Market Data

U.S. Aluminum Imports by the Numbers: The Full Range Behind the $2.80B Monthly Bill

A ranked look at the monthly import series over its recorded history, charting the surges, the swings, and the run-up to today's level, with the standout months tabulated.

At $2.80B in May 2026, up about 38.0% from a year ago, U.S. aluminum imports sit at the 7th percentile of their archived range in the Census International Trade series, a window that spans everything from a low of $1.84B to a peak of $16.07B. The history is short but violent, and the standout months carry lessons for anyone benchmarking metal spend against the national trend.

The recorded range, ranked

The floor of the archived window came in Jul 2025 at $1.84B; the ceiling arrived in Apr 2026 at $16.07B. That is a spread of 8.7x from trough to peak, extraordinary for a series describing physical metal flows, and a reminder that this line absorbs price shocks, tariff deadlines, and demand swings all at once. Today's reading of $2.80B sits well inside those extremes, which is itself informative: the outliers mark what panic buying and demand vacuums look like, and the current print resembles neither.

Percentile is the fastest way to place any month without memorizing the history: the latest reading stands at the 7th percentile of the archived window, meaning roughly 7% of recorded months came in lower. Watching that percentile move month to month is more informative than the dollar level itself, a series this volatile turns raw levels into noise, but a percentile that grinds steadily higher or lower is a trend with the noise squeezed out. It is the single number worth copying into a monthly procurement review.

What made the extremes

The series' spikes and troughs rarely trace to demand alone. Tariff actions have repeatedly compressed months of purchasing into deadline sprints, Section 232 duties on aluminum, first imposed in 2018 and revised several times since, are the classic accelerant, while the pandemic era showed how fast import demand can evaporate when factories idle. Price matters too: because the Census reports dollars, a world-price surge inflates the line even at flat tonnage. The practical rule for reading the chart above: the closer a month sits to either edge of the range, the more likely policy or price, rather than orders, put it there.

The dollar-versus-tonnage caution applies with special force to ranked lists. A month can top the value table because the world price spiked while actual tonnage was unremarkable, and a cheap-metal month can rank deceptively low while record volume moved. Cross-checking the standout months against the global aluminum price archive separates the two stories. As a rule, value records set during price spikes tell you about markets; value records set at ordinary prices tell you about demand, and only the second kind should change a capacity or sourcing plan.

Aluminum imports, May 2026: $2.80B. Versus the archived extremes of $1.84B (Jul 2025) and $16.07B (Apr 2026), the latest month annualizes to about $33.64B.

The closer a month sits to either edge of the range, the more likely policy or price, not orders, put it there.

Benchmarking your own spend against the series

The run-rate math makes the benchmark concrete. The latest month annualizes to about $33.64B nationally; the archived low would annualize to $22.07B and the peak to $192.84B. If your aluminum budget assumed the midpoint of that range, about $107.45B annualized, you would be planning for a market materially different from the one the latest print describes. Anchor the budget to the current reading, note the percentile, and let the monthly releases mark your position inside the range rather than guessing at it.

Put your volumes through the metal price sensitivity calculator to see what a move across this range would do to your costs. Test your exposure to the swings

Published 2026-07-13.