Most cape guides call a cape "rare" or "very rare" and leave it there. We'd rather give you a number. Crafty tracks every Java Edition profile that has worn an official cape, so this list ranks each cape by how many accounts we've recorded with it. That runs from capes owned by a single person up to the one six million players share. Our crawler hasn't seen every account in existence, so treat each count as a floor. The ratios between capes are the part to pay attention to. The full gallery with 3D previews is on the capes page.
The ranking, rarest first
Rows with several capes are ties, and every cape in the row has exactly that count. The rank numbers skip ahead to make room for them.
What the numbers tell you
One cape has a single owner and another has nearly six million, and almost nothing sits between roughly 600 and 3,000. That gap splits the list into three clear tiers. The personal and staff capes at the top are as good as unique. The event capes, MINECON through Moonlight Trail, sit in the thousands. Everything from Builder down was a mass promotion and runs into the hundreds of thousands or millions.
MINECON capes are rarer than most people assume. Each convention cape is on three to seven thousand tracked accounts, which makes a 2011 cape rarer than any promotional cape by a factor of forty or more. They're also the capes most often faked with mods and most often found on sold accounts. If a "2011 attendee" account looks like it changed hands last year, check its skin history.
The list of capes you can still earn is short. Only four capes on the list are open today: Common and Pan, which are automatic, and the Minecraft Experience and Moonlight Trail capes while their events tour. Everything else is closed. Mojang has reopened a cape exactly once, when the Founder's cape from MINECON Live 2019 came back in May 2025. Assume a closed cape stays closed.
The most common cape is Migrator. Pan went to everyone from May 2025, but Migrator went to every account that migrated before March 2022. That was most of the player base back then, and those accounts have carried it ever since.
How capes work in 2026
A Java account can own any number of capes and wear one at a time. You pick it on your profile page at minecraft.net or in the launcher's Skins tab. The cape shows on the player model, and on elytra it becomes the wing texture. A profile with no cape equipped shows nothing, even if it owns several. That's why some rare capes have owners who never display them.
Crafty records a cape when it sees it on a profile, so the capes page lists every account that has worn each cape, and when. Each cape's page shows the texture in 3D along with the live owner count we built this table from.
FAQ
What is the rarest Minecraft cape?
Several capes are tied with a single known owner: Millionth Customer, Prismarine, Spade, Snowman, dB, Oxeye, Blueprint and the Japanese Translator cape. Mojang gave each of them to one person as a one-off gift. Of the capes a normal player could have earned, Scrolls is the rarest with seven tracked accounts, followed by the MINECON 2011 cape.
Is the Migrator cape rare?
No. It's the most common cape in Java Edition, on nearly six million tracked accounts. Every account that moved from Mojang to Microsoft before the March 2022 deadline got one. People sometimes call it rare because you can't get it anymore, but an account created after 2020 simply can't have one.
Can you still get a Minecraft cape?
Yes, and two come automatically. Every Java account has had the Pan cape since May 2025, and signing into Bedrock Edition gets you the Common cape. Event capes like Minecraft Experience and Moonlight Trail are handed out at the in-person events while they run. Every other official cape is closed, and you can't buy any of them.
How does Crafty count cape owners?
We record every Java profile our crawler and our users look up, and note which capes each profile has worn. A cape's count is the number of distinct accounts seen with it. That makes it a lower bound on the real total, but the ratios hold up because the same crawl covers every cape equally.