Iron Scrap Rate Today in India — 16 September 2026

Start with the number that matters if you are sitting on material in Maharashtra. Iron punching scrap in Jalna is at ₹39,500/MT (₹39.50/kg) today, confirmed with the mill this morning. That is the best clean-grade rate anywhere in the state, and once freight comes off it is the best in the country for a Marathwada seller. It sits ₹6,600/t above Jalna’s own HMS 80:20 base of ₹32,900/MT, which is exactly what you would expect. Punchings are small, dense, even pieces of mild steel straight off a press shop, with no rust, no dirt and no other metal mixed in. A furnace can melt them as they are, so it pays extra for that certainty. The wider market is still split two ways, and that split has now held for six straight weeks. Prepared grades keep firming while yard-collected material drifts. Mandi Gobindgarh’s end-cutting index sits at ₹38,400/MT DAP, Mumbai HMS 80:20 is near ₹33,100/MT, and Ludhiana leads the national board at ₹38,700/MT. Sponge iron in Mandi is around ₹28,600/MT. The read for sellers has not changed: mixed or wet material gets no reward this week, and clean sorted single-grade lots are a completely different conversation.

Two columns, not one. This is the single biggest fix we have made to this page, because a headline city rate is meaningless unless you know which material it refers to. Prepared means sorted, dry, single-grade material — end-cutting, clean HMS 1, punchings, MS sheet. Mixed yard means everything a collection yard actually accumulates: assorted gauges, some rust, some rubber, some light tin. In most Indian cities today the gap between those two numbers is ₹5,000 to ₹8,000/MT. If a buyer quotes you a city’s prepared number and then pays you the mixed number at the weighbridge, that is the trick, and this table is how you spot it.

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Iron scrap rate today, 16 September 2026. Prepared = sorted, dry, single-grade. Mixed yard = assorted collection-yard material. All figures ex-yard, excluding 18% GST.

Most weeks in scrap are boring, and that is a good thing. Rates move a few rupees, everyone shrugs, work carries on. This week was not one of those weeks. But all the action was in copper, not iron — and if you only sell iron, that is still worth two minutes of your time, because brass follows copper and copper sets the mood for the whole metal market.

1. Copper stopped going up for the first time in eight weeks

Copper had risen seven weeks in a row. Then it stopped, and it has kept sliding since. COMEX copper is now around $6.55 a pound, down roughly $0.40 a pound from its recent high, with about $0.25 of that fall coming in just a few sessions. LME three-month copper broke its eight-week winning run and has not recovered. In a market that had become one-way, the break matters far more than the size of it — and US scrap yards have already started marking their copper buying prices down.

2. The squeeze that was driving the price finally broke

This is the real story of the week, and it is simpler than it sounds. On the LME there are two prices at any time: what you pay for metal today, and what you pay for metal delivered in three months. Normally the three-month price is a little higher, because someone has to pay to store the metal. When the today price goes above the three-month price, it means buyers are short of metal right now and will pay extra to get their hands on it. Traders call that backwardation. You can just call it panic.

At its peak that gap hit $545 a tonne — the widest since late 2021. Within days it had collapsed to under $100. The reason is that metal finally started showing up in the warehouses. LME copper stocks went from 204,975 tonnes on 14 August, the lowest level since February, to 238,575 tonnes by 20 August — about 16% above the February low. One day alone saw around 20,000 tonnes delivered in, the biggest single-day build since April, with Trafigura reported to be behind a large share of it. China told the same story: Shanghai exchange stocks jumped 28.4% in a week to 89,548 tonnes. When metal appears on two continents at once, the shortage was never as bad as the price said it was.

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3. Jalna held steady — the mill re-confirmed the same card

Last time we checked, Jalna iron punching scrap jumped ₹700/t in a single week, mill-confirmed. This time the mill has moved again: punching to ₹39,500, end cut ₹38,500, melting ₹37,500, and super to ₹36,600 — a smaller ₹500 to ₹600 move, but the fourth consecutive check-in with the card moving up rather than sitting still. Local re-rollers and TMT mills in Jalna are running hard, billet is holding near ₹40,900/MT, and clean punchings are the one feed they cannot swap for sponge iron — when a mill needs a specific grade and has no substitute, it pays up, and it did so across the entire card at once rather than on one grade alone. See what that means for your load →

Meanwhile the wider Indian market has started moving in the direction Jalna moved first. Kallanish reported on 4 September that Indian scrap prices are rising as freight costs firm — a reversal from three weeks earlier, when the same publication described Indian buyers resisting rising import offers. Read together, the sequence is telling: buyers resisted (21 Aug), the market firmed anyway and tested buyer appetite (27 Aug), and now prices are rising with freight named as the specific driver (4 Sep). Jalna’s local demand story got there first; the freight-cost story is now doing the same job nationally.

