CS2 commend limits: numbers from 178,707 sends
Updated 15 September 2026
Valve publishes no numbers about how commends work. We publish ours: a log of 178,707 sends from 5,177 accounts and three measurements on our own server. Below are the three limits every CS2 commend runs into, an honest note on where each figure comes from, and what follows if you are aiming for a round number.
Where the numbers come from
Two sources, each with its own limits. The first is the log of a CS:GO bot from September 2019 to January 2020: 178,707 unique sends, 5,177 sending accounts, 511 target profiles. A large sample, but an old one, and it records what the bot did, not what Valve thinks. The second is a set of measurements on our own CS2 server in summer 2026: three runs with different settings of our own limiter, to separate our pace from someone else's ceiling. Neither source is Valve documentation — there is none. Everything below is observation, and we mark where it ends.
Limit one: an account commends a player once — forever
The log holds 169,363 sender–target pairs, and not one repeats. Not for lack of trying: a repeat send from the same account simply does not count, and in 2026 we checked again — a repeat after a day, a week or a month does not move the counter. This explains almost everything about the niche: 1,000 commends on a profile means 1,000 different accounts, not fifty in rotation. For the same reason "mutual commending" with friends yields exactly one from each, and that is the end of its potential.
Limit two: no more than three sends per account per day
The 2019 bot kept an 8-hour pause between sends from one account — not out of caution, but because the game would not accept a send any sooner. Distribution per account-day: 86% one send, 13.8% two, 0.3% three, more than three never in four months. Median one, mean 1.14. Over its lifetime an account sent 34 commends on average, median 12, one in ten passed a hundred, the record was 150. The market figure of "20 commends per account before cooldown" is a myth: it comes from a parameter in an open-source script that meant twenty accounts per batch.
Limit three: about 20 commends per profile per 5 minutes
This is the one number every seller advertises, and for a long time we took it for someone else's constant. Measurement showed otherwise. Three runs with our limiter at 20, 60 and 200 sends per five minutes: in each the game accepts about twenty commends and then goes silent until roughly the end of the five-minute window. The run capped at 20 finished — 40 of 40; the runs at 60 and 200 hit refusals and closed at 20 and 23. So the ceiling sits on Valve's side and is tied to the receiving profile, not to the seller. In practice: 100 commends is 25–30 minutes, 1,000 is over four hours, and nobody can go faster. All sellers can differ on is the start and the parallelism, not the pace.
The rule without which the limits mean nothing: you can only commend someone you shared a server with
The game accepts a commend only from someone who is on the same game server as the recipient at that moment. A client's claim of "I was there" does not count — presence is confirmed by the server. Hence the step every honest service has and profile comments do not: to receive commends you join the server via a connect string and stay while delivery runs. What that looks like with us is on the How it works page. A service promising commends "by link, no need to join anything" is not selling commends.
What this means if you are aiming for a round number
A commend cannot be removed, so count from your current values, not from zero — the free checker shows them in seconds. Budget time by the third limit: 20 per five minutes, and that covers all three counters at once — the game accepts one commend with the chosen types ticked, not three separate ones. Because of the first limit the order size is bounded by the number of accounts that have never commended your profile; we compute that remainder per profile and show it before payment. Because of the second, a large order is spread across a large pool rather than a few accounts in sequence.
How many commends players actually have
133 profiles with readable counters have passed through the checker: the median is 60 friendly, 58 teacher, 57 leader, with eight profiles at zero across the board. The sample is skewed — these are people who came to check their counters — but as a reference for "what looks normal" it serves. More on what these numbers do and do not do is in the trust factor write-up.
What we do not know
The exact mechanism of the third limit: a fixed window or a sliding one, counted per recipient, per server or both. How long a sending account lives and what that depends on — we have not one confirmed case of a sanction for commends specifically, but absence of cases is not proof. Whether Valve counts commends in trust factor — there is no reason to think it does directly. If you have data that refines or refutes anything in this text, write to us; we will update the page and credit the source.
See the current counters
Free checker: paste a SteamID and see the three counters, level and medals — the way the game itself returns them.