Brass Price

If you came here looking for the brass price in a hurry, the live ticker and 30-day chart at the top of this page have the number — derived from copper futures with a brass-to-copper ratio applied, then scrap-discounted to roughly what a US yard would pay for yellow brass. Everything below is for when you have a few more minutes and want to know why the number is what it is, and what your bucket of fittings, faucets, or shell casings is actually worth before you load the truck.

This page is written for scrap sellers, not commodity traders. There's no futures contract for brass — you can't short it, you can't hedge it, and that's actually the first interesting thing about it. You're here because the box of plumbing tear-outs, the bin of decorative hardware, or the bucket of spent shells is worth real money, and you want to walk into a yard knowing what fair looks like.

Today's brass price at a glance

Brass isn't a directly-traded commodity. There is no "brass futures contract" the way there is for copper, aluminum, or zinc. Instead, brass is an alloy — roughly 62–67% copper and 33–38% zinc by mass for the most common yellow-brass formulation, with a smaller percentage of trace metals like lead or tin in plumbing-grade alloys.

The ticker above derives a brass price from live copper futures using a typical Cu/Zn mass-blend ratio of roughly 0.62. We're transparent about this because most pages quoting a "brass price" online either pull from a regional yard's posted board or quote a single industrial buyer. Both are valid, but neither tells you the underlying math. If copper reads $4.20/lb on the COMEX tape, the derived brass spot lands near $2.60/lb — and your local yard will pay somewhere in the $1.90–$2.70/lb range for clean yellow brass after their grade and contamination discounts.

The gap between that derived spot and what a yard pays you is the entire reason this page exists. For the broader scrap metal pricing reference, our cross-metal page tracks the same patterns across copper, aluminum, and steel.

Spot vs. yard payout — the brass discount stack

Because brass tracks copper, the macro forces moving brass prices are almost entirely the macro forces moving copper. When COMEX copper rips 5% in a week, your yard's posted brass board moves a couple of days later — not perfectly, not as fast, but in the same direction. The yard then layers its own discounts on top.

Yard payout = (copper spot × brass alloy ratio) − (yard margin) − (grade discount) − (contamination deduction).

A worked example helps:

Numbers above are typical industry ranges — your local market will run tighter or looser. The big lesson: yellow brass typically pays 62–80% of copper spot, and red brass closer to 75–85%, depending on cleanliness and the yard's appetite for the grade that day. For deeper grade-by-grade context, our copper and wire scrap-grading guide covers the closely-related copper ladder that brass derives from.

Brass grade ladder — yellow, red, plumbing, shells, dirty

Almost every US yard quotes the same four-or-five tiers. The difference between adjacent tiers is real money, and unlike copper, a magnet won't help you sort — neither yellow nor red brass is magnetic. Sorting is by weight, color, and origin.

A few things worth calling out that the typical yard board glosses over:

• The 62% factor is not arbitrary. A 67/33 yellow-brass alloy is, by mass, 67% copper and 33% zinc. Copper trades around 4–5× the price of zinc on the LME, so the value-weighted blend lands close to (0.67 × 1.00 + 0.33 × 0.20) ≈ 0.74 of copper. Yards then haircut another 10–15 points for processing, which lands real-world yellow-brass payouts near 62% of copper spot. Red brass with 85% copper content sits closer to 80% of copper, before haircuts.
• Chrome plating drops a tier. Chrome-plated brass faucets need to be stripped before reuse, and many yards bump them down to plumbing-brass tier on inspection. If you can pop the chrome cap off with a hammer, you'll get yellow-brass pricing instead.
• Dezincification is a real concern at the yard. Old plumbing fittings exposed to corrosive water can lose their zinc content, leaving a porous copper-rich shell. Yards know about this and will sometimes downgrade visibly-pitted plumbing brass to dirty-brass tier. Not always — it depends on the grader and whether they care that day.
• Brass shells are regulated. Many yards will refuse spent shells without verification that primers are removed, and some require photo ID or a federal firearms-license check for higher volumes. Call ahead. The Copper Development Association alloy reference is the institutional reference if you want the alloy compositions and applications written up properly.

What moves brass prices

The honest answer: copper moves brass prices, and almost nothing else does meaningfully on a week-to-week basis. Brass isn't traded as a standalone commodity, so there's no "brass demand" reading on a Bloomberg terminal — only the underlying inputs. Four drivers do most of the work:

• Copper is roughly two-thirds of the alloy by mass and four-fifths by value. When copper rips on China stimulus or Chilean supply disruptions, brass follows within a few days. Watch the LME copper page and the COMEX continuous front-month — that's your leading indicator.
• Zinc is the secondary input. Zinc prices are far more volatile than copper but matter less to the brass price because zinc is the smaller share of the alloy and trades at roughly one-fifth of copper per pound. The LME zinc page tracks the global benchmark; in a normal year, zinc moves the brass price by 1–3 percentage points and gets ignored by sellers entirely. In a year where zinc has its own supply crisis (rare), it matters more.
• Plumbing and construction demand sets the structural floor. A construction slowdown reduces demand for new brass valves and fittings, and the secondary scrap market reflects that within a quarter. A construction boom does the opposite. This is slower than the copper-price linkage but more enduring.
• No financialization buffer. Because brass isn't traded on a futures exchange, there's no speculative-positioning effect cushioning or amplifying scrap moves. What you see on the yard board is closer to fundamental supply and demand than what you see for copper, where ETF flows and futures positioning routinely add or subtract a few percent. For broader context on how scrap-metal prices propagate through the supply chain, our trade-and-pricing market context walks through the macro structure.

