The Contractor's Guide to Trade Material Costs in 2026

If you want one trade material costs guide as a contractor, here is the short answer: in the first half of 2026 the metals moved hard and the finished goods moved slowly. Copper and brass mill shapes are up about 7.5% from January to June 2026, steel mill products about 14.6%, and plastics pipe and fitting manufacturing about 6.4%. Plumbing fixture fittings and trim moved 0.4% over the same window. HVAC equipment moved 2.8%. Every one of those is a producer price index from BLS, and June 2026 readings are preliminary.

That spread is the whole point of this guide. “Material is up” is not a useful statement when the raw metals in your wire are running four times faster than the finished fixtures on the same invoice. Your exposure depends entirely on which trade you are in and which lines dominate your material spend.

Below is the index data by trade, what actually drives each number, and the part that matters most: the gap between what your inputs cost and what you are allowed to charge for them.

The one number every trade should look at first

The Associated General Contractors tracks the producer price index for inputs to new nonresidential construction against the price contractors actually bid. In May 2026, input prices rose 1.8% for the month and 8.4% year over year, the largest annual jump since the pandemic, while contractors’ bid prices rose only 3.5% year over year. April told the same story: inputs up 6.6% year over year against bid prices up 3.6%.

That is roughly five points of margin compression, industry-wide, showing up in a single line. Blame the bid and the contract terms before you blame the supply house. That is why a guide like this is worth reading even if your supplier is treating you perfectly.

The underlying series, inputs to nonresidential construction goods, read 166.9 in January 2026 and 177.5 in April 2026 (preliminary), about 6.4% in four months. The residential goods series sat at 344.247 in June 2026 (preliminary) against 203.4 in 2016.

The index table: January to June 2026

One consistent window, so the comparison is fair. All values are BLS producer price indexes, not seasonally adjusted. June 2026 figures are preliminary and BLS revises them.

Series	What it stands in for	Jan 2026	Jun 2026 (P)	Change
Iron and steel mills manufacturing	Strut, hangers, rigid conduit, structural	274.380	318.281	+16.0%
Steel mill products	EMT, rigid, black pipe, sheet stock	315.369	361.439	+14.6%
Copper and brass mill shapes	Wire, copper tube, fittings	747.384	803.275	+7.5%
Copper rolling, drawing, extruding	The mill stage for wire rod and tube	166.772	178.822	+7.2%
Plastics pipe	PVC, CPVC, DWV pipe	171.280	182.609	+6.6%
Plastics pipe fittings and unions	PVC and CPVC fittings, unions	334.420	354.724	+6.1%
Unitary air-conditioners, except air source heat pumps	Condensers, split systems, packaged units	280.520	297.025 (May)	+5.9%
Plastics construction products	Jacketing, boxes, fittings, PEX	340.654	354.773	+4.1%
Plumbing fixture fittings and trim	Faucets, valves, trim	451.310	453.198	+0.4%
Heat pumps	Air source heat pumps	146.923	141.564	-3.6%

One row breaks the window on purpose. WPU114802 publishes about a month behind every other series here, so its most recent reading is May 2026 rather than June. Wherever you use it, allow for that lag and compare like months.

Two more series do not fit that window and are worth naming separately. Sheet metal products, the ductwork proxy, went from 337.053 in June 2025 to 353.935 in June 2026 (preliminary), about 5.0% year over year. Aluminum mill shapes went from 246.9 in January 2025 to 391.268 in June 2026 (preliminary), about 58.5%, which is the single most violent line in this entire guide and the reason MC cable and aluminum-bodied equipment behave the way they do right now.

One important caveat on how to read this table. These are producer price indexes: what manufacturers charge, in aggregate, across a whole category. They are not your counter price. Your counter price includes the distributor’s cost layer, your negotiated multiplier, freight, and whatever the branch’s system looked up that day. The index tells you the direction and rough magnitude of the wave. It does not tell you what hit your invoice.

Electrical: metals-driven, fastest-moving, most watchable

If you are an electrical contractor, your material spend is unusually exposed to metal indexes because so much of what you buy is metal with a thin coating on it.

Wire and cable. Driven by copper, plus aluminum or steel for armored products. Copper and brass mill shapes are up 7.5% in five months, and AGC reported copper and brass mill shapes up 26.8% year over year in May 2026. The mechanism behind that, and why your counter price does not move the same day the metal does, is worked through in how copper prices move wire prices at your supply house. Which cable type moves fastest is a separate question with a real answer: Romex, THHN and MC cable rank differently.

Conduit and strut. EMT and rigid ride steel. Steel mill products +14.6% and iron and steel mills manufacturing +16.0% over five months is a serious move, and it is happening faster than copper right now. PVC conduit rides the plastics pipe series instead, at +6.6%, which is why the price relationship between EMT and PVC conduit has been shifting on you.

Gear and devices. Panels, breakers and switchgear are assemblies. They contain copper, steel and aluminum, but they are priced on long manufacturer lead times and published price letters rather than on the week’s metal. This is the category where your category discount matters more than the commodity, and where the contract price versus counter price distinction does the most damage when it fails.

Practical note for electrical: wire is the line where a bad price is most expensive and most invisible, because it moves so often that no one has a stable memory of what it cost last time. It is also, at most distributors, the line with the least generous return terms. Multiple published policies give no credit on cut wire at all.

