Market Data

What the PPI for Iron and Steel Measures, and Why It Reads 357.11

A plain-English guide to the BLS producer price index that sits underneath every steel quote, weld, and beam in America, and the forces behind its current move.

The PPI for iron and steel is a Bureau of Labor Statistics index (1982=100) tracking the prices U.S. mills receive for iron and steel. As of May 2026 it stood at 357.11 and was rising, up about 7.0% from a year ago, meaning current mill prices are roughly 3.6 times their 1982 baseline. That one number sits underneath nearly every steel quote written in the country.

An index, not a price

The first thing to understand is that 357.11 is not a dollar figure. The BLS surveys mills each month for the net transaction prices they actually receive, not list prices, across the iron and steel product mix, then chains those readings into a single index scaled so that 1982 equals 100. A reading of 357.11 says mills are collecting about 3.6 times what they did in 1982 for a comparable basket of product. Because it measures revenue at the mill gate, the index sits upstream of the service-center markups, freight, and processing charges a fabricator sees on an invoice. Those layers add cost, but they move with the mill price underneath them, which is why procurement teams treat this series as the master benchmark even though nobody pays "the index" directly.

What actually moves the number

Three inputs do most of the work. Iron ore and ferrous scrap set the raw-material floor, integrated mills ride ore, electric-arc furnaces ride scrap, and the U.S. fleet is now predominantly the latter. Energy comes second: melting steel is one of the most electricity- and gas-intensive things American industry does, so power and fuel costs feed through with little lag. The third force is capacity and trade policy, mill utilization, import volumes, and tariff regimes decide how much pricing power producers have over the cost floor. Demand from construction, autos, and machinery determines whether mills can hold price increases or must give them back. When you see the index climbing, some combination of those forces is doing the pushing.

PPI, iron and steel (1982=100), May 2026: 357.11. The archived history runs from 307.94 in Nov 2025 to 357.11 in May 2026; the latest reading sits 100% of the way up that range.

Nobody pays the index directly, but every steel invoice in the country moves with it.

What the index does to a real quote

Put the number to work on a job. Take a structural fabrication contract carrying $250,000 of steel content. The index is up about 7.0% from a year ago (+7.0%), and if mill prices moved with it, the past year alone repriced that line by about $17,534, in the direction of the index. A quote written off last year's material cost and held open for months silently absorbs that swing. That is the practical reason to read this series: not to predict steel prices, but to know how stale your own numbers are before you sign.

Put your material share and a price-move scenario into the metal price sensitivity calculator to see what an index swing does to your job cost. Test your steel exposure

Published 2026-07-13.