Conduit Price Increase: What Drives EMT, Rigid, and PVC

A conduit price increase almost never has one cause, because conduit is not one product. EMT and galvanized rigid steel move with steel mill pricing. Aluminum rigid moves with aluminum, which has been running far hotter than steel. PVC conduit moves with plastics resin, which has been the calmest of the three. So when your supply house raises all three in the same month by the same percentage, that is worth a question, and when they move apart, that is normal and you can prove it.

Proving it means knowing what actually sets each number, which published index tracks each one, and how to separate a real market move from drift on your own account.

If you have not read the general version of this problem, start with what material price creep actually is. This post is the conduit-specific version.

Three products, three different raw materials

Conduit gets talked about as one line on a takeoff. It is three separate commodity stories sitting in the same rack.

EMT and galvanized rigid (RMC and IMC) are steel tube. Thin wall for EMT, heavy wall and threaded for rigid. Your price tracks steel mill output, plus the galvanizing, plus the forming.

Aluminum rigid is a different metal on a different cycle. Contractors reach for it in corrosive environments and where weight matters, and its price has behaved nothing like steel over the last two years.

PVC conduit (Schedule 40 and 80) is an extruded plastics product. Its cost chain runs back through resin, not through a mill.

You can watch all three separately in public data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes producer price indexes for each input, updated monthly, free, and with history going back decades. It also publishes one for conduit itself, though that series blends metallic and plastic conduit with fittings, so it will not separate your EMT from your PVC. Watch both: the conduit series for what the product class did, the input series for why.

What you are buying	The public series that moves it	What that series did in the first half of 2026
Conduit and conduit fittings, all types	Noncurrent-carrying electrical conduit and conduit fittings, WPU11710216	202.6 in January to 206.7 in June (preliminary), about 2%
EMT, IMC, galvanized rigid	Steel mill products, WPU1017	315.4 in January to 361.4 in June (preliminary), roughly 15% in five months
EMT, IMC, galvanized rigid (upstream)	Iron and steel mills and ferroalloy manufacturing, PCU331110331110	274.4 in January to 318.3 in June (preliminary), rising every month in between
Aluminum rigid	Aluminum mill shapes, WPU102501	246.9 in January 2025 to 391.3 in June 2026 (preliminary)
PVC conduit, Sch 40 and 80	Plastics pipe, WPU07210603	171.3 in January to 182.6 in June (preliminary), about 7%
PVC conduit (broader check)	Plastics construction products, WPU072106	340.7 in January to 354.8 in June (preliminary), about 4%

Every 2026 figure above is marked preliminary by BLS and gets revised. Re-pull the number before you put it in an email to your rep.

The shape of that table is the whole point. In the same five months, the steel input ran more than twice the plastics input. A distributor raising EMT and PVC by the same percentage in the same letter is not tracking their own cost, they are tracking their price list. Note also that the finished conduit series moved 2% while its steel input moved 15%. Conduit prices do not pass mill moves through one for one, at least not in the same half-year, so an increase letter that quotes the mill number as its justification is quoting the wrong number.

EMT and rigid: you are buying steel, and steel has been moving

Steel mill products sat at 315.4 in January 2026 and 361.4 in June, and the broader iron and steel index hit 366.3 in June, its highest reading since the 433.5 peak of late 2021. That is a real, documented, market-wide move. If your EMT went up this spring, the first honest answer is that the mill price went up.

The Associated General Contractors, which reads the same BLS data every month, reported steel mill products up 13.3% year over year in April 2026 and fabricated structural steel up 15.6% year over year in May. Full-year 2025 was already steel mill products up 17%. Two consecutive years of double-digit steel moves is the backdrop your EMT price is sitting on.

Trade policy is layered on top of that. ConsensusDocs maintains a tariff resource center that currently lists 50% duties on steel, aluminum, and copper items and 25% on derivative products. Conduit fittings, straps, and couplings frequently fall on the derivative side. That is one reason your fittings and your tube do not always move together.

Between EMT and rigid, expect rigid to be the twitchier line. It carries more steel per foot, so a mill move lands harder on it in absolute dollars, and threading and coupling add labor and machining cost that do not track the mill index at all.

Aluminum rigid runs on a completely different cycle

If you buy aluminum rigid, you already know it has not behaved. Aluminum mill shapes went from 246.9 in January 2025 to 391.3 in June 2026 (preliminary). AGC flagged aluminum mill shapes up 48.8% year over year in May 2026, after 30.5% across full-year 2025.

The practical consequence for estimating: an aluminum-rigid substitution you priced from a six-month-old job, or a spec that lets the engineer swap galvanized rigid for aluminum after award, is a materially different exposure than it was. If you carry an allowance for metal conduit generically, split it. Aluminum and steel have not been the same bet.

