10/21/2026
Shall we be blunt? Sounds good I will.
Let’s dive deep into iron prices for this one.
Is iron racing upwards? yes it is. Talking with a few other shops like ours and suppliers, things have gotten crazy. For your information, coil is the cheapest form of raw steel you can get. Majority of iron products are originated from coil as it’s either flatted to turn into sheet steel or formed and turned into tubes. For price comparison, 4x10 sheets were at $.42-$.48 a pound in the fall of 2025, in May of 2026 it was around $.52 a pound, the quote I got 3 weeks ago was $.98-$1.25 a pound. Yesterday a friend of ours who uses a lot of sheets said he couldn’t find any under $1.2 a pound. “Find” is the keyword there. I did hear rumors that we are headed to $1.3 a pound as supplies are incredibly tight. Talking with a few shops, we are starting to see suppliers reply with “no quote” as finding the material is getting extremely difficult. The supply issue is allegedly due to the demand from data centers, the political environment with Canada, and supposedly equipment manufacturers are gearing up for a good 2027 with higher commodity prices. Looking at what paint costs our operation, I don’t believe that last one as we find far better tax relief investments than iron, but not my monkey not my circus.
Now let’s talk about the board price of iron. Currently the price for coils on the CME is roughly $.68 a pound. For comparison, in fall of 2025 the board price was roughly $.36 a pound and yielded a sheet price of roughly $.44 to us, only a $.08 a pound spread. Today, that spread is roughly $.52. I am getting told that high fuel costs are the reason this spread is so high, but as I pointed out in a previous post, fuel changing doesn’t change overall costs all that much on a per pound basis. I personally believe that the surge in demand and decrease in supply has caused there to be more profit in certain sectors of the iron supply chain, but that’s just the part that won’t get said out loud and is my belief. I believe that $.20-$.30 of the quoted prices of sheets is due to transportation costs, or the perception of them due to higher fuel costs. Keep in mind $.20 a pound is $9,600 on a 48,000 pound load, so you be the judge of how much of the $.20-$.30 is profit and how much is a true cost.
Now we use a lot of well pipe in our products and that really hasn’t gone anywhere in the past year. With the increase in oil prices, supplies of used well pipe have increased, but so has transportation costs. Each of those combined have caused our pipe prices to stay stable and we don’t look for this to really move. Pipe prices depend more on crude oil prices (the desire for well owners to reline wells) and scrap prices.
As we go through the end of this year and beginning of next, don’t look for prices to come down at all. For our products, we expect prices to continue to increase as we run out of cheaper supplies. I am getting tight on funds as we have invested sooo much into trying to buy the products needed for this winter, but there is only so much we can do.
I hope this puts into perspective what is happening for us in the world so you can make informed decisions on whatever it is you are pricing out.
Side note: I read a headline that lumber has fallen on its face…. I don’t know how true that is, but something to consider.
