CS2 Map Pool: Every Active Duty Swap Since Launch

Counter-Strike 2 has been out for 1,068 days as of August 30, 2026, and in all that time the Active Duty map pool has been seven maps. Not six, not eight. Seven.

Valve has changed which seven exactly five times, and every single change was a straight trade: one map in, one map out, same patch. That regularity is the useful part: the whole history fits in one table.

Seven maps, five swaps

The current pool has not moved since July 8, 2026 — 53 days at time of writing. Every claim below is dated from Valve's own Counter-Strike 2 release notes on Steam rather than from a wiki, because on this particular subject the wikis lag badly (there is a section on that at the end).

Two things to get straight before the tables:

• Active Duty is not "the maps in the game." It is the pick/ban pool for Premier and for official competitions. Maps that leave it stay in the game; Valve's May 7, 2025 update re-organised the Casual and Deathmatch map groups and listed Vertigo in Defusal Group Alpha, three months after cutting it from Active Duty.
• The pool changes on Valve's schedule, not the Majors'. Four of the five swaps landed on the first day of a Premier season. The fifth did not, and that one is worth its own section.

The current Active Duty seven

As of August 30, 2026, the Active Duty pool is Ancient, Anubis, Cache, Dust II, Inferno, Mirage and Nuke. Here is how long each one has held its place, counted from CS2's launch or from the update that added it. Several of these maps were in Active Duty long before Counter-Strike 2 existed — Mirage has been in it since 2014 — so the column below is CS2 tenure, not career tenure:

Four of the seven have never been touched. Valve's release notes contain no entry adding Ancient, Inferno, Mirage or Nuke to Active Duty at any point in Counter-Strike 2, and they are in the pool today, so they have been in it on every day of the game's life.

The other three are the interesting ones. Cache is 53 days old in the pool; the Cache callouts guide covers the map itself and the 2,659 days it spent outside Active Duty before July.

Every swap Valve has made in CS2

Five changes in 1,068 days. All five in one table, with the Premier season each one opened:

Read down the "Out" column and you find Overpass twice, which no other map manages. It was cut in April 2024, spent 447 days outside the pool, came back with Season Three, lasted 357 days, and was cut again for Cache.

Read the middle two rows together and you get a neat piece of symmetry: Train's entire CS2 Active Duty career lasted 358 days (January 28, 2025 to January 21, 2026), and Overpass's second stint lasted 357. Two maps, one day apart.

Two maps have been removed and later restored inside Counter-Strike 2, and Anubis served the shorter sentence: it was out from July 16, 2025 to January 21, 2026, a gap of 189 days, against the 447 Overpass spent outside the pool between its first cut and its return.

The one swap that was not a new season

Premier seasons in CS2 have not been evenly spaced, and the map pool is the clearest place to see it:

Season One ran 489 days — more than two and a half times the longest season that has followed it (Season Three, at 189), and within 37 days of Seasons Two, Three and Four combined. That is why the Dust II swap sits awkwardly in the timeline: it happened on April 25, 2024, roughly seven months into a season that still had nine months to run, and it is the only pool change in Counter-Strike 2 that did not open a new season.

Valve did not bury it, either. The release notes for that day say the update "Replaced Overpass with Dust 2 in the Active Duty Group, current competition map pool, and Premier matchmaking," and the accompanying blog post put it plainly: "We've updated the Active Duty map pool (for both Premier and competitions), removing Overpass and bringing back Dust II."

Since Season Two, every pool change has ridden along with a season launch and its other work: Season Three nerfed the MP9 and gave CTs a $50 team award per Terrorist killed, Season Four adjusted the MP7 and MP5-SD, Season Five redesigned C4 explosion damage. Two things a season summary might imply are absent from the notes. Valve announced a Premier medal for Seasons Two, Three and Four, but neither the July 8, 2026 release notes nor the Season Five announcement mentions one. And the only CS Rating recalibration Valve has documented is the Season One-to-Two transition in January 2025. The rank system guide covers what a season reset does to your number.

You can rebuild the launch pool from the notes

Valve's September 27, 2023 launch notes announce Counter-Strike 2 and Premier Season One, but they never list the Active Duty maps. You do not need them to. Take the current seven, undo the five swaps in reverse order, and the launch pool falls out:

So Counter-Strike 2 launched on Ancient, Anubis, Inferno, Mirage, Nuke, Overpass and Vertigo — no Dust II. It was outside the pool on launch day and did not return for 211 days.

