Valorant runs on regional shards, and an account belongs to one of them.
Riot sets the region when the account is created, from where you are at the
time, and moves it afterwards only to match where you actually live — never
by preference, and never for free in ranked terms. So the region is the first
thing to settle when you buy an account, before the rank, before the skins,
before anything else on the listing.
| region | covers | shard |
|---|
| NA | United States, Canada | North America |
| LATAM | Spanish-speaking Latin America | Latin America |
| BR | Brazil | Brazil |
| EU | Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, North Africa, Russia and the CIS | Europe |
| AP | South-East Asia, Oceania, Japan, India, and most of Asia outside Korea | Asia-Pacific |
| KR | Korea | Korea |
The shard is what matters in play. Competitive queue is locked to it: you
cannot queue ranked with a friend on another shard, and your rank exists only
there. Unrated and custom games can cross shards, but if you bought the account
to climb, the shard is the whole point.
Ping follows the shard as well, and Valorant is a game where it shows. An NA
account played from Europe means a hundred-plus milliseconds on every peek —
fine for a casual round, miserable for anything you care about winning.
Only to where you physically live — and it costs the current season. Riot's
Account Transfer FAQ separates two things: the Region of Residence (the
country on the account, which sets the store currency, payment options and
default language) and the shard (which servers and queues you get). Both
are set from your location when the account is created. Riot changes them on
request — through the region page in Player Support, which tells you on login
whether you are eligible, or by ticket — but, in Riot's words, "you can only
change your shard or Region of Residence to match your physical location", and
"you cannot change shards just to play in other regions". Playing through a
VPN is how accounts end up on the wrong one, not how they get moved.
What moves with the account: the collection (skins, player cards, buddies,
sprays), agents, loadouts, account level, MMR, contract and battle-pass
progress, past seasons' rank rewards. What does not: the current ranked act
(you restart it), match history, purchase history and Night Market offers.
Between NA, LATAM and BR everything transfers, the current act included. After a
move the account is locked for 90 days before the next one. Exceptions:
no transfer into China, Korea requires a new account made there, Vietnam
requires permanent residency, and Korea to Japan is not offered.
What it means when you buy: the region on the card is where the account plays
now, and the only place it can go is your own country, on Riot's terms, once
per 90 days, at the price of the current act. An NA account bought to play from
Europe means either a hundred milliseconds on every peek or a support ticket
about an account created on another continent — neither is a bargain. Buy the
region you play in.
On some games we price, a table like this mostly reflects what is listed on each
server rather than the server itself. Valorant is different: most of this gap
is real. We split the shelf by skin count and compared regions inside each
band, and the ordering held — among accounts with a deep skin collection, an NA
account costs several times a LATAM one and well over an EU one.
The reason is on both sides of the trade. NA buyers pay more, and NA sellers are
fewer, so the NA shelf is thin and dear. LATAM and AP supply is deep relative to
what buyers there will spend. EU sits in between, and it has one more quirk: it
is where most fresh, low-skin accounts are listed, so the cheapest starter
accounts on the whole shelf are European even though the built ones are not.
The practical version: the region you need decides the price band you are in,
and there is no bargain in buying across it. An EU account bought to save money
is not a saving if you live in Texas — you will play it at a ping that loses
rounds, and you cannot queue ranked with anyone you know.
- Where you physically play. In a tactical shooter this outranks everything;
the region with the lowest ping to you is the only one worth considering.
- Where your friends are, if they are in a neighbouring region — EU players
in Turkey and Russia are on the same shard as Germany, for instance, so the
table above already groups them.
- Nothing else. Rank, agents and skins are compared after the region is
fixed, never instead of it.
Once the region is settled, what decides a Valorant account's price is the skin
collection, then the knives, then the agent count — the rank barely moves it,
because it resets every act. All of that is in
how much a Valorant account is worth;
this page is about the choice that comes before it.
Each region carries its own live median, so you can see what your band costs
before opening a listing:
Region is the first filter almost every Valorant buyer applies, and a listing
that does not name one is invisible to all of them. Put it in the first few
words, using Riot's own labels — NA, EU, AP, LATAM, BR, KR — so the buyer's
filter and your title agree.
The price table is read from our live catalogue when the page loads, sorted by
median rather than by listing count, and prints how many listings stand behind
each row — the KR and BR rows are small, so read them as a direction rather than
a rate. The claim that the gap is real was checked by splitting the shelf by skin
count and comparing regions inside each band. The transfer rules are Riot's
Account Transfer FAQ for Valorant as of June 2026, at the time of writing;
Riot changes them, so check the FAQ before filing a ticket.
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