Mandi Gobindgarh Scrap Rate Today — 16 September 2026

Two very different markets are running side by side in the same mandi today. Mixed and old iron is at ₹30,200/MT and under pressure. End-cutting is at ₹38,400/MT and holding firm. Sorting is the whole game right now, and the rest of this page shows you exactly where the money is — grade by grade, city by city, and day of the week by day of the week.

Rates don’t move for no reason. When order books thin out and Punjab’s re-rollers defer their weekly melt targets, every yard within 30 km of the mandi feels the pull almost immediately. That’s the nature of this market. Gobindgarh isn’t like Pune or Mumbai where you have multiple steel clusters absorbing demand from different directions. Here, the majority of scrap feeding the local furnaces comes from a tight corridor — Fatehgarh Sahib, Khanna, Sirhind, and parts of Ludhiana district. When that corridor slows, rates drop faster than they recover.

Worth knowing how much weight this one town carries. Over 300 rolling mills and induction furnaces sit inside the cluster, along with roughly 200 scrap-cutting units and 40-odd foundries. That makes Gobindgarh one of India’s top three secondary steel markets, and the price set here effectively becomes the benchmark for all of Punjab and chunks of Haryana. A move in the mandi ripples out to smaller yards inside a 200 km radius within a day or two. If you’re selling anywhere in that band, this is the number you should be benchmarking against, not your local dealer’s word.

Steel scrap rates in Gobindgarh had been under mild downward pressure on the standard grades through much of the monsoon, as sluggish steel demand and stepped-up GST document checks at the mandi entry points slowed truck arrivals. That backdrop is now shifting. Reuters-syndicated reporting carried by Business Recorder on 8 September described Indian steel prices set to rise further as post-monsoon infrastructure and automotive demand picks up, alongside costlier coking coal pushing up what mills pay for virgin steel — which makes scrap comparatively more attractive. Kallanish has separately named firming freight costs as a driver of the recent rise, and one market tracker, Price Watch, reported sponge iron nationally up around 12% month-on-month and scrap itself rising close to ₹1,100 per tonne week-on-week. None of that means Gobindgarh’s mixed-grade discount disappears overnight, but the direction of travel has changed from “under pressure” to “firming on several fronts at once.”

Here’s the catch — the mills that buy at the higher end aren’t buying more volume. They’re buying better quality. If you’re sitting on a mixed yard lot with household scrap blended into your industrial grade, you’re not getting ₹31. You’re getting ₹28, maybe ₹29 if your relationship with the buyer is solid. Meanwhile the prepared grades have quietly gone the other way, and that split is the single most important thing happening in this market right now.

The price spread between grades in Gobindgarh is wider than most sellers expect. Right now it’s the widest it has been all year.

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Now the numbers most rate pages leave out entirely. Scrap doesn’t price itself. It prices off what the furnace can sell, and off what the cheaper alternative costs. These are the linked benchmarks worth checking before you accept any quote.

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Mandi Gobindgarh Iron Scrap Price Per Kg — 16 September 2026

• Standard ferrous scrap / old iron (loha): ₹27.50–30.50/kg — household items, mixed yard lots, general iron; the verified-dealer baseline today is ₹30.20/kg
• HMS 1 (Heavy Melting Scrap): ₹31–36/kg — thick-section steel, plates above 6mm, structural angles, clean lot required; genuinely clean HMS 1 is fetching ₹35–36/kg in the mandi
• HMS 2: ₹28–32/kg — thinner sections, mixed melting grade, more moisture risk, and the grade most likely to get reclassified at the gate
• Melting scrap (LMS): ₹33.90–35.30/kg — prepared melting grade, sized for direct charge
• MS iron sheet scrap: ₹35–39/kg — clean, unpainted, pressed or baled; premium grade for induction furnace operators
• CRC scrap: ₹36.50–38.30/kg — cold rolled cuttings, consistent chemistry, one of the fastest-moving grades in the mandi
• End cutting scrap: ₹36.50–38.40/kg — the grade tracked as Gobindgarh’s benchmark, and the one that has held firmest all month
• Rail cutting / heavy scrap: ₹39.50–40.50/kg — highest-paid ferrous grade here, limited availability
• Industrial steel scrap mix: ₹34–40/kg — factory-direct, documented source, high purity
• Cast iron (industrial grade): ₹29–31/kg — pump bodies, machine bases, engine blocks from factory lots
• Cast iron (foundry / low-grade): ₹22.50–27.50/kg — mixed casting scrap, higher impurity, lower melt efficiency

