Scrap Copper Prices Today

As of July 18, 2026, COMEX copper trades at $6.22 per pound. Scrap yards pay a discount to that benchmark: clean bare bright wire typically brings about $4.97 to $5.60 per pound, with No.1 and No.2 copper lower. All yard figures here are estimates that vary by yard and region.

There is no single national scrap price. Every yard sets its own board each morning from the exchange benchmark, its freight and processing costs, and local competition, which is why copper scrap prices in one city can differ by 20 or 30 cents a pound from the next. The number that anchors them all is the exchange price, which you can follow on our live copper price per pound page. The closer your material is to pure, furnace-ready copper, the closer your quote gets to that benchmark.

Yards in the US grade copper against the recycling industry's ReMA (formerly ISRI) specifications. The grade names sound like produce because the specs use code words: Barley, Berry, Candy, Birch, and Cliff. What matters for your payout is simple: clean scrap copper, free of solder, paint, insulation, and attachments, earns the top grades, and every contaminant knocks you down one.

Grade boundaries are strict in the spec but applied with judgment at the scale. A batch of shiny stripped wire with a few painted pieces mixed in will usually be bought entirely as the lower grade, which is why sorting before you go is the highest-value work in scrapping.

The table below multiplies the live COMEX copper price by typical payout shares reported by recycling industry price trackers. These are estimates for clean, sorted material, not quotes: a high-volume industrial seller may beat the top of a range, while small mixed loads often price below the bottom, and every yard and region differs.

Why the discount at all? The yard carries sorting labor, processing, freight to a mill or refiner, hedging risk on price moves between purchase and resale, and its own margin. The spread widens when prices fall fast and tightens when mills compete for material. If the price of scrap copper matters to your timing, watch the exchange trend on the live copper price chart and sell into strength.

Copper wire prices depend entirely on what is under the insulation. Yards buy insulated wire whole, priced per pound of the whole wire based on estimated copper recovery: standard THHN building wire runs about 75 percent copper by weight, household Romex about 60 to 65 percent, while thin cords and holiday light strings can be low-recovery material worth only a fraction of those rates. Stripping changes the math: insulation off, clean wire 16 gauge or thicker becomes bare bright, the top grade on the board. Whether stripping pays depends on your time and tooling; weigh the whole-wire quote against the bare bright rate times your expected recovery before committing an afternoon to it. Burnt wire is a trap: burning off insulation is illegal in most jurisdictions and downgrades the copper to No.2 or below because of oxidation.

Five habits separate top payouts from average ones. Sort by grade before you arrive, because mixed loads price at the lowest grade in the bin. Clean what is cheap to clean: cutting soldered ends off pipe can move it from No.2 to No.1. Call two or three yards with exact descriptions and weights; spreads between local yards routinely exceed 10 percent. Time the market using the live exchange price rather than yesterday's news. And know your weight on your own scale first. If you are weighing copper coins rather than pipe and wire, see the copper penny melt value page; pennies follow the same copper math but with a federal melt ban attached.