Skip to main content

How to sell Steam Trading Cards

Steam is much more than a digital marketplace for PC games. Over the years, Valve as expanded the platform in various ways, turning it into more of a social media platform. Along with achievements, you’ll earn trading cards for playing games. Trading cards offer desktop-resolution art from the game, which you can download and do with as you please. You can also use trading cards to craft badges, which show on your profile page and contribute to your Steam level.

There’s a catch, though. You can never earn all of the trading cards from a game. There’s a limited number of drops, and once you’ve reached that limit, you won’t earn any more trading cards. The only way to complete your set is to buy the remaining cards from the Steam Community Market, which sell for a few cents each. If you can’t be bothered, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to sell Steam trading cards.

Recommended Videos

Further reading

Download the Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator app

steam trading cards guide mobile app download
Image used with permission by copyright holder

In order to use the Steam Community Market to sell cards (or anything else), Valve requires that you set up two-factor authentication with its Steam Guard Mobile Authenticator app. You can find the app in the Google Play store, the iOS App Store, and the Microsoft Store. Sign in to the app with your Steam account to use it and activate two-factor authentication. Keep it handy — you’ll need it to confirm some actions when you try to sell cards.

Play some games, earn some cards

steam trading cards guide store page
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Not every game on Steam issues trading cards, but if you find games that have some, procuring a few is as easy as installing a game and playing. Cards drop after you’ve spent a certain amount of time playing the game, and there’s usually a limit on the number of drops per session — how many cards you can get depends on the game. To check if a game supports cards, check its store page under the list of features to see if it’s tagged as including Steam Trading Cards. That’s not completely foolproof — some games dish out cards even though it isn’t listed as a feature — but the designation is pretty reliable. You can also search Steam using the Steam Trading Cards tag to find more games with cards.

Find the cards you don’t want in your inventory

steam trading cards guide inventory menu
Image used with permission by copyright holder

When cards are added to your account, they appear in your Steam inventory. You can find your inventory by hovering over your account name at the top of the Steam window and clicking “inventory” on the drop-down menu that appears. On the Inventory page, click the left-most “Steam” tab to see your cards. From there, you can select cards and find the ones you’re ready to get rid of on the market.

Clicking on a card allows you to read its description and find other info, including the number that have sold on the market in the last 24 hours, and what the lowest starting price is on the market.

List your card

steam trading cards guide sell menu
Image used with permission by copyright holder

When you’re ready to sell, click your card and scroll all the way to the bottom of the screen, to the bottom of the section on the right side that gives you information on the card. Beneath the information about the sales volume and starting price on the Community Market, you will see a button marked “Sell” that will get you started. When you click it, you’ll get a window that lets you set your price for the card, and shows you a graph of how many cards have sold lately, and at what price. Use that information to decide how much to ask for the card when you list it.

You can set your price in either one of two ways: How much money you will receive from the person buying your card, or how much they will pay in total. The two prices are different because Steam adds a small fee to every transaction on the Community Market, so the price the buyer pays is always a little higher than what you receive in Steam credit.

Confirm the listing

steam trading cards guide confirmations menu mobile appsteam trading cards guide confirmations mobile app

Now it’s time to grab your Steam Guard Authenticator app. Log in to the app and go to the “Confirmations” tab on the main menu, which you can access by tapping the three lines in the top left corner of the app. Find the listings you want to confirm and tap the big gray box on their right side, then click “Confirm Selected.” Once you hit that button, your card goes on the Community Market.

Check your listings

steam trading cards guide marketplace check listings
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Once you post a card, it’s easy to find and view your listings or adjust as needed. To find them, hover over the “Community” tab on Steam to pull up the drop-down menu and hit “Market.” Steam will show your current active listings, which you can remove if you need to (and relist if you want to change prices), as well as your complete market history on another tab. Otherwise, that’s it — you have listed your Steam trading cards on the Community Market, and all that is left to do is wait for pennies’ worth of Steam credit to roll in.

Phil Hornshaw
Phil Hornshaw is an author, freelance writer and journalist living in Los Angeles. He is the co-author of The Space Hero's…
12 best graphics cards of 2025: the GPUs I recommend after 200 hours of testing
RTX 3080 graphics cards among other GPUs.

With the demands of modern PC games, no less than one of the best graphics cards will do, preferably in partnership with one of the best processors. We've reviewed every GPU released in the past several generations from Nvidia, AMD, and Intel, but these 12 are the GPUs that stand out the most.

Now is a great time to score a deal on a graphics card as we're winding down the current generation. If you don't mind waiting, however, it might be worth holding out on picking up a GPU. Nvidia has its RTX 50-series GPUs, AMD is working on its RDNA 4 offerings, and Intel's Battlemage graphics cards just launched.

Read more
Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket adds trading next week, but there’s a catch
pokemon trading card game pocket announced lucario

Pokémon TCG Pocket: Space-Time Smackdown | Coming Soon!

Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket is getting two major updates next week. Trading will finally come to the mobile card game on January 29, while new cards are coming on January 30 via the Space-Time Smackdown booster set. Those hoping that trading will let them quickly fill out their collection might be disappointed by how it works, though.

Read more
Half-Life 3 detectives think they’ve found new clues in Steam’s code
Half-Life 2

The evidence for Half-Life 3 continues to build, with fans now saying they have proof the game exists within Steam's back-end code. There have been quite a few hints lately that could be interpreted to be the long-awaited sequel, but after many, many, many disappointments over the past two decades, we urge you to take this news with the proper dose of skepticism.

On the Valve subreddit, u/Relevant_Basis5444 discovered that Valve has two games listed under Upcoming Releases, but only Deadlock is visible. The finding prompted a discussion among users -- many confirming the listing -- and one even said that using the Wayback Machine shows only one upcoming game as of December 29. Of course, there is a chance this could be nothing more than a bug.

Read more