Finished steel is up 44.8 percent over twelve months. Ferrous scrap is up 11.7 percent. That gap is the most important number in the market, and it explains why mill margins have expanded while yard boards have barely moved. Our ferrous board sits at $300 a short ton, having softened about 1.5 percent over three months.
Scrap Price Today market analysis, written from exchange settlement data, mill and refiner pricing practice and published policy documents. Figures are examples; today’s numbers are on the live scrap price board.
We rebuilt this page after finding a flaw in our own method, and the correction changes the conclusion rather than a detail. It is set out in full at the end.
Two prices that used to move together
CME hot-rolled coil, the benchmark for finished steel, is at $1,197 a short ton against $793 twelve months ago. Over the same period the US producer price index for iron and steel scrap rose 11.4 percent, and it has eased 1.5 percent in the last month.
Historically those two track each other reasonably closely, because scrap is the main input to the steel. They have separated sharply, and company filings show the same thing from the inside: Steel Dynamics reported second-quarter selling prices up $162 a ton year on year while the metallic raw material cost feeding its furnaces rose $5 a ton.
Metallics are 55 to 65 percent of electric arc furnace operating costs by the same company’s account. An output price up 14 percent against a dominant input up 1 percent is a margin story, and the margin is not being made at the scale.
The three prices a seller actually faces
| US domestic mill program | Turkish import price | West Coast container | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Measurement | USD per gross ton (2,240 lb), delivered | USD per tonne CFR, bulk cargo landed | USD per tonne CFR, container to Asia |
| Recent level | Down about $10 to $20 for August shipment on HMS and shredded | $371 to $375 for HMS 80/20 from Europe and the US East Coast | About $325 for HMS 80/20 into Taiwan |
| Reset frequency | Monthly settlement week | Cargo by cargo | Follows Asian demand |
| Who follows it | Yards within trucking distance of a mill | East Coast and European export yards | West Coast yards |
| Direction | Softer | Broadly flat | Subdued |
Those export figures come from Steel Market Update’s reporting in mid-August, which recorded four Northern European and Baltic cargoes at $371, a UK cargo at $375, and US East Coast business around $375 with a $20 premium for shredded. HMS 95/5 traded at $390 and shredded at $395.
The freight arithmetic worth doing
Our ferrous board of $300 a short ton converts to about $331 a tonne. Reported freight from the US East Coast and Northern Europe to Turkey has been running $40 to $44 a tonne.
Add them and you land at roughly $371, within a dollar of what Turkish mills actually paid. The apparent gap between the domestic and export price is not margin or mystery; it is the ship.
That is also the sanity check on our own anchor. Two independently sourced numbers, a domestic index and a reported cargo price, reconcile through a published freight rate.
Why demand is strong and prices are not
Domestic steel demand is genuinely firm. US mills shipped 8.54 million net tons in June, up 8.7 percent year on year, with first-half shipments up 5.3 percent on American Iron and Steel Institute data, and imports fell to about 1.9 million tonnes.
New melting capacity keeps arriving too. Nucor has fired the electric arc furnace at its new West Virginia sheet mill, a four billion dollar project.
So why has scrap lagged? Because tariff protection sits on the finished product, not on the raw material. Mills capture the difference between a protected output price and an unprotected input, and scrap only rises when mills compete hard enough for tonnes to hand part of it back. Our analysis of where the tariff gains landed works through that in detail.
What a seller should do with this
- Stop reading finished steel headlines as scrap signals. A record hot-rolled coil price does not mean a record scrap price, and this year it emphatically has not.
- Watch your mill’s settlement week rather than a daily chart. The scrap benchmark itself is published monthly, which tells you how fast this market actually moves.
- Preparation still beats timing on ferrous by a wide margin. Cutting plate and structural to charge size moves material up a grade, worth more than the entire twelve-month move on some loads; the preparation guide has the sizes.
- Ask which market your yard sells into. A domestic-mill yard and an export-dock yard are quoting off different numbers on the same morning.
- Keep cast iron separate. Our board has it at $288 against light iron at $264 a ton.
- In importing markets the picture inverts, as our Turkey and Bangladesh pages describe.
Key numbers
- Ferrous scrap board $300 a short ton, up 11.7 percent over twelve months, down about 1.5 percent over three months (Scrap Price Today series).
- US producer price index for iron and steel scrap up 11.4 percent year on year, peaking in March and easing since (Bureau of Labor Statistics via FRED).
- CME hot-rolled coil $1,197 a short ton against $793 twelve months ago, up 44.8 percent.
- Steel Dynamics second-quarter selling prices up $162 a ton, metallic raw material cost up $5 a ton, with metallics 55 to 65 percent of mill operating costs (company quarterly filing).
- Turkish HMS 80/20 booked at $371 to $375 a tonne CFR in mid-August, freight $40 to $44 a tonne (Steel Market Update).
- US mill shipments 8.54 million net tons in June, up 8.7 percent year on year (American Iron and Steel Institute data).
What this metal pays around the world
Scrap is a global market priced in US dollars, but what reaches a seller depends on trade position, freight to the nearest consumer and how many buyers compete locally. The table below converts the same grade into each market’s own currency and units at the day’s exchange rate, and shows the factor we apply.
| Market | Local price | USD per ton | Market factor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turkey | ₺16,667 / tonne | $312 | 1.04 |
| Germany | €290 / tonne | $306 | 1.02 |
| United States | $300 / ton | $300 | 1.00 |
| China | CN¥2,178 / tonne | $294 | 0.98 |
| Canada | C$402 / ton | $291 | 0.97 |
| United Kingdom | £235 / tonne | $288 | 0.96 |
| Australia | A$436 / tonne | $285 | 0.95 |
| United Arab Emirates | AED1,154 / tonne | $285 | 0.95 |
| Saudi Arabia | SAR1,153 / tonne | $279 | 0.93 |
| India | ₹28,765 / tonne | $276 | 0.92 |
| Bangladesh | ৳35,773 / tonne | $264 | 0.88 |
| South Africa | R4,485 / tonne | $255 | 0.85 |
The correction, and how this page is now built
Until this rebuild, our ferrous board was derived from hot-rolled coil futures using a fixed recovery share. That worked while finished steel and scrap moved together. This year they did not, and the method produced a twelve-month gain of nearly 45 percent when the actual scrap market rose about 11 percent. Anyone reading our steel board as a guide to what their load had gained was reading a number that was too high.
We have re-based it. The ferrous series now follows the Bureau of Labor Statistics producer price index for iron and steel scrap, which measures scrap itself rather than the product made from it, anchored to a dollar level derived from published Turkish cargo prices less reported freight. The index is monthly, so our ferrous board now steps monthly, which is closer to how mill programs actually behave.
The limitations are worth stating plainly. A national index is not your local mill program, the anchor depends on published export prices that we re-check, and the index lags by a month. Direction and magnitude are now sound; a specific dollar figure for your grade at your yard is not something any index can give you.
The full derivation is on the editorial policy page and the current figures are on the live board. If your mill is settling materially away from these levels, that is worth telling us at info@scrappricetoday.com.