One thing to keep straight before you get on the phone: the mandi rate and your pickup quote are not the same number. The figures above are wholesale, ex-yard, before 18% GST and freight. An individual seller collecting a small lot will typically be offered ₹5–7/kg under the wholesale baseline, because the dealer is absorbing sorting, aggregation and transport on your behalf. That’s not a scam, it’s the cost of small volume. It does mean that if you can build to a full tonne, you should be dealing with a furnace or a serious trader directly rather than the first kabadiwala who answers.

If you want to understand why HMS 1 and HMS 2 carry different values even when the quoted range looks identical, the HMS 1 vs HMS 2 scrap specs for Indian mills breakdown explains exactly what furnace operators check when they grade your load.

Ferrous is over 85% of the volume traded here, which is exactly why non-ferrous is where sellers get quietly robbed. A copper coil or an aluminium window frame pulled out of the same demolition job is worth many multiples of iron per kilo, and a buyer who sweeps it into a mixed ferrous weight has just made a very good afternoon at your expense.

There’s a second trap here that almost nobody explains properly. Non-ferrous scrap trades at two completely different price levels in Gobindgarh, and both are real. The dealer or pickup level is what a local yard pays a household or small seller. The trade level is what a bulk, GST-invoiced consignment fetches when it goes to a refiner or secondary smelter. The gap between them is enormous. Know which one you’re being quoted.

Tier 1 — Dealer / pickup level (small and household lots)

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Tier 2 — Trade / mill-supply level (bulk, 1 tonne+, GST invoiced)

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Ludhiana is the strongest ferrous market in the country right now at about ₹38,700/MT on prepared grades, propped up by pig iron near ₹40,700/MT and an engineering base that doesn’t shut down for the monsoon. There is also a structural reason Ludhiana’s demand has stayed this firm: Tata Steel commissioned its second-largest scrap-based steel plant in Ludhiana earlier this year, adding meaningful new furnace capacity to a corridor that already had the tightest buyer competition in North India. That is one more mill bidding for the same scrap pool, and it is not going away when the season turns. Delhi NCR trades slightly higher on industrial MS scrap because transport to Haryana’s re-rollers is shorter and demand is split across more buyers. Gobindgarh’s rates are competitive on premium grades specifically because of the concentration of induction furnaces in one cluster. When they’re all buying at the same time, a good lot moves fast and you don’t need to discount.

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That table will surprise people, so it’s worth explaining properly. Gobindgarh looks cheap on mixed iron precisely because it’s a professional melting market, not a collection market. Buyers here grade hard and pay for exactly what they can charge into a furnace, so household-quality material gets no sympathy. Flip to the prepared grades and the picture inverts completely: end-cutting at ₹38.40/kg and rail cutting near ₹40/kg are levels a small Punjab town simply cannot match, because those towns have no furnace to sell to. Bring sorted material to Gobindgarh and you win. Bring a mixed pile and you’d genuinely have done better in Kapurthala.

But that’s only half the story. When multiple furnaces are on maintenance shutdown simultaneously — which happens in late May before the summer heat peaks and again in October — the yard rate drops sharply because there’s no competition between buyers. Gobindgarh’s demand isn’t diversified. It’s concentrated, and that concentration swings both ways.

