How to Install a Claude Skill in Cowork (Step by Step)

The hard part of buying a skill is deciding which one to buy. Installing it is a four-minute job — but the first time through, there are two spots where people stare at their screen wondering why nothing is happening. Both are easy fixes once you know what to look for. This walkthrough takes you from the file you downloaded all the way to watching the skill run, and it spends extra time on the parts that actually go wrong.

Quick mental model before we start: a skill you buy on Skillmint is a one-time purchase. You pay once, you download it, and it's yours — it runs locally on your own machine, no subscription, no per-call billing, nothing phoning home. Once it's in the right folder, Cowork treats it like any built-in capability.

What you actually downloaded

After checkout, Skillmint hands you a .skill file. Despite the fancy extension, it's a plain zip archive. Inside it is a folder containing a SKILL.md file — that Markdown file is the skill. It tells Claude what the skill does, when to use it, and how to behave once it's triggered. Some skills also bundle helper files (scripts, templates, reference docs) alongside the SKILL.md, and those come along inside the same zip.

That's the whole package. No installer, no account linking, no background service.

1. Save the file somewhere you can find it

When the download finishes, you'll have something like contract-reviewer.skill sitting in your Downloads folder. Leave it there for now. You don't need to move it anywhere special yet — you just need to know where it is so you can unzip it in the next step.

If your browser was overly helpful and renamed it to contract-reviewer.skill.zip, don't panic. It's the same file. The double extension is cosmetic.

2. Unzip it

Double-click the .skill file, or right-click and choose your system's extract option. On macOS the built-in Archive Utility handles it; on Windows, Extract All does the job.

You should end up with a folder. Open it and confirm you can see SKILL.md inside. This is worth doing now, because the single most common installation failure comes from how this folder is nested — and it's much easier to catch here than later.

A correct unzip looks like this:

contract-reviewer/
  SKILL.md
  (maybe some helper files)

What you do NOT want is a folder inside a folder, like contract-reviewer/contract-reviewer/SKILL.md. More on that in step 5.

3. Find your Cowork skills folder

Cowork reads skills from a dedicated folder on your machine when it starts up. The default location is:

~/.claude/skills/

The ~ is shorthand for your home directory. On macOS that's /Users/yourname/, so the full path is /Users/yourname/.claude/skills/. The leading dot makes the .claude folder hidden by default — on macOS, press Cmd+Shift+. (period) in Finder to reveal hidden folders, or use the Go menu's Go to Folder option and paste the path.

If the skills folder doesn't exist yet, create it. An empty ~/.claude/skills/ is perfectly fine; Cowork will just find nothing in it until you add something.

4. Move the skill folder into place

Drag the unzipped folder — the one with SKILL.md directly inside it — into ~/.claude/skills/. You should now have:

~/.claude/skills/contract-reviewer/SKILL.md

The folder name is for your benefit only. Rename it to whatever helps you keep track; Cowork doesn't care what it's called. What it cares about is that SKILL.md lives exactly one level down — inside a folder, inside skills. Not loose in skills/, and not buried two folders deep.

5. Restart Cowork so it gets picked up

This is stuck-point number one, and it catches nearly everyone. Cowork scans the skills folder when it launches. If you added the skill while Cowork was already running, it has no idea the new folder appeared. Nothing is broken — Cowork simply hasn't looked.

Quit Cowork completely and reopen it. Don't just close the window; fully quit the app so it does a fresh startup scan. After it reopens, your skill is part of its toolkit.

6. Trigger it

You don't open or launch a skill the way you'd open a document. Skills work by description. You tell Claude what you want done, and if your request matches what the skill is built for, Claude reaches for it on its own.

The skill's listing on Skillmint usually tells you what phrases set it off — something like "review this contract" or "check this lease for red flags." Type a request close to that wording, attach or paste whatever the skill needs to work on, and let it run.

7. Confirm it's actually doing its job

It's easy to assume a skill fired when Claude just answered normally. To be sure, give it a task the skill should obviously own, and watch the shape of the response. A good skill produces structured, recognizable output — the same format you saw in the sample on its listing. If the result matches that pattern, the skill is live and working. If you get a generic answer instead, head to troubleshooting.

Troubleshooting

Ninety percent of failed installs are one of these three things:

1. You didn't restart. If the skill never seems to trigger, quit Cowork fully and reopen it before doing anything else. This fixes most "it's not working" reports on its own.
2. The folder is nested one level too deep. This is stuck-point number two. If your path looks like skills/contract-reviewer/contract-reviewer/SKILL.md, Cowork won't find the skill, because SKILL.md isn't directly inside the folder it's scanning. Open the outer folder, pull the inner folder's contents up one level so SKILL.md sits at skills/contract-reviewer/SKILL.md, delete the now-empty inner folder, and restart.
3. `SKILL.md` is misnamed or missing. The file has to be named exactly SKILL.md — same spelling, same capitalization. If your unzip produced skill.md, Skill.md, or a stray .txt extension, rename it and restart. While you're there, confirm the unzip actually finished and didn't leave you looking at the zip's contents in a preview window instead of real files on disk.

If you've checked all three and the skill still won't trigger, the problem usually isn't installation — it's the trigger phrase. Re-read the listing for the exact wording the skill responds to and try again with something closer to it.

That's the whole loop

Download, unzip, drop the folder into ~/.claude/skills/, restart, trigger, confirm. The first time it takes a few minutes because you're hunting for the skills folder and learning where the SKILL.md needs to sit. After that, every new skill you buy is a thirty-second job: unzip, drop in, restart. You own each one outright, so once it's installed, it's installed for good.