4. Everywhere else, iron did almost nothing — and that is good news

Turkey’s HMS 80:20 benchmark has now held in the $371 to $375 band for over a month, with traders describing a fall from here as unlikely. That plateau, not a fresh spike, is the real story internationally. Prepared grades in India held the gains they built through July and September; mixed and yard-collected material has stayed the weaker half of the market throughout. A steady plateau after a run-up is usually a healthier sign than the run-up itself — it means buyers have absorbed the higher level rather than just chasing a spike.

One thing worth flagging honestly: a separate ship-recycling market report (Wirana, cited by Fiinews on 6 September) noted Indian and regional scrap prices had risen for roughly seven straight weeks and floated the possibility of a small downward correction from here, even while noting ship-recycler bids had actually improved again at the end of that week. Markets that run for seven weeks in one direction do not usually keep running forever. If you are holding sorted material and the price looks good, that is not a reason to panic-sell, but it is a reason not to assume the number only goes up from here.

5. The one thing to watch next week

Washington has still not decided whether US import tariffs will be extended to cover refined copper. That single decision is now the biggest thing hanging over the metal. American warehouses are sitting on a record 670,000 tonnes of copper, about eight times what they held in February 2025, because buyers rushed to bring metal in before any tariff landed. July alone saw US copper imports pass 200,000 tonnes, the strongest month in twelve years. The gap between the US price and the London price is still around $400 to $450 a tonne, and that gap is really just the market putting a number on the tariff risk.

If the tariff is extended, that metal stays locked inside the US and the rest of the world — India included — stays short. If it is not, some of that stockpile comes back out and copper eases further. Either way, brass moves with it, because brass is roughly two-thirds copper. A decision made in Washington will show up on the Delhi brass board within about a week. That is not a theory; it is how every big copper move of the last two years has travelled.

Two other things are worth keeping an eye on. Zijin Mining has warned that flooding at the Kamoa-Kakula complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo could cut its share of output by as much as 57,000 tonnes this year — a reminder that the supply side can turn again quickly. And crude oil has firmed further to around $97 a barrel. That one lands straight on your diesel bill, and it is a big part of why Kallanish is now naming freight cost as the reason Indian scrap prices are rising. Every rupee added to freight makes selling far from home worse and selling locally better, which is the quiet reason the case for a Jalna sale has strengthened this month rather than weakened.

One correction to something we flagged before: Alang’s ship-breaking scrap had eased through August. A report dated 5 September now describes ship-recycler bids improving again. We do not have a precise new rupee figure to publish for that yet, so we are not going to invent one — but the direction has clearly turned, and if you deal on the west coast, expect firmer offers there than a month ago.

The headline change this month: Pune’s premium over Mumbai has gone. For most of this year Pune quoted above the coast, and Marathwada sellers used that gap to justify the haul. As of today, the ScrapRates.in dealer baseline puts Pune at ₹33.57/kg and Mumbai at ₹33.85/kg — Mumbai is now marginally ahead on mixed material. The Pune–Mumbai spread that stood near ₹5,450/MT in mid-July has not just narrowed, it has flipped. If your last sale decision was built on “Pune always pays more,” it is out of date, and it is costing you freight.

Here is where most Marathwada sellers lose money. They look at a Pune headline rate, see it sitting above Jalna, and put material on a truck. Then the freight bill arrives. A 10-tonne load from the Jalna belt to Pune or Mumbai costs ₹9,000 to ₹13,000 in transport and tolls, which is ₹0.90 to ₹1.30/kg off whatever you were quoted. Run that deduction across the table below and the picture flips on most grades. The gross gap between Pune and Jalna on base HMS 80:20 is only ₹0.67/kg today, so the haul eats all of it and then some. Column five shows what you actually keep, not what you were promised at the gate.

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Start with today’s number. Iron punching scrap: ₹39,500/MT, confirmed with the mill this morning. Against the Pune baseline of ₹33,570/MT that is ₹5,930/t in your favour before freight, and about ₹7,000/t after it. On a single 10-tonne load that is roughly ₹70,000 you keep instead of handing to a transporter.