Nobody tells you this part: the Friday effect is real here, just like it is in Maharashtra’s MIDC markets. Furnace operators don’t want trucks queuing up over the weekend. By Friday afternoon, buyers get selective. If you’re holding a borderline lot — say, your HMS 2 has some moisture from monsoon rain or mixed thin sections — Friday is the worst time to push for ₹31. You’ll get docked, or you’ll wait until Monday. Tuesday to Thursday morning is when intake calendars are still being filled and a buyer actually has a reason to say yes.

Where the Global Market Fits In

Gobindgarh feels like a purely local market and it mostly is, but the ceiling on your rate gets set several thousand kilometres away. Turkey’s HMS 80:20 CFR benchmark, the reference price for seaborne ferrous scrap worldwide, has held firm in the $371 to $375/MT band for over a month, with traders describing a fall from here as unlikely. Containerised import bids into India sit around the same range — roughly ₹35,750/MT at today’s USD/INR of 95.60, before customs clearing and inland freight.

Add clearing, port charges and 1,400 km of road haulage from Nhava Sheva to Mandi and imported material lands nowhere near competitive against domestic scrap right now. That’s actually good news for you. Through much of this year, imports have capped what northern mills would pay when the rupee weakened; that cap has lifted for now. The rupee is the variable to watch: it printed an all-time low near ₹96.97 to the dollar, firmed as far as ₹94.50 a few weeks ago, and has since eased back further to about ₹95.60 — still well off the record, but the direction matters, since a stronger rupee quietly makes imports cheaper again.

A factory-direct load from a Punjab industrial unit — turbine components, press shop offcuts, clean MS punch scrap — will fetch ₹3–6/kg more than a comparable-looking yard-collected lot. This isn’t negotiable. Gobindgarh buyers know the difference on the weighbridge and in the melt. Factory scrap has documentation, a consistent composition, and zero household contamination. Yard scrap doesn’t, and that gap directly reflects the risk a furnace operator takes on sorting and melt inefficiency.

That’s where most sellers lose money. They mix a factory-origin lot with yard-collected scrap thinking the buyer won’t notice. A mill operator in Gobindgarh who processes 200–300 tonnes a week has seen every blending trick in the book. One seller tried to blend 4 tonnes of thin cast iron into an industrial MS lot and got docked ₹2.5/kg on the entire 11-tonne load. That’s ₹27,500 gone on a deal he thought was closed, and he lost the buyer’s trust on top of it. For more context on how this grading decision affects your net realisation, read the detailed breakdown on factory vs yard scrap price difference.

When a loaded truck arrives at a Gobindgarh furnace yard, four things happen before a rate is confirmed.

• Visual purity check: are there visibly non-ferrous items, rubber, plastic, or wood mixed in? Even one flagged item shifts the negotiation.
• Moisture assessment: rain-wetted scrap, especially HMS 2, triggers moisture docking of ₹1–2/kg depending on the buyer’s current stock position — a bigger risk right now with the monsoon in full swing. Outdoor-stored material can carry 1–3% extra gross weight that contributes nothing to melt yield.
• Weighbridge reconciliation: the gap between your loaded truck weight and the yard’s own weighbridge reading is a pressure point. Disputes over 50–80 kg on a 10-tonne load aren’t uncommon, and the buyer almost always wins that argument unless you have your own certified slip. Put a number on it: at ₹30.20/kg, an 80 kg discrepancy is ₹2,416 gone in silence.
• Documentation: with GST checks tightened at the mandi entry points, a clean e-way bill and tax invoice is now part of the grading conversation, not an afterthought. Registered buyers can claim the 18% input credit and will pay more for material that arrives with proper paperwork than for identical steel arriving without it.

Scrap that arrives pre-sorted — segregated by grade, baled where possible, dry, and accompanied by a basic delivery note — consistently gets better treatment at the gate. That’s not generosity from the buyer. It’s risk pricing. You can check the Bureau of Indian Standards classification framework to understand exactly how mills define and verify heavy melting scrap grades.

