Material Prices for Commercial Contractors in May 2026

The materials market in May 2026 is not forgiving. Steel has reversed two quarters of decline and is trending upward again. Copper just shattered an all-time price record. Lumber has posted nine consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth. And concrete, while not spiking, is sitting at a persistently elevated level with no near-term relief in sight. If those four numbers are not already part of every project conversation your firm is having, they should be.

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Transcript

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If you bid a project in January and you are still using those same material numbers to execute it today, you are already losing money, and you may not even know it yet. Construction input prices have surged at an annualized rate of 12.6% just to start 2026. Steel is climbing again. Copper just set an all-time record. Lumber has posted nine straight quarters of year-over-year growth, and concrete costs are grinding higher with every single pour. This episode is about what is actually happening to commodity prices in May 2026, what is driving it, and more importantly, what the sharpest contractors in the country are doing about it right now. This is the Commercial Contractor Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Wilcox, Chief Marketing Officer with Commercial Contractor Pros. Today, we are going deep into the numbers that are reshaping every estimate, every contract, and every conversation you are having with an owner. Let us start with the big picture, because before we get into individual materials, you need to understand the macro environment these prices are living in. The Associated General Contractors of America has been sounding the alarm on construction input cost inflation for months now. And McCrina Wilkins, a data specialist with the organization, put it plainly when she noted that construction input costs are rising significantly faster than the prices contractors are actually able to charge on bids. That gap between what it costs to build and what the market will bear in contract pricing is the central tension every contractor is navigating right now. It is not just inflation, it is a structural mismatch. And when you layer tariffs, energy volatility, and geopolitical disruption on top of already elevated materials costs, that mismatch gets wider and more dangerous with every passing quarter. So let us break it down material by material, starting with the one that touches almost every project you are running. Steel. As of today, in May 2026, hot rolled coil steel is sitting at $2,519.61 per ton. And that is up 7.5% just from the first quarter of this year. If you have been watching steel since the beginning of 2026, you already know it had been moving sideways for a while, which gave a lot of people a false sense of stability. That comfort window is closing. The energy steel cost connection is a major reason why. Steel production is an energy-intensive process, and with oil approaching $100 per barrel and natural gas spiking sharply in February, we are talking about a 10.9% month-over-month increase. The embedded energy cost inside every ton of structural steel is pushing fabrication costs higher from the inside out. That is a cost the market cannot absorb without passing it through to you. Now here's where tariffs enter the picture. Under Section 232, the United States is currently imposing a 50% tariff on items made entirely of steel. 50%. That is not a rounding error or a policy footnote. That is a structural price floor that is rewriting what domestic steel costs across the board. Barry Zackelman, who runs one of the largest steel tube manufacturers in North America, has been outspoken about the fact that when you look at total building impact, steel tariffs are adding real material dollars to every structural bay, every frame, every column line on a commercial project. The number most analysts are watching right now is the third quarter 2026 forecast trajectory because there is a genuine concern that as fabrication demand ramps up for projects that were permitted and contracted earlier this year, the combination of tariff-driven cost floors and energy-driven production costs could push structural steel meaningfully higher before the year is out. If you have steel-heavy projects coming out of the ground in the second half of this year, this is the data point that should be keeping you up at night. Now let us talk about copper, because what is happening in the copper market right now is extraordinary by any historical standard. On May 13th of this year, copper hit $6.61 per pound on the ComX, an all-time record. And it is not an anomaly or a flash spike driven by one bad day of news. Year over year, copper is up 43.6%. 43.6% in one year. Think about what that means for a major commercial project with significant electrical scope. Think about it this way: a project that was bid 12 months ago with copper at roughly $4.60 per pound is now being built with copper at $6.61 per pound. That is not a rounding error. That is a change order waiting to happen if your contract does not have the right escalation language. The structural demand drivers behind this copper surge are not going away. Data center construction is running at a historic pace, and every data center consumes copper at a rate that dwarfs a conventional commercial building.

