Methods and sources

Every number on the dashboard comes from the series below, downloaded from FRED, the database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which republishes them from the International Monetary Fund, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. The page is checked against FRED every weekday. Download every observation as a CSV file.

Licenses

• Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau data are works of the U.S. government and in the public domain.
• The International Monetary Fund’s terms for statistical data allow its data to be copied and published with credit to the IMF as the source. The global prices on this site are credited as: Source: International Monetary Fund, Primary Commodity Prices, via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The IMF publishes the full set of prices at no charge on its commodity prices page.
• The news page shows each headline with its publisher, date and a link to the publisher’s page, and no article text. Federal Register documents are works of the U.S. government.

How the dashboard figures are calculated

• The Latest column shows the most recent month published. Global prices are in U.S. dollars per metric ton, and the units line under each name gives the price per pound (the price per ton divided by 2,204.62). Construction spending is shown in billions of dollars.
• The 1 mo and 12 mo columns are percent changes from the month before and from the same month a year earlier.
• The Since Jan 2019 column is the percent change from January 2019, about a year before the pandemic.
• The 36-mo range column places the latest value between the lowest and highest values of the last 36 months, the latest month included. Hover over it, or read it with a screen reader, for the low and high and their months.
• The small charts set each series to 100 in January 2019 and draw every series in a group on one scale, so a line ending at 150 has risen 50% since then.

Global prices

The IMF’s Primary Commodity Prices are monthly averages of benchmark prices, in nominal U.S. dollars. For copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc, tin and lead the benchmark is the London Metal Exchange cash price for the grade the IMF names, and for iron ore it is ore delivered to China. The IMF updates them once a month, two to three months after the month they cover, so the latest global month on the dashboard is older than the latest U.S. month.

A monthly average does not show the swings within a month, and the benchmark is a price for large lots of pure metal at an exchange warehouse. A buyer in the United States pays more: the regional premium (for aluminum, the Midwest premium), freight, the mill’s or service center’s margin, and for stainless the alloy surcharge, which follows nickel.

U.S. producer prices

The mill, scrap, equipment and building material series are Producer Price Indexes. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says they measure the average change in the selling prices that domestic producers receive for their output. They leave out freight and the markup of a distributor or service center. They are not seasonally adjusted, so the change on the year is the more reliable comparison. The most recent months are revised for up to four months after they are first published, and the dashboard picks up those revisions when FRED does.

Each index has its own base period, so compare the percent changes and the small charts rather than the index levels. The Bureau stopped publishing its hot-rolled sheet and strip index in February 2022 and most of its stainless steel mill product indexes before that, so the dashboard uses the hot-rolled bars, plate and structural shapes index for carbon steel plate and beams, and nickel, stainless pipe and tube, and stainless scrap for stainless.

Construction spending

Construction spending is the Census Bureau’s value of construction put in place, at a seasonally adjusted annual rate: the month’s pace of spending if it continued for a year. The Census Bureau counts data centers in the office category, and power construction covers electric power and oil and gas facilities.

What the dashboard leaves out

Futures prices, London Metal Exchange official prices, the Midwest aluminum premium, stainless alloy surcharges and daily prices for silver, lithium and electrical steel are published by exchanges, mills and price reporting agencies under licenses that do not allow republishing without a paid agreement. The dashboard lists where each one is published.