First-timers get taken here purely for not knowing the local mechanics. A few things that make a genuine difference to your realisation:

• The one-tonne line. Bulk sellers with a tonne or more negotiate directly with furnace owners. Anything smaller goes through an aggregator, and the aggregator’s margin comes out of your rate. Build to a full load before you travel.
• Where to go. The furnace owners are along GT Road and in Industrial Area Phase I and II. Loha Bazar and the Motia Khan area around Nand Lal Market are where the traders and brokers sit. Selling to a trader is faster; selling to a furnace pays better.
• Payment cycles run 24–48 hours for regular suppliers. If someone wants 15 or 30 days on a first deal, price that delay in or walk.
• Use the town’s own weighbridges. Gobindgarh has dedicated public weighbridges. Getting your certified slip before you reach a buyer’s gate removes the single most common argument in this market.
• Call three, not one. Quotes on identical material routinely differ ₹1–2/kg across the mandi on the same morning. That’s ₹10,000–₹20,000 on a 10-tonne load for the price of two phone calls.

The Two Market Clocks Nobody Explains

Think about it this way: Gobindgarh’s scrap market runs on two clocks. The first is the billet demand clock, driven by construction cycles and export orders for TMT bars. The second is the furnace maintenance clock, which follows heat and festival breaks. The two clocks don’t always sync. When billet demand is strong but furnaces are in maintenance rotation, you get the unusual situation of rates staying firm even with lower throughput.

Pre-Diwali is consistently the worst window to push prices in Punjab. Furnaces cut buying 10–12 days before the festival as workers go on leave and transport availability drops. Scrap piles up in yards, sellers get desperate to clear inventory, and rates drop by ₹2–4/kg in the two weeks around the festival — typically the last week of October through mid-November. Sellers who hold until post-Diwali restocking almost always recover that gap and then some.

Here’s a detail that catches out traders who work both regions: this Punjab pattern runs opposite to Maharashtra’s. In clusters like Jalna, mills rush to clear finished goods before the holiday, which briefly lifts scrap intake. In Gobindgarh, the labour break dominates and buying simply stops. Same festival, opposite effect on your rate. You can see how broader Punjab and Maharashtra demand patterns connect in the guide on best places to sell scrap iron in Maharashtra, which maps demand clusters by region.

Monsoon Supply Squeeze

Right now, in the middle of the monsoon, arrivals into Gobindgarh have thinned out just as mills predicted back in April and May. Mud makes scrap artificially heavy, local roads flood or get blocked, and loaders can’t work safely in wet conditions, so daily tonnage reaching the mandi is running below the pre-monsoon average. Layer the GST document checks on top of that and the corridor from Fatehgarh Sahib, Khanna and Sirhind is delivering noticeably less than it should be. Because dry, well-sorted stock is scarce right now, buyers are willing to pay a premium for lots that avoid the moisture docking most yards are currently facing.

Smart yard owners who stockpiled clean, dry material before the rains set in are the ones moving lots at the top of the range this month. And this is where it gets interesting: the sellers who consistently get top-of-range rates in Gobindgarh aren’t selling better scrap than everyone else. They’re selling at better times, with better documentation, and arriving Tuesday to Thursday rather than Friday afternoon. Those three habits alone are worth ₹1.5–2/kg above the walk-in rate.

Mandi Gobindgarh Scrap Rate FAQs

If you want to understand the most common errors that cost sellers money during this window, the scrap seller mistakes to avoid page covers grading and timing failures in detail. For transport cost planning before committing to a long-distance buyer in Punjab, the guide on scrap steel transportation in India is worth reading before the truck rolls.

All rate figures cited here are indicative and subject to daily market movement as of September 2026. Ferrous benchmarks are cross-checked against the main Iron Scrap Rate hub; non-ferrous and smaller-town figures are dealer-surveyed indications. Confirm directly with your Gobindgarh buyer or a verified dealer like SteelBaba before loading.