That reconstruction is only valid if the five swaps are the complete list, so I checked it against Valve's full Steam news archive back to February 2023: there is no other Active Duty pool change in Counter-Strike 2's release notes. The Fandom wiki's Active Duty Group category, read the same day, lists exactly the seven maps in the table above — two independent sources landing on the same seven.

The three maps currently out

Three maps have been in the Counter-Strike 2 Active Duty pool and are not in it now:

None of the three has been announced for a return, and leaving Active Duty is not the same thing as leaving the game. Valve's May 7, 2025 update — three months after Vertigo left the pool — re-organised the Casual and Deathmatch map groups and listed the maps in each: "Defusal Group Alpha: Dust 2, Mirage, Inferno, Vertigo" and "Defusal Group Delta: Train, Anubis, Ancient, Overpass, Nuke." A map cut from Active Duty is still a map Valve is putting in front of players.

The pool is also the Major pool

This is the part that makes the pool matter to people who never queue Premier. Valve's April 2024 notes name the "current competition map pool" alongside Premier in the same sentence, and the announcement for the StarLadder Budapest Major 2025 makes the connection explicit: that Major was the first with a best-of-five Grand Final, and Valve wrote that "the Major Champions will need to prove their quality by winning three maps in the Active Duty Map Pool."

The timing on the last swap is worth holding onto. The IEM Cologne 2026 Major played its Grand Finals in June 2026, with Team Falcons beating FURIA 3-0 — and along the way, per Valve's own recap, Falcons "outlasted Team Spirit 16:12 on Dust II" in the semifinals. That Major ran on the Season Four pool. Overpass was in the Major pool in June 2026 and was cut from Active Duty on July 8, inside three weeks of the trophy lift, with Cache taking its slot.

If you are grinding lineups, that is the practical lesson: the pool you practise is the pool the next Major gets played on, and it can turn over within weeks of one finishing. The practice server guide has the commands for drilling the current seven.

Where the wiki is behind Valve

Two source problems worth knowing about, because both would have put a wrong date in this post if I had trusted the wiki over the release notes.

The Counter-Strike Wiki's Anubis article stops in 2025. It records the map being "removed from Active Duty in the July 15, 2025 update" and ends there. The July 15 is not the error — that update posted at 00:01 UTC on July 16, which is the evening of July 15 where Valve is, and this post uses the UTC date throughout so the tables stay internally consistent. The error is what comes after: the article never records the January 21, 2026 update that put Anubis back. The same page's infobox still lists the map as Active Duty, which happens to be right again now — for the wrong reason.

The wiki's Train article carries no CS2 patch list at all. Its update log ends in January 2020, so nothing there tells you Train entered the pool in January 2025 or left it a year later.

The category listing is the part of that wiki I would still trust for this: Category:Active Duty Group currently contains Ancient, Anubis, Cache, Dust II, Inferno, Mirage and Nuke and nothing else, which matches Valve exactly. The prose in the individual map articles does not.

What I could not verify

Why Valve makes each swap. The release notes state what changed and never why. Cache replacing Overpass, Anubis replacing Train, Train replacing Vertigo — Valve has published no reasoning for any of the five, so neither will I.

Whether Season Six brings a sixth swap. Four of the five changes opened a season, but that is a pattern in five data points, not a policy Valve has stated. Seasons Two through Four ran 169, 189 and 168 days; Season Five hit day 53 on August 30, 2026. Do the arithmetic if you like, but nothing has been announced.

The exact calendar date of the Cologne 2026 Grand Finals. Valve's June 17 post says Grand Finals were on the Sunday, and the champions' items shipped July 1, 2026 — that is enough to place the Major before the July 8 swap, which is the only thing this post needs it for.

More map breakdowns and weapon math live on the Counter-Strike 2 coverage hub.

Quick Action Checklist

• The CS2 Active Duty pool right now is Ancient, Anubis, Cache, Dust II, Inferno, Mirage and Nuke.
• It has been seven maps on every day of Counter-Strike 2. All five changes were one-in, one-out.
• Cache is the newest arrival, in since July 8, 2026 — 53 days as of August 30, 2026.
• Ancient, Inferno, Mirage and Nuke have never left, 1,068 days each.
• Dust II was not in the pool at CS2 launch. It returned on April 25, 2024.
• Anubis and Overpass are the two maps removed and later restored. Anubis was out 189 days, Overpass 447.
• Overpass is the only map cut twice: April 2024 and July 2026.
• Train's whole CS2 Active Duty run was 358 days; Overpass's second run was 357.
• Four of five swaps opened a Premier season. The April 25, 2024 Dust II swap is the exception.
• Active Duty is the Major pool too, and it turned over within three weeks of the Cologne 2026 Grand Finals.