Jalna is not a collection point that ships your material somewhere else. It is a working re-rolling and TMT cluster where the mills melt what they buy, and that changes the maths for anyone selling inside a 150 km radius. Billet here is holding around ₹40,900/MT with local TMT near ₹45,300/MT, so there is real furnace demand behind the bid, not a trader hoping to resell your load. The base index has climbed from ₹30,500/MT on 17 July to ₹32,900/MT now — ₹2,400/t of recovery in about a month — and Jalna is trading within ₹200/MT of Mumbai.

Jalna mill grade card — all five grades, confirmed today

Most rate pages give you one number for a city. A mill does not buy “Jalna scrap” — it buys named grades, and it pays a different price for each one. Below is the full card we confirmed with the mill this morning. If you know which line your material falls on before you pick up the phone, you are already negotiating from a stronger position than nine out of ten sellers.

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Read the right-hand column, because that is the whole argument for sorting. The gap from Super to Punching is ₹2,900 per tonne, narrower by ₹100 than it was, because Super gained slightly more ground than the other grades today. On a 10-tonne load that gap is still ₹29,000, and the only thing standing between the two numbers is a few hours of separating material into the right piles. No negotiation, no market move, no waiting for October. Just sorting.

One important note on the numbers you will see elsewhere on this page. The ₹32,900/MT figure we quote for Jalna HMS 80:20 is a published index for a standard delivered grade, and we keep it so you can compare Jalna against Mumbai and Pune on the same basis. The card above is different: it is what this mill actually pays, by its own grade names, today. When the two disagree, trust the card. An index is an estimate. A mill card is an offer.

What you actually keep: Jalna against every other market

Headline rates are easy to compare and almost always misleading. Two things eat them: the truck, and the wait. Below is the same 10-tonne load of clean punchings, sold from a Marathwada yard, with road freight taken off and then the cost of waiting for your money taken off as well. Ludhiana and Mandi Gobindgarh both quote higher than Jalna. Look at what actually survives.

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Once both costs are counted, Jalna wins by ₹3,240/t over Navi Mumbai, ₹3,830 over Mumbai, ₹5,840 over Ludhiana and ₹6,130 over Mandi Gobindgarh. On a 10-tonne load that is ₹32,400 to ₹61,300 extra, for material that never leaves your district.

The column nobody else puts in the table: when you actually get paid

Every rate page in India compares quoted numbers. Almost none of them tell you when the money lands, and that is the part that decides whether a deal was good. In the Punjab corridor, 30 to 60 day credit is normal. Ludhiana and Mandi Gobindgarh will quote you ₹38,700 or ₹38,400 and mean it — you will just be waiting a month and a half to see it. Jalna pays same day, or inside 24 working hours. Those are not the same deal, even if the numbers on the phone sound close.

Put a cost on the wait. Most yards fund themselves at around 2% a month, whether that is a bank line, a financier or your own money that could be buying the next load. Wait 45 days for ₹34,700 and that costs you about ₹1,040 per tonne in money terms alone. That is the number in the table above. But the interest is the smaller half of the problem.

The bigger half is what your capital could have done instead. Say you have ₹3.8 lakh working — the value of one 10-tonne load. Sell in Jalna and that money is back with you the same day, so it can buy the next load tomorrow. Sell to a mill on 45-day terms and the same ₹3.8 lakh is frozen for a month and a half. In the time it takes Punjab to pay you once, a Jalna seller has turned the same money over four or five times. Even if every single load earned a bit less, the seller who gets paid daily finishes the quarter far ahead. That is not a rate argument. That is arithmetic about how hard your money works.

There is a third cost that never shows up anywhere. Once your material is 1,600 km away and already melted, you have no leverage. If the buyer decides at the gate that your HMS 1 is really HMS 2, or that the weighbridge read 200 kg lighter, what exactly are you going to do about it from Beed? Slow payment and distance are the same problem wearing two hats. Sell close, get paid fast, keep the argument on your own ground.

There is one case where the old advice still held: very large, genuinely clean HMS 1 or sorted factory-direct volume, where Pune MIDC buyers pay ₹38,000 to ₹40,500/MT and the premium was wide enough to pay for the trip. At ₹39,500 for punchings, Jalna now sits inside the upper half of that Pune range gross, before you even count the two-to-three week wait for payment or the 250 km haul, a weighbridge you do not control and a regrading argument you cannot win from that distance. For virtually every seller in Marathwada, that trip no longer makes sense.

