Your Steam trade URL: where to find it and when to reset it

Your Steam trade URL is a personal link that lets someone send you a trade offer without being on your friends list. Trading sites, bots and buyers ask for it whenever they need to send you items or request yours. It can't take anything on its own, but it's worth knowing where it lives, who should have it, and when to replace it.

What the link is

A trade URL looks like https://steamcommunity.com/tradeoffer/new/?partner=…&token=…. The partner number identifies your Steam account. The token is an access key: it's what allows people who aren't your friends to send you offers. Without a token, the same link only works for people already on your friends list.

Valve's trade offer FAQ puts it simply: you can send offers to friends whose inventory you can see, or to anyone who has given you their trade URL. That's all the link grants. Nothing moves until someone builds an offer and both sides act on it, and Valve requires a confirmation for any trade offer that sends items out of your account, with no way to switch that off.

So the trade URL is not a password. It's closer to a postal address for trade offers: anyone who has it can send you something, including offers you'd never want to accept.

Where to find it

On the Steam website or in the client:

Hover over your profile name and open Inventory.
Click Trade Offers.
Choose Who can send me Trade Offers?
Under Third-Party Sites, copy the URL in the box.

You can also go straight to steamcommunity.com/my/tradeoffers/privacy while signed in; Valve's own FAQ links that page as the place to find your unique trade URL. Copy the whole thing. A link that stops before &token= only works for your friends, which defeats the purpose of giving it to a site.

Most sites also need to see your items to build an offer for them, so check that your inventory privacy is set to Public. Prima Games' walkthrough makes that the first step before handing out a trade URL. Our guide to Steam privacy settings for trading covers which settings matter.

A trade URL only lets people send you offers; every offer still needs your decision

Who should have it

Give it to services you actually use and people you're deliberately trading with. Posting it in public trading groups or on your profile works, but it also invites anyone to send you offers. Valve's scam list includes users who spam high-value requests for little in return, hoping you'll accept one by mistake, and a public trade URL makes you easier to reach.

Paste it from the Steam page each time rather than from an old note or chat log. If you've regenerated it since, the old copy no longer works, and a link copied from somewhere else could belong to someone else entirely. Developers of Steam trading tools warn about exactly that: a user-provided trade URL may not belong to the user who provided it, so double-check it's yours.

When to create a new one

Next to your current link is a Create New URL button. Clicking it generates a fresh link and the old one stops working, which is the only way to "turn off" a trade URL you've given out. Prima Games describes it the same way: to disable your trade URL, you create a new one.

Good times to do it:

You posted the link publicly and now get a stream of junk offers.
You've stopped using a site that has your link saved.
Someone you don't trust got hold of it.
You're cleaning up after a security scare, alongside changing your password and checking your account (see our account security checklist).

After you reset it, update the link on every site you still use. Until you do, those sites are holding a dead link and can't send you offers, so anything they try to deliver to you will fail.

Reading offers that arrive through it

Because anyone with the link can send offers, check each one before acting. Steam's trade offer window shows how long you've been friends with the sender, their Steam level and how old their account is, and Valve suggests using that information to make sure you're dealing with the right person. Hover over every item on both sides and check the wear and the exact name, since swapping in a lookalike item is one of the oldest tricks.

A few practical limits are useful to know. Trade offers expire automatically after two weeks if nobody responds. Since April 2026, a trade offer containing Counter-Strike 2 items can hold at most 1,000 items. And items you receive in a CS2 trade stay locked for seven days under Steam's trade protection, so plan around that if you're buying to resell.

If an offer arrives that you didn't expect, you don't have to respond. Ignoring or declining it costs you nothing, and an offer that asks for your items while giving nothing back should simply be declined.