Net of Tax, Valve's Steam Frame Price List Runs From $982 in Poland to $1,101 in Canada

Valve's September 14 Steam Hardware announcement prices the 256GB Steam Frame at 1,059 US dollars, 1,529 Canadian dollars, 1,049 euros, 889 pounds, 1,609 Australian dollars and 4,539 zloty, and the 1TB model at 1,299, 1,859, 1,279, 1,089, 1,969 and 5,549 in the same currencies, with one qualifier underneath: "All prices are inclusive of VAT where applicable." That qualifier is why a straight conversion misleads. At the European Central Bank's reference rate for the same day, a German buyer appears to pay $1,211.70 for a headset an American buys for $1,059. The European sticker contains value added tax, however, and the American one contains no sales tax until checkout.

The figures below take the consumption tax out first and convert second. Exchange rates are the ECB's euro foreign exchange reference rates published on September 14, 2026, at which one euro bought 1.1551 US dollars, 0.85598 pounds, 4.3418 zloty, 1.6202 Australian dollars and 1.6041 Canadian dollars. The euro price is stripped of Germany's standard 19 percent VAT, the pound price of the UK's 20 percent, the zloty price of Poland's 23 percent and the Australian price of the 10 percent GST. Canadian and US prices are taken at face value: Valve's note covers VAT, and its announcement does not say whether the Canadian figure includes GST or HST, so the Canadian result should be read as an upper bound. The euro result varies by member state; at France's 20 percent rate, 1,049 euros comes to $1,009.75 before tax.

On that basis the 256GB kit costs $981.76 before tax in Poland, $999.72 in the United Kingdom, $1,018.24 in Germany and $1,042.83 in Australia, all below the $1,059 US price. Canada is the one listed market above it, at $1,101.02. The 1TB kit runs in the same order, from $1,200.22 in Poland through $1,224.62 in the UK, $1,241.49 in Germany and $1,276.16 in Australia, against $1,299 in the US and $1,338.65 in Canada. US buyers then pay state and local sales tax, which narrows or erases the gap depending on the address. Valve does not say which exchange rates it used or when it set these prices. A spread of a few percent is as consistent with ordinary currency movement as with deliberate regional positioning. The storage premium does not depend on the rate at all: in every currency Valve published, the 1TB model costs between 21.6 and 22.7 percent more than the 256GB model.

The reservation terms are the supply data

Valve has published no production figure for the Steam Frame and no count of units in the first allocation. The terms of sale partly fill that gap. The company says it is "following the same approach we implemented with the launch of Steam Machine, as we found the reservation system helpful in improving the purchase experience and limiting resellers." Signups close September 17 at 10 a.m. Pacific, when Valve runs a one-time randomization, and the Steam Frame product page FAQ says each model and each shipping region gets its own list. An account that lands on the waitlist holds, in the announcement's wording, a place "beyond the number of Steam Frames currently available for reservation," and the FAQ adds that "any future production runs of Steam Frames will be offered to customers in the order they're on the waitlist." A purchase email carries a 72-hour window, after which the reservation moves down the queue. Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong buy through KOMODO, Valve's authorized distributor, which publishes its own pricing. South Korea comes later.

Two eligibility rules operate as reseller controls. Signups are limited to one per household, which Valve says it enforces with "payment method, shipping address, and other information." An account must also have made a Steam purchase before April 27, 2026, the identical cutoff printed on the Steam Machine's reservation FAQ. Holding that date fixed shuts out any account whose first Steam purchase came in the 140 days before the September 14 announcement, which removes the cheapest way to multiply entries. Valve has not explained why it chose April 27.

What the Steam Machine queue showed

The Steam Machine is the only public precedent for how quickly one of these queues moves, and its 512GB model sits $10 below the Frame's entry price at $1,049. Its lottery closed on June 25, as this site reported. In a July 28 update, Valve wrote that it was fulfilling orders daily and that "we expect everyone in the reservation queue will have the option to purchase by the end of this year." The same post said that because each queue and waitlist is "per-product, per-region," some had already run out and Valve had begun inviting accounts off the waitlist. A reservation secured in late June therefore carried a horizon of up to roughly six months, set by the model and region chosen. Valve has published no equivalent schedule for the Frame, and mapping the Machine's timeline onto a headset with different components would be a projection. The mechanism is the same. The pace is unknown.

Demand is the less certain half. Counterpoint Research's quarterly XR tracker put global VR headset shipments down 18 percent year over year in the second quarter of 2026, and tied part of the decline to price increases during the memory shortage, a finding this site covered on September 11. A lottery with a waitlist shows that Valve expects signups to exceed its first allocation. It does not show the size of either number. A four-figure headset could sell out its first run inside a contracting category and still be small by unit volume. (The launch hardware and accessory prices and the signup steps are covered separately.)

For institutional buyers, the binding constraint is the household limit rather than the price. A training program or a development studio that wants several headsets cannot assemble them through a process capped at one signup per household, and neither Valve's announcement nor its FAQ describes a volume or business purchasing channel. Organizations weighing the Frame for 2026 budgets should plan on one evaluation unit at most, obtained through the same randomized queue as consumers. Fleet availability should be treated as unscheduled until Valve publishes a channel or a delivery timeline.