Market Data

Iron Ore at $104 and Climbing: Where the Price Goes Through 2026

With the tonne price climbing, we lay out the demand and supply forces, Chinese mill output, seaborne supply, the yuan, that decide whether iron ore breaks higher or fades by year-end.

Iron ore is trading at $104/tonne as of Jun 2026 on a rising trend, up about 7.9% from a year ago, per IMF data distributed through FRED, with direction from here hinging chiefly on Chinese steel demand and seaborne supply from Australia and Brazil. For plant managers and CFOs budgeting steel spend for the next fiscal year, those two variables, plus the yuan, are the whole forecast.

Demand: the China variable that decides everything

China's mills consume roughly 70% of the seaborne trade, so the demand forecast is functionally a China forecast. The bullish channels are infrastructure stimulus and manufacturing exports, steel-hungry, policy-driven, and capable of turning quickly. The bearish channel is property: Chinese construction has historically been the single largest end use for the country's steel, and its multi-year contraction remains the standing drag on ore demand. Layered over both is policy: Beijing periodically caps crude-steel output for emissions and profitability reasons, and a strictly enforced cap can sever the usual link between steel demand and ore buying for months at a time. The net of those forces is currently showing up as a rising benchmark at the 49th percentile of its archived range, a reading that says the market is balanced enough for the next policy or property headline to set the direction.

Iron ore (62% Fe, CFR China), Jun 2026 (IMF via FRED): $104/tonne. Archived range: $96 in Jun 2025 to $112 in May 2026. The latest print sits at the 49th percentile.

Supply: the seaborne pipeline and its new entrant

The supply side is a story of few actors and long lead times. Australian and Brazilian majors dominate the seaborne trade, and their quarterly shipment guidance is the market's supply calendar; weather disruptions in the Pilbara or licensing issues in Brazil tighten the market within weeks. The structural newcomer is Guinea's Simandou deposit, the largest high-grade ore project in a generation, whose ramp-up adds a genuine new source of tonnage to a trade that has not had one in years. Ore also competes with scrap: as electric-arc-furnace capacity grows in China and elsewhere, each point of scrap-based steelmaking share trims ore demand at the margin. Put together, the supply pipeline argues against sustained scarcity pricing, while the demand concentration argues against complacency. A budgeting posture anchored to the current level, with sensitivity run to both ends of the archived range, is the defensible middle.

The iron ore forecast is functionally a China forecast, everything else is freight and timing.

What it means for a steel budget

Translate the benchmark into the number a CFO signs. Blast-furnace steel embeds roughly 1.6 tonnes of ore per tonne of metal, so a plant buying 500 tonnes of steel a year is carrying about $83,033 of ore cost inside its steel spend at today's $104/tonne. A 10% ore move shifts the raw-material floor by roughly $17 per steel tonne, about $8,303 a year at that volume if mills pass it through fully, as they generally do with a lag. That figure belongs in the budget's sensitivity table next to wages and energy, and it is the quantitative case for indexing long steel contracts rather than betting the year on a single fixed price.

Use the metal surcharge impact calculator to see what an ore-driven mill increase does to your steel line and your quotes. Stress-test the surcharge

Published 2026-07-13.