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Power grid modernization and infrastructure investment are pulling copper from the same market. Renewable energy build-out, solar, wind, battery storage, all of it is copper intensive. And then there is China, whose industrial demand for copper has remained stubbornly strong despite the economic headwinds the country has been managing. All of these forces are competing for copper that is not being produced fast enough to meet combined global demand. That structural shortfall is why analysts are not calling this a temporary spike. It is a new pricing regime. And there is a risk that most people are not talking about. The Middle East conflict that escalated on February 28th has created a supply disruption in the sulfuric acid market, which is a critical input for copper refining. When you reduce the availability of sulfuric acid, you constrain how much refined copper can actually be produced, even when the raw ore exists. That kind of upstream supply chain vulnerability is the sort of thing that does not show up in price charts until it already has. Watch that situation closely. What makes copper exposure particularly acute for commercial contractors is that it goes well beyond wire and conduit. Copper is embedded in your switch gear. It is in your transformers. It is in your busway. It is in your motor control centers. The producer price index data for electrical components and copper containing assemblies is showing nearly a 25% increase over the past year. So even if you think you have a handle on your wire pricing, you may be underestimating your total copper exposure when you account for every copper-bearing component across the full electrical scope. And with bid windows in today's market running roughly 60 days from estimate to award to notice to proceed, the price you use to build your copper numbers on day one may be completely disconnected from what you are paying by the time you cut purchase orders. That 60-day window is not a theoretical risk. It is an active threat to project margins. Let us move to lumber, which has a different character than steel and copper, but is telling a story that deserves just as much attention. Lumber has now posted nine consecutive quarters of year-over-year price growth. Nine straight quarters. As of the second quarter of 2026, random length lumber composite pricing is sitting at $916.62 per thousand board feet. And the Madison's Lumber Index, one of the most widely watched benchmarks in the industry, was at $524 per thousand board feet as of May 1st. When you step back and look at the cumulative picture, lumber has risen 44.5% since the pandemic. That is not a spike that corrected. That is a permanently elevated baseline that has just kept grinding higher. The structural reasons are real and persistent. Canadian mill closures have reduced North American softwood supply at a time when residential and commercial construction demand has remained stubborn. And the tariff environment is adding pressure on top of that. Softwood lumber from Canada is currently subject to a 10% tariff, and certain processed lumber derivatives, things like engineered wood products and panels, are subject to tariffs as high as 25%. So the supply constraint is being amplified by a trade policy environment that makes imported supply more expensive while domestic capacity has not expanded nearly fast enough to fill the gap. The bottom line on lumber right now is that there is no visible catalyst for a meaningful correction. The industry fundamentals point to continued elevation through the rest of 2026 and likely into 2027. Now let us talk about concrete, because the concrete story is different in texture from the other materials, but in some ways it is the most insidious of all. Concrete is not having a spike moment, it is having a persistent grind moment. And the difference matters because spikes attract attention and force conversations. Grinds get absorbed quietly into your unit costs until one day the math just stops working. Standard Ready Mix concrete is currently running between $135 and $175 per cubic yard nationally, depending on your market and mixed design. Specialty mixes, high strength, fiber reinforced, self-consolidating, are running past $220 per cubic yard in many markets. And here's the part that explains why concrete costs are not going to moderate anytime soon. Diesel fuel is up 73.8% year over year, and diesel is not a peripheral input for concrete. It is central. It powers the batch plants, it drives the mixer trucks, it runs every pump. Every pore has diesel embedded in it at multiple points, and with oil near $100 per barrel, that embedded cost is not going anywhere. The asphalt market, which is a useful proxy for petroleum-intensive building materials more broadly, saw a 41% price increase in April alone. That is the world your ready mix supplier. Thanks for listening to the Commercial Contractor Podcast. This is Adam Wilcox, Chief Marketing Officer at Commercial Contractor Pros. For more podcasts about the commercial construction business, please visit Commercial Contractor.net. If you need help with marketing your commercial construction company, whether you need website design, SEO, construction photography, lead generation, or you would like to sponsor these great podcasts, please visit Commercial Contractor.net or call six one nine three one four four three three three for a free strategy session to see how we can take your business to the next level.