How to read a yard's brass price sheet

Most US scrap yards post brass prices below copper on the same chalkboard or LCD inside the office, updated daily or twice daily. A typical board reads:

Yellow Brass $2.10 / lb    Red Brass $2.85 / lb    Plumbing Brass $1.65 / lb    Brass Shells $1.95 / lb

Three things first-time brass sellers miss when they read these boards:

1. Yellow brass is the default tier. If you bring in a mixed bucket and don't sort, the entire load gets graded at yellow brass even if half of it was red brass. That's a 20–30% payout haircut on the red-brass portion. A five-minute pre-sort by color (red has a distinct pinkish tint vs. yellow's gold) is some of the highest-paying time in scrapping. The scrap preparation guide covers the breakeven on sorting time.
2. Plumbing brass is the catch-all downgrade. If your yellow brass has any solder lines, packing washers, chrome plating, or rubber seats still attached, the grader has discretion to call it plumbing brass. That's a 25–35% drop. If you have a hacksaw or a torch and twenty minutes, separating the brass body from the chrome cap or solder joint usually pays. The logistics-and-removal page covers when calling for pickup makes more sense than driving in.
3. The board posts a ceiling, not a floor. Posted prices assume clean, sorted, identifiable material. The grader's call on inspection is what you actually get paid. Don't argue — sort cleanly upfront and the grader will quote at or near the board.

For a regional sanity check on what your local yards are quoting, start with our scrap-yards directory and call two or three before driving. For a broader comparable view, our scrap-metal-prices-near-you reference tracks regional patterns across grades.

Selling brass scrap — prep, weigh-in, and getting paid right

A short checklist that captures what experienced scrappers do without thinking when they have a brass-heavy load:

• Pre-sort red vs. yellow before you drive. Red brass has a distinctly pinker, copper-leaning tint and a noticeably heavier feel for the same volume (the higher copper content adds density). Yellow is bright golden. Once you train your eye, sorting is fast. If you can't tell, set those pieces aside in a "ask the grader" pile rather than mixing them in.
• Strip chrome and solder when the math works. A chrome-plated faucet body weighs 1–3 lb. Separating the chrome (downgrades to scrap-iron tier) from the brass body can reclassify the brass portion from plumbing-brass at 55% to yellow-brass at 70% of copper spot. On a 10-lb load of fixtures, that's a real $20–$40 swing. The line is whether your time is worth the recovery.
• Remove primers from spent shells. Many yards require this. Live primers are a safety hazard at the shred line. A primer-removal tool from any reloading supplier handles this in seconds per case.
• Bring photo ID. Most US states require yards to record the seller's ID for nonferrous transactions over a low threshold ($25–$50 in many states). Brass is nonferrous. ID rules apply.
• Watch the scale. Reputable yards welcome verification. For a 30-lb bucket of mixed brass, a half-pound miscalibration is real money. Ask which scale is being used.
• Check whether the yard separates shells. Some major buyers maintain a dedicated shell-buying counter with separate paperwork; others lump shells into yellow brass. The shell counter often pays better. Our OmniSource buyer profile is a representative profile of one of the larger US-based industrial chains; the same patterns apply at most major buyers and many independents.

For the rest of the seller-side pricing literacy — taxes, payment thresholds, and what reputable yards expect from a first-time seller — our scrap pricing literacy guide is the deeper read. If you're moving enough volume that you're considering specifically what copper-leaf grades pay, our copper scrap price detail and copper per pound leaves cover the cousin metal that drives brass economics.

Per-unit conversions — pound, ounce, gram, kilo, ton

US scrap yards quote brass per pound. International readers and anyone coming from a precious-metals background will want the conversions:

Substitute the live ticker number above for the example $2.60 to get current values. Note that brass is priced per avoirdupois pound, not troy ounce — troy units are the precious-metals world. If you came here from gold pricing or silver pricing, the unit convention is different.

Frequently asked questions

Related brass and metal pricing pages

For the cousin metal that drives most of brass economics, our copper price pillar is the deeper read on the underlying market — when copper moves, brass moves with it. If you're shopping multiple metals, the other pricing pillars cover aluminum prices, stainless-steel prices, and the precious metals via live gold pricing and silver pricing. For local-market sanity-checking, scrap metal prices near you helps you see what your regional yards are quoting today, and the scrap-yards-near-me directory is the fastest way to find buyers for a quick three-quote sweep.

Live exchange data on the page above is sourced from Metals.dev (or Yahoo Finance as a fallback), with brass derived from the COMEX HG=F continuous copper contract using a 0.62 alloy ratio. For the official global reference, the LME copper page and LME zinc page publish the daily inputs that feed every brass price quoted on this site or any other.