PVC conduit: resin, and a much quieter one

BLS does not break PVC conduit out on its own. WPU11710216 is the conduit series and it does cover plastic conduit and fittings, but it blends them with the metallic side, so it will not isolate your PVC. For that, the closest commodity series is plastics pipe, the same extrusion off the same resin chain. It ran 171.3 in January 2026 to 182.6 in June (preliminary), and the broader plastics construction products series ran 340.7 to 354.8 over the same window. Both are up. Neither is up anything like steel or aluminum.

PVC also has cost drivers that have nothing to do with resin, and they hit contractors harder than they hit the index:

Freight and volume. Conduit is bulky and light for its dollar value, so a truck fills up on cube long before it fills up on weight. Diesel was up 105.9% year over year in May 2026 and truck transportation up 17.3%. Anything you buy by the bundle carries more of that than a box of devices does.
Sunlight and shelf life. PVC that has been racked outdoors too long is a return argument waiting to happen, and returns on conduit run into the same restocking terms as everything else. See supply house restocking fees before you plan on sending back an over-order.
Bell end, coupling, and length conventions. Ten-foot versus twenty-foot, belled versus plain, and whether couplings are included are the three places a PVC price comparison quietly stops being a comparison.

The part of a conduit price increase that is not the metal

Here is where the market story stops and your account story starts.

A distributor holds a stack of prices for every SKU: list, a category multiplier, your negotiated contract rate, any manufacturer special pricing, and the generic counter price underneath all of it. Distributor ERP built for the electrical trades holds category-specific percentage discounts off list as the structure of a contractor agreement, so your discount on conduit is a different line in the agreement than your discount on wire or on gear. That is exactly why conduit can drift while your wire price stays put. The mechanics of which number fires are in contract price versus counter price, and the vocabulary for the tiers is in column pricing at an electrical distributor.

Then there is the spread between customers, which is bigger than most contractors assume. On the Mike Holt forums, a contractor put it plainly: “Electrical supply houses have different prices for just about everyone. I have seen them charge everything from 15% of list all the way up to list price for the same item to different customers.” Same thread, same poster: “I have had projects where two different P.O.s with the same part on it got charged two different prices.” That is a description of how category agreements, job quotes and account lookups interact, not an accusation of bad faith.

Three conduit-specific ways your number moves without the market moving:

Unit of measure. Conduit is quoted per foot, per length, per bundle, and per hundred feet depending on the branch and the system. A price that looks like a 10x increase is usually a UOM change.
Manufacturer substitution. Your contract rate and any manufacturer special pricing attach to a catalog number. A different brand of the same trade size is a different record, priced off the default.
Job quote exhaustion. A quote covers named quantities. Buy past them and the balance reprices to stock pricing, with no phone call.

How to tell a market move from drift on your own account

Do this with the invoices you already have. It takes about twenty minutes for a quarter.

Pull every conduit line from the last six months: part number, trade size, unit of measure, quantity, unit price, branch, and date.
Normalize everything to price per foot. This single step catches most of what looks like creep.
Plot your EMT, your rigid, and your PVC separately. Do not average them, they are three different markets.
Compare each one against its index above over the same window. Your steel conduit rising while steel mill products rise is the market. Your PVC rising at the same rate as your EMT, while the plastics pipe series is up a fraction of that, is a question for your rep.
Check whether the increases cluster by branch or by ticket type. If every drifted line is a will-call pickup, you have a lookup problem, not a market problem.
Look at the gap between your material cost trend and what you actually bid. AGC’s May 2026 release noted input prices up 8.4% year over year against contractors’ bid prices up only 3.5%. That spread is the number your margin lives in.

What to ask your supply house

Nothing in this list is confrontational, and reps field all of it routinely.

Ask which category your conduit discount sits in, and whether steel conduit, PVC conduit, and fittings are separate categories in your agreement. Very often they are, and one has quietly been left uncovered.
Ask for the effective dates on that agreement, and whether it is loaded at every branch you actually buy from.
Ask whether a mill increase letter is behind a specific jump, and for the effective date on it. Manufacturers publish these. A rep who can hand you one has just done your homework for you.
Ask whether your regular conduit part numbers carry any manufacturer special pricing, and whether that pricing survives a brand substitution. Usually it does not.
If you are heading into a real pricing conversation rather than a cleanup, the ground rules are in how to negotiate with your supply house, and the gear-side version of the same exposure is in panels, breakers, and gear lead times and escalation.

The short version

Conduit is three commodities. EMT and rigid follow steel, aluminum rigid follows aluminum, PVC follows resin, and in the first half of 2026 those three moved at very different speeds.
Steel mill products ran roughly 15% from January to June 2026 (preliminary). Plastics pipe ran about 7% over the same months. Aluminum has been the outlier upward since early 2025.
Watch both. BLS publishes a conduit series, WPU11710216, but it blends metallic and plastic conduit with fittings, so pair it with the input index for the material you actually bought.
Normalize your own history to price per foot before you conclude anything.
If all three products move together on your invoices while the indexes move apart, that is an account question, not a market one.
Ask for the increase letter and the effective date. That request is normal, and it is the fastest way to close the question.