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Ludhiana at ₹38,700/MT is the highest ferrous number in India today, and it has been at or near the top of the board for six weeks running. That is not an accident of geography. Ludhiana’s furnace demand comes from bicycle, fastener, auto-component and general engineering work, not construction — so it does not fall away in the monsoon the way Mumbai, Jalna and Hyderabad do. Pig iron in Ludhiana around ₹40,700/MT gives the local price floor a hard base, because when pig iron is expensive, high-quality scrap becomes the cheaper route to the same steel chemistry.

The practical implication for sellers elsewhere: North India is currently absorbing prepared scrap at ₹1,500 to ₹3,000/MT above most western and southern markets. On a 20-tonne load of clean HMS 1 or railway scrap that is ₹30,000 to ₹60,000 of gross difference, which is enough to cover long-haul freight from Rajasthan, Haryana, western UP and parts of MP. It is not enough to justify sending material from Maharashtra or Telangana. Delhi NCR sits just underneath at ₹37,400/MT on prepared grades and ₹33.20/kg on mixed household-channel material — a spread that catches out a lot of first-time sellers in Narela, Bawana and Mayapuri. Our Delhi scrap rate page breaks that down by grade.

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Almost nobody clears a yard and finds only iron. There is usually a coil of wire, a few brass fittings off an old tap, an aluminium window frame, a dead motor. Per kilo that material is worth ten to forty times what your HMS is worth, and it is where the actual margin on a mixed load hides. So here is the non-ferrous board for today, and a warning: these three metals are currently telling completely different stories.

Copper is the one making headlines. COMEX copper set a fresh record earlier this month, with the front contract peaking above US$6.70/lb and later-dated contracts trading past US$7.00/lb. COMEX copper has since fallen back to around US$6.55/lb, down roughly US$0.40/lb from the high, after its first weekly fall in eight weeks. The squeeze that drove the run has broken: the extra you had to pay for metal delivered today rather than in three months peaked at US$545/t and collapsed to under US$100, as LME warehouse stocks rose about 16% above their February low and Shanghai stocks jumped 28.4% in a week. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s concentrate export ban, in force since late June, still limits supply. In rupee terms the Indian copper price sits near ₹1,382/kg, with Delhi armature scrap bid at ₹1,404/kg. Full detail in why this week was different. Brass and aluminium are going the other way — brass has softened on weak fabrication and hardware demand, and aluminium is under pressure from a firmer dollar, expected Middle East supply and steady profit booking. Same split we described in ferrous, entirely different cause.

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Copper scrap rate today (tamba rate)

The copper scrap rate today runs from ₹1,404/kg for armature scrap up to ₹1,540/kg for CC rod on a Delhi wholesale basis, with the Indian copper spot price near ₹1,382/kg. National aggregators quote household and mixed copper considerably lower, generally in the ₹850 to ₹1,100/kg band, and the spread is almost entirely about insulation and contamination. Bare bright wire and clean armature go straight into a furnace. Insulated cable has to be stripped, and the buyer prices the copper he can actually recover, not the weight on the scale. If you are selling cable, strip it first or accept that you are selling plastic at copper weight.

One thing worth watching if you trade copper regularly: at these levels, substitution has started. Chinese cable and wire manufacturers are reported to be swapping aluminium in for copper in low- and medium-voltage power cable and automotive wiring, which is the historical pattern once copper clears roughly US$13/kg. That does not cap the price tomorrow, but it is the mechanism that eventually does. Sellers sitting on copper waiting for another leg up should know that the demand side has a release valve.

Brass scrap rate today / pital rate today

The brass rate today is ₹930 to ₹970/kg wholesale, depending on grade — honey brass at the top, purja at the bottom. That is the brass scrap rate today on a trade basis, and it is the number a foundry buyer works from. If you want to sanity-check any brass price you are quoted, do the arithmetic yourself, because brass is not a commodity in its own right; it is copper and zinc in a fixed ratio. A typical 65:35 brass at today’s copper price of ₹1,382/kg and zinc at ₹339/kg carries roughly ₹1,020/kg of raw metal value. Take off melting loss, refining margin and the dealer’s cut and you land almost exactly where the market is. That single calculation tells you two things: the ₹930–₹970 wholesale band is real, and any “pital rate 1 kg today” under ₹500 for genuinely clean brass is a household-channel number rather than a market one.

It also tells you what to watch. Because brass is roughly two-thirds copper, the brass price per kg follows copper far more closely than it follows its own demand. Brass has softened this month even while copper set records, which means fabrication and hardware demand is weak enough to override the copper pull — an unusual setup, and not one that normally lasts. If copper holds these levels and hardware demand recovers into the festive build, brass has more room to move up than down.

