Costs are at a record, and the rules are about to change again. The producer price index for construction inputs hit 354.9 in March, an all-time high and up 6% from a year earlier, per AGC’s tracking. Now a July 24 tariff reset threatens to reshuffle the deck on steel, copper and cement all over again.
The metals are where it bites hardest. COMEX copper is trading near $5.76 a pound, up 32% year over year. Steel pipe and tube are up 12.5%. Fabricated rebar and structural metal jumped 16.6% through February, and cement has climbed 7.7%. None of that is abstract on a bid sheet.
The July 24 cliff
Here’s the wrinkle. Steel, aluminum and copper items carry a 50% tariff, their derivatives 25%, and a 10% global baseline has sat on top through the summer. That baseline, the Section 122 measure, expires July 24 and gets replaced by country-specific Section 301 duties. Depending on where your steel and cement originate, landed costs could rise or fall, and the map gets more complicated overnight.
What buyers can do
Contractors are hedging the only ways they can: locking prices where suppliers will hold them, pre-buying long-lead metal, and writing escalation and tariff-adjustment language into contracts. The consolidation wave doesn’t help either, as our coverage of Martin Marietta’s $13.5B lime deal shows the majors betting on pricing power holding up. A steel-heavy job like Texas Instruments’ Lehi fab lives or dies on getting ahead of exactly this.
Reference: AGC Tariff Resource Center.