The metal that holds buildings up just got a lot more expensive, and contractors are already walking away from work because of it. A survey from the Associated General Contractors and NCCER found that 43% of general contractors have canceled, postponed, or scaled back at least one project in the past six months, and the reason they keep citing is the cost of materials.
What the metal tariffs actually cost
Steel and aluminum now carry a 50% tariff. Copper sits at the same rate. Derivative products made mostly of those metals get hit at 25%, and grid equipment built with them carries 15%. Softwood lumber is lighter at 10%, though the stacked rate on Canadian imports lands closer to 36%.
The price data tracks the policy. Steel bars, plates, and structural shapes climbed 12.1% on the producer price index. Steel pipe and tube rose 9.4%. Aluminum mill shapes jumped 30.5% as domestic production failed to cover what tariffed imports used to supply, and copper and brass mill shapes were up 21.3% year over year in April.
Three percent doesn’t sound like much until you price a tower
Run the math across a whole job and the tariffs add roughly 6% to material costs against a 2024 baseline, and about 3% to total project cost. That’s the average. On a steel-frame high-rise or a metal-heavy industrial build the hit runs higher, and it shows up right when owners are deciding whether to proceed. Input prices for nonresidential work ran at a 12.6% annualized pace over the first two months of the year, the fastest stretch since the supply-chain mess of early 2022.
That’s the mechanism behind the cancellations. A project pencils at one number during design and a different number at buyout, and the gap is wide enough that some owners pause rather than eat it.
What contractors are doing about it
The practical responses are familiar to anyone who priced work in 2021. Lock in material orders earlier. Write escalation clauses into contracts so the risk doesn’t sit entirely on the builder. Substitute where the spec allows, though structural steel and copper wiring don’t have easy swaps. Some firms are pulling buyout forward by months to beat the next tariff adjustment, a tactic the Associated General Contractors has been walking members through.
None of that fixes the underlying problem, which is that the tariffs are policy and policy can change again. For now the safest assumption is that metal stays expensive. The contractors cutting projects today are betting it gets worse before it gets better.