Plumbing: split down the middle between copper and resin

Plumbing is the trade with the widest internal spread in 2026, and it is why “material is up” is close to meaningless on a plumbing invoice.

Copper tube and fittings. Full copper exposure. Copper and brass mill shapes at +7.5% in five months, on top of the run from 645.990 in January 2025 to 803.275 in June 2026 (preliminary), roughly 24% over eighteen months. This is the category behind the three-quarter inch copper 90 elbow example on our own homepage.

PVC, CPVC and DWV. Plastics pipe +6.6% in five months, from 171.280 in January 2026 to 182.609 in June (preliminary), with fittings and unions close behind at +6.1%, 334.420 to 354.724. Faster than most people assume, and unlike copper it is not something contractors habitually watch. Neither series separates PVC from CPVC, so treat them as a family read rather than a line-item read.

PEX. Rides the plastics construction products series, +4.1%, the calmest of the piping options right now.

Fixtures, faucets and trim. Nearly flat. Plumbing fixture fittings and trim moved from 451.310 in January 2026 to 453.198 for March through June (preliminary), and has been pinned at that exact reading for four straight months. The manufacturing-side series tells the same story: 410.019 in December 2025 to 417.588 in June 2026 (preliminary), about 1.8%.

That last row is the useful one. If your fixture and trim pricing moved materially in the first half of 2026, the index does not support blaming the market. That is exactly the situation covered in price creep versus a real market increase, and it is worth a specific question to your rep rather than a shrug.

HVAC: equipment splits in two, and the metal around it keeps climbing

HVAC has the strangest shape of the three trades.

Equipment. There is no single equipment number, and averaging one out of the industry index is how shops end up mispricing this. Unitary air-conditioners, except air source heat pumps moved 280.520 in January 2026 to 297.025 in May (preliminary), about +5.9%, which puts cooling equipment in the same range as copper rather than off in a quiet corner. Heat pumps went the other way over the same stretch, 146.923 in January to 141.564 in June (preliminary), about -3.6%. Two halves of the same aisle, moving in opposite directions, so never blend them and never read one as a proxy for the other. The blended industry index PCU333415333415 is worth a glance only as a category-level cross-check, and it will not show you this split. Over the longer arc both are well up: air-conditioners from a 2021 annual average of 210.814 and heat pumps from 126.254, roughly +41% and +12% respectively. Note also that WPU114802 publishes a month later than the rest, hence the May reading, and that neither series prices a specific configured rooftop unit or breaks out furnaces and air handlers.

Sheet metal and duct. +5.0% year over year on the sheet metal products series, riding the same steel pressure as conduit.

Line sets and copper components. Full copper exposure, same 7.5% five-month move as the plumbing side.

Refrigerant. Not covered by any series in our verified source set, and we are not going to invent one. Refrigerant pricing in 2026 is driven by regulatory phasedown and allocation rather than by a metals index, and if that line matters to your spend the only reliable read is your own purchase history.

The HVAC pattern to watch for: one equipment line rising while the other falls, with accessories, line sets, duct and fittings climbing underneath both. Shops that benchmark against a single blended equipment number miss most of their actual inflation, and shops that benchmark cooling equipment and then apply the same number to a heat pump job get it backwards.

What to actually do with this

The index tells you what the wave looks like. It cannot tell you whether you caught it fairly. That takes your own paper.

Pick your ten highest-spend SKUs. Not categories. Specific part numbers with specific units of measure. For most shops ten covers well over half of material dollars.
Pull twelve months of unit prices for each. Same part number, same UOM, same branch. The unit price is the only number that means anything here; totals hide everything.
Compare your move to the matching series above. Your copper tube running well ahead of +7.5% over the same months is a question worth asking. Your fixtures running ahead of +0.4% is a bigger one.
Separate the market from the lookup. A category-wide rise is the market. One SKU jumping while its neighbors hold is usually a pricing record that fell over, which is the failure pattern in contract price versus counter price.
Check the quote against the invoice before you check anything else. The most expensive gaps are not creep at all, they are a quote and an invoice that do not agree.
Send the credit request on fresh invoices. Recent lines get corrected. Old ones get explained. There is a ready-to-send template if you would rather not draft it.
Take the index to the negotiation, not the accusation. “Copper and brass mill shapes are up 7.5% since January and my copper tube is up 19%, help me understand the delta” is a conversation. Anything sharper is an argument. The rest of that playbook is in how to negotiate with your supply house.

None of this assumes bad faith at the counter. Distributors are absorbing the same metal moves you are, on inventory they bought at last quarter’s cost, while fielding manufacturer price letters they did not write. The problem is that nobody calls to tell you which of your prices rose, by how much, and whether the rise was the market or a record that stopped applying.

The short version

Metals are running far ahead of finished goods in 2026. Steel +14.6% and copper +7.5% from January to June, against fixtures at +0.4%.
Aluminum is the outlier, up roughly 58.5% since January 2025, which is why armored cable and aluminum-bodied equipment feel different from everything else.
Input costs rose 8.4% year over year in May 2026 while bid prices rose 3.5%. That gap is the real story for every trade.
Electrical is metal-driven and fast. Plumbing is split between fast copper and flat fixtures. HVAC equipment is calm while everything bolted to it is not.
The index gives you direction. Only your own unit price history tells you whether your invoice was fair.