reviewer asks next: awards do not change where content ranks. Content is ordered by recency or helpful votes, and the announcement says the number or type of awards “does not cause that content to appear higher or lower on lists.”
Do Points Expire, and What a Refund Does
They do not. Valve's FAQ answer is one word longer than it needs to be: “Nope! The Points Shop is here to stay, and open all year around.” Points earned in 2020 are still spendable today.
A refund is the one thing that takes points away, and it can take more than the points:
“When you refund a game, the points you gained from that purchase will be deducted from your account. If that causes your Points balance to go negative, we'll also remove the most recent items and Community Awards you've used points for, until your balance is no longer negative.”
In practice: buy a game, spend the points it earned on a background, refund the game, and the background goes with it. If you think a refund is possible, leave the points from that purchase alone until you are past the point of asking for one.
What Points Are Not
Because “100 points per dollar” invites people to think of a point as a cent, it is worth listing what the balance cannot do, all confirmed by Valve's own rules:
- You cannot buy points. The only way in is a qualifying purchase.
- You cannot convert points to wallet funds, cash or anything with a price tag.
- You cannot buy a game, DLC or a Market item with points.
- You cannot gift, trade or transfer points, or the items bought with them.
- Since January 2026, you cannot receive points from other people either.
The “one point equals one cent” shorthand is a way of remembering the earn rate, not an exchange rate. A balance of 10,000 points is a record of roughly a hundred dollars spent; it is not a hundred dollars.
Work Out Your Own Numbers
Because the rate is converted through dollars, working out what a purchase earns in your own currency is a small piece of arithmetic — and one where rounding the wrong way promises you a point you will not get.
Our Steam Points Calculator does the conversion both ways: how many points a given spend earns, and the smallest spend that earns a given number of points. It keeps one rate per currency, each with the date a person last read it on Valve's banner, and flags the ones we have not verified ourselves — today that is every currency except złoty, and the tool says so rather than pretending. It converts spend to points and back. It does not put a price on points, because nothing does.
Compare its result with the banner on your own Points Shop page. If they differ, the banner wins, and we would like to know.