Aluminium scrap rate today

The aluminium scrap rate today spans ₹250 to ₹363/kg wholesale, against an Indian aluminium spot price near ₹357/kg. Look at the width of that band, because it is the most important thing on this page for anyone holding aluminium: company rod at ₹363 and local purja at ₹250 is a ₹113/kg spread on the same metal. As a share of the price, that is a far bigger sorting penalty than anything in iron. Wire scrap at ₹335 and bartan at ₹294 sit in between. An hour spent separating wire from utensils from turnings is worth more per kilo than anything else you will do that day.

Direction is currently down, on a firmer dollar, expectations of higher Middle East supply and continued profit booking. That said, aluminium is the one non-ferrous metal with real support underneath it right now, precisely because of the copper substitution described above. If copper stays where it is, aluminium demand from cable makers gets a floor that has nothing to do with construction season.

Everything above this point is a wholesale or mill rate — what a yard, dealer or furnace pays for a proper tonnage lot. Most people reading this page are not moving tonnes. They are clearing a house, an office, or a small workshop, and the number that actually matters to them is what the neighbourhood kabadiwala will pay per kilo. That is a genuinely different market, and it deserves its own honest numbers rather than a footnote.

We checked several household pickup rate cards active in Delhi NCR, and they do not agree with each other by a wide margin — which is itself the most useful thing we can tell you. On the same category of iron, published rates ranged from ₹20/kg to ₹42/kg. On brass, we saw anything from ₹280/kg to ₹600/kg. Nobody in that range is lying to you. Every kabadiwala is pricing a different assumption about your material’s condition, how much competition exists in your area, and how far a vehicle has to travel to reach you — and that spread is normal at doorstep scale in a way it is not in the wholesale trade above, where everyone quotes off the same published index.

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Notice how far below the wholesale numbers these sit. The national mixed-iron wholesale baseline on this page is ₹32.50/kg, and copper armature scrap is trading wholesale around ₹1,404/kg — several times the ₹600–₹900/kg a household pickup service pays for the same clean copper. A kabadiwala paying less is not cheating you; he is a small operator absorbing collection, sorting, fuel and a minimum-pickup-value model built around ₹200 to ₹1,000 loads rather than 10-tonne ones, and every kilo he collects from a household costs him proportionally more to aggregate than a yard buying a full truck at once. That gap is exactly why quantity is the biggest lever you have.

The simple rule: if you can consolidate enough material to make a proper load — even a couple of hundred kilos of sorted metal, well short of a full truck — it is almost always worth checking what Steel Baba will pay before you call a kabadiwala, because you are cutting out exactly the small-lot aggregation margin described above. If what you have is genuinely a one-off household clearance too small to be worth that call, your nearest local kabadiwala remains the right, practical choice — just use the ranges above to know whether the number you are being offered is fair before you agree to it.

What actually moves your rate at doorstep scale, in order of how much it’s worth:

• Segregation. Iron, copper, aluminium, brass and steel kept in separate piles get quoted against the correct rate line. Mixed metal gets quoted at the lowest matching rate, every time — no kabadiwala sorts your pile for free before weighing it.
• Quantity. Most pickup services apply a minimum value (₹200 to ₹1,000 depending on the operator) to cover the cost of sending someone out. Below that, you either get a lower rate or you wait and combine with more material.
• Cleanliness. Rust, paint, attached plastic or wood, and moisture all get docked before the per-kg rate is applied — the same principle as the wholesale side of this page, just enforced more informally.
• Getting more than one quote. Rates on identical material can differ by ₹6/kg or more on iron and by hundreds of rupees per kg on copper and brass. That gap is real money on even a modest household clearance — a second phone call costs you two minutes.

One table tells you more about timing than any forecast will. Notice the pattern: the prepared benchmarks (Mandi end-cutting, Jalna punchings, Ludhiana) have added ₹2,000 to ₹2,900/MT off the June floor, while mixed material in the same markets has gone nowhere or slipped. That is the split, quantified.

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← Swipe the table sideways to see all columns →

Your rate is not decided by the scrap market. It is decided by six or seven other markets, and the scrap price is what falls out at the end. Here is every one of them today, with the direction it is pushing. If you only read one table on this page before you negotiate, make it this one.

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Count the colours and you have the whole market in one line: seven things pushing up, five pushing down, one cutting both ways, and the tie is broken by grade. That is exactly why prepared grades keep firming while mixed material sits. The upward pressures — Turkey, import parity, billet, rebar, the Punjab GST checks — all act on clean, specific, mill-ready material. The downward pressures — sponge iron, pellet, monsoon — all act on ordinary melting scrap, because that is the material sponge iron can replace. Alang is the exception that proves the rule: it eased through August on pure supply, and is now reported turning up again, which is a broader market signal rather than a grade-specific one. Nobody is going to swap punchings for sponge, regardless of which way Alang moves. That is the entire reason the two ends of this market have pulled apart.

The slow change nobody talks about: sponge iron is eating scrap’s share

The monsoon and the rupee move your rate this month. This next thing will move it for the next five years, and most sellers have never heard the numbers. India’s sponge iron output grew 44% between 2021 and 2024, from 37.06 million tonnes to 54.28 million tonnes. It reached roughly 55 million tonnes in 2025 and is heading towards 65 million tonnes by 2030. Consumption has climbed almost as fast, up 41% over the same period.

Every tonne of that is a tonne of furnace feed that did not need to be scrap. Sponge iron gives a mill something scrap struggles to: a predictable supply, a stable price and the same metal yield every single time. That is why a re-roller will pay a premium for punchings and shrug at a mixed load. He can replace the mixed load. He cannot replace the punchings.

The other side of the story is more encouraging. Under the National Steel Policy, India wants to lift the share of steel made from scrap from about 25% today to 45% by 2030, and the country already recycles roughly 25 to 30 million tonnes of scrap a year. If that target is taken seriously, demand for properly sorted, properly documented scrap goes up a long way from here. Both things are true at once: cheap sponge iron will keep a lid on ordinary melting grades, and policy will keep pulling clean sorted material higher. The sellers who do well over the next five years will be the ones who sort.

Zoom out from this week and the month tells a bigger story. September 2026 has not been a simple recovery month. It split the market in half, and the split is getting wider. Late June delivered a six-month low on the domestic ferrous index. By mid-July, tighter arrivals and firmer billet pulled Mandi Gobindgarh, Mumbai and most of the coast back up. Then the last five weeks sorted the winners from the losers. Prepared grades kept the gain and added to it: end-cutting in Mandi is now ₹38,400/MT. Old, yard-collected grades gave theirs back, with standard ferrous in the same mandi down ₹1 to ₹2/kg on GST verification checks that slowed truck arrivals. The national mixed-iron baseline sits around ₹32.50/kg, well off May’s ₹36.76/kg but roughly level with the late-June trough. The odd part is that the world market is doing exactly the same thing. In the US, September settlements held prime grades like busheling near flat while heavy melt and shredded dropped $10 to $20 per gross ton — a fall that did not move Turkish import prices at all, it simply swung more US material into the export channel. Same split, different continent.

On the west coast, Alang ship-breaking melting scrap has eased to about ₹32,500/MT ex-yard, which adds a little supply into Gujarat and Maharashtra just as monsoon buying stays need-based. Ludhiana remains the outlier worth watching at ₹38,700/MT, with pig iron there around ₹40,700/MT. The Punjab corridor draws its demand from engineering and auto-component work rather than construction, and that base does not fall away in the monsoon the way it does in Mumbai, Jalna or Hyderabad. North India stays the bright spot. The other structural shift is on the raw material side, and it is the least talked-about factor in this market. Better quality DRI is now flowing into western India from newer Maharashtra capacity — notably the new Gadchiroli plant — so Mumbai and Jalna furnace operators are sourcing roughly 82% Fe sponge at ₹1,500 to ₹2,000/t below imported scrap. Several western India buyers have simply not bought imported scrap for two months. That one fact explains most of why mills are not chasing melting grades, and it is why the recovery has favoured grades sponge iron cannot substitute for: end-cutting, busheling, railway scrap and clean rolling scrap.

Scrap rates never move as one block. On the same September morning a yard in Ludhiana is quoting ₹38,700/MT while a seller in Kanpur is being offered ₹29,900/MT for material that is not fundamentally different. That is an ₹8,800/MT gap on the same day, in the same country. It is not luck and it is not somebody cheating. Several forces are working at once, and if you do not know what they are, you will keep handing money away every time a truck leaves your gate.

1. Region decides your starting point

Where you are standing when you negotiate matters more than almost anything else you can control. Pune sits inside a cluster of induction furnaces, steel re-rollers and auto-sector demand. Buyer density is high, competition for sorted material is sharp, and quotes on clean lots reflect it. A seller supplying a furnace in Bhosari MIDC does not have to fight for a fair rate, because two or three other buyers will call by lunchtime. Even so, Pune’s mixed baseline has come off its May peak to ₹33.57/kg and now sits fractionally below Mumbai — a good reminder that a strong location will not save you in a soft month.

Move inland to Jalna, Latur or Dharashiv and everything changes. Fewer active furnaces means less footfall from serious buyers. Monsoon rain is easing but still interrupting collection, and Jalna mills are running part scrap, part sponge to keep production steady when arrivals thin out. Transport cost alone takes ₹2 to ₹4/kg before your material reaches a distant buyer. A factory-direct lot out of Jalna MIDC still earns ₹3 to ₹5/kg more than yard-collected scrap from the same district. The factory vs yard price difference is real, consistent, and worth understanding before you agree to anything.

2. Quality is the real price lever

Two loads of iron scrap crossing the same weighbridge can be ₹7 to ₹9/kg apart, and both sellers will be told they got the market rate. The difference is purity and grade, and that gap has widened this month rather than narrowed. Clean HMS 1 (thick section, 80% minimum, minimal rust) is fetching ₹34 to ₹37/kg as a national band, and considerably more on factory-direct lots in Pune, where it reaches ₹40 to ₹41/kg. MS sheet and rolling scrap in clean condition commands ₹35 to ₹38/kg because it melts predictably and mills can plan around it. Cast iron industrial grade is quieter at ₹28.50 to ₹32.50/kg. Mixed, unsorted or contaminated lots land at ₹27 to ₹30/kg, several rupees below where they sat in May. Bureau of Indian Standards material guidelines spell out exactly why mills turn away high-slag material before it ever gets weighed.

3. Furnace demand and the DRI substitution effect

Scrap price is not set on its own. Buyers want liquid steel, not scrap for its own sake. When DRI or sponge iron is cheap, induction furnace operators blend it in or replace scrap outright. DRI (CDRI) in Mandi Gobindgarh sits at ₹28,600/MT, Bellary PDRI has eased to about ₹26,100/MT and pellet in Hyderabad is near ₹25,900/MT. Both are cheap enough to give operators a real alternative, which limits how hard mills chase scrap. The bigger development is supply: newer Maharashtra DRI capacity has improved availability of higher-Fe sponge in the west, and buyers in Mumbai and Jalna are picking up roughly 82% Fe material at ₹1,500 to ₹2,000/t under imported scrap. When DRI prices climb again, as they did from December 2025 through May 2026, mills come back to scrap hard and rates recover faster. That is the cycle. How steel plants decide scrap rates internally is worth ten minutes before your next negotiation.

4. Import parity — the ceiling that lifted

Through June, imported material set a hard ceiling on Mumbai. That has gone for now. Containerised HMS into India is bid around $372–$375/MT CFR — roughly ₹35,750/MT at USD/INR 95.60 before customs clearing and inland freight, and clearing plus logistics typically adds another $40 to $45/t. Mumbai’s domestic ₹33,100/MT sits comfortably underneath all of that, the opposite of where we were ten weeks ago. Turkey’s CFR benchmark near $375/MT is doing most of the work, since it pulls every European, UK and US export cargo higher. The rupee is the counterweight: it printed a record low near ₹96.97, firmed as far as ₹94.50 a few days ago, and has since eased back further to about ₹95.60 — and a stronger rupee quietly cuts import costs. Keep an eye on both. If Turkey softens or the rupee strengthens further, the space Indian sellers have right now closes fast.

5. Monsoon timing and the sell/hold decision

Construction demand softens sharply from June through September across most of India. Steel output follows it down. Scrap buying cools. Rates fall. Then, as we saw this month, they can partially recover mid-season when supply gets disrupted, which is exactly what the GST document checks in Punjab did to arrivals. What is different about September 2026 is that the recovery has been selective rather than broad, and that pattern is worth tracking. The full window is still historically October and November, when post-monsoon construction restarts, mills rebuild inventory and DRI prices usually firm alongside. Sellers who held through the 2025 monsoon and sold in September or October captured ₹5,000 to ₹7,000/MT more than those who moved in June and July. The arithmetic looks similar this year, with one caveat: if you are holding prepared grades, part of that upside is already on the table today.

6. Moisture, mix and weighbridge accuracy

Three things will kill a quote faster than any market correction. Water sitting inside pipes or hollow sections. A mixed pile carrying non-ferrous bits, rubber or light gauge tin. And a disputed weighbridge reading at the buyer’s yard. Scrap stored outdoors through monsoon rain picks up 1 to 3% in gross weight and adds nothing to what the furnace actually gets out, so buyers either dock a flat percentage or drop the per-kg rate across the whole load. A weighbridge owned by the buyer is rarely a neutral instrument. Getting a certified government scale reading before the material reaches his gate gives you leverage no price chart can. Put a number on it: at ₹33/kg, a 150 kg discrepancy on a mid-sized truck is just under ₹5,000 gone in one transaction. Legal Metrology department portal — verify your local scale compliance. Weighbridge vs yard weighing mechanics are worth knowing cold before you negotiate.

7. What “kabadiwala rate” actually means

Local kabadiwalas price differently from wholesale dealers, and there is a structural reason for it. They collect small quantities from households, move them short distances, and carry heavy sorting overhead in their buying price from day one. That is why neighbourhood rates sit ₹3 to ₹8/kg below what a clean industrial lot fetches on the same afternoon. Nobody is being cheated; they are covering the cost and risk of collecting in small lots. But if you are holding industrial-grade or MIDC-sourced scrap, you should never be transacting at kabadiwala pricing. A buyer quoting you street-level rates on a properly graded load is telling you something about the buyer, not the load. Walk.

This is the section most scrap rate pages leave out, and it is the one that costs sellers real money. Every price on this page is exclusive of GST. Ferrous waste and scrap sits under HSN 7204 and attracts 18% GST, a rate that did not change under the 2025 rate rationalisation. What did change, from 10 October 2024, is who pays it and how.

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1. Separate before you sell. Sorted material is fetching ₹6,000 to ₹8,200/MT over mixed in the same market this month. On a 10-tonne load that is ₹60,000 to ₹82,000. Nothing else on this list pays as well per hour of effort.
2. Get it dry. Water in pipes and hollow sections adds 1–3% to gross weight and zero to melt yield. Buyers dock for it either way; tilting and draining a stack costs you a morning.
3. Strip the non-metal. Concrete, wood, rubber, plastic and tin blended into a ferrous pile reclassify the whole load, not just the offending portion. That is the single most expensive mistake in this trade.
4. Magnet-test anything shiny. If it does not stick to a magnet, it does not go in the iron pile. Ever. Stainless is worth roughly four times ordinary iron; copper is worth about forty times. See the copper, brass and aluminium rates above before you let any of it go by weight.
5. Weigh on a neutral, certified scale first. A buyer-owned weighbridge is not a neutral instrument. Establish your own number before the material leaves.
6. Take three quotes on the same day. Rates move daily. A quote from Tuesday is not a quote. Ask each buyer for a rate per named grade, not one blended number for the load.
7. Do the freight maths before you agree. A ₹1,000/MT better rate 250 km away is a worse deal than a local sale, because road freight and tolls run ₹900 to ₹1,300/MT on a 10-tonne load.
8. Agree the payment terms in writing. Same-day settlement with a GST invoice beats a higher rate on 45-day credit that you then chase. At 2% a month, waiting 45 days costs you about ₹1,040 per tonne — often more than the rate difference you were chasing. Price is only half a deal.

Every number on this page comes from one of four places, and we would rather tell you which than pretend to a precision nobody in this trade actually has.

• Published index assessments — BigMint’s melting scrap and end-cutting indices for Mandi Gobindgarh, Mumbai HMS 80:20 DAP and the Raipur billet index. These are DAP or ex-works assessments, clearly labelled where used.
• Verified dealer aggregates — ScrapRates.in city baselines for Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad, which reflect what dealers are quoting rather than what mills are paying. These usually run below index numbers on prepared grades and above them on mixed.
• Our own morning yard survey — direct calls into Jalna, Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar, Bhosari, Bhiwandi, Taloja and Patancheru before 10:00 AM IST. This is where the Jalna punching-scrap number comes from and it is confirmed with the mill, not estimated.
• International benchmarks — Kallanish, Steel Market Update, SteelOrbis and Platts for Turkey CFR, Nhava Sheva import bids and US domestic settlements, converted at the day’s USD/INR mid-market rate.
• Non-ferrous — the Delhi metal market daily board for copper, brass, aluminium, zinc, lead, gun metal, nickel and tin, cross-checked against MCX and LME-linked spot prices for copper and aluminium. Household pickup baselines come from verified dealer aggregates and are labelled separately, because they price different material through a different route.

All figures are indicative and exclude 18% GST. We show ranges because that is how the market actually quotes — a single number for a grade across a whole city would be a fiction. Rates move intraday. Confirm with a verified local buyer before you finalise anything, and treat this page as your starting point in a negotiation, not the final word.

Iron Scrap Rate FAQs