Aluminum Price per kg (United States)

The price is down 7.7% over the past month and +38.8% over the past year.

In the past year the monthly price has moved between $2.92 and $3.98.

Measured over longer windows, aluminum is +38.8% on the year and +19.9% over five years.

Aluminum (Al) is the most widely used non-ferrous metal, prized for being light, strong for its weight, conductive and endlessly recyclable. Transport is its largest market, from car bodies and battery enclosures to aircraft, followed by construction, packaging and electrical cable, where aluminum carries most of the world's overhead high-voltage power. Electrification adds weight to almost every one of these markets: an electric car uses noticeably more aluminum than a petrol one, while grids and solar farms need it in bulk.

Other uses

• Window frames, cladding and curtain walls
• Drinks cans and foil, the most recycled packaging there is
• Heat exchangers, radiators and electronics housings
• Alumina for refractories, abrasives and technical ceramics

Demand for aluminum follows construction, transport and packaging, with electrification adding a steady new layer through vehicles, grids and solar. Supply is shaped above all by power: smelting is so electricity-hungry that capacity clusters where energy is cheap, and China produces more than half the world's primary metal. For US buyers there is a second layer to the price, the delivered premium paid on top of the international benchmark, which rises with freight, tariffs and tight local stocks.

What moves the price

• Chinese output and the cap on its smelting capacity
• Energy prices, which can force smelters in Europe and the US to curtail
• US tariffs on imported metal and the premium they create
• Car, construction and packaging demand

Aluminum spent much of the 2010s weighed down by Chinese overcapacity, until Beijing capped its smelting capacity and the market tightened. Energy has driven the biggest moves since: the power crisis of 2021 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 sent prices to record highs, as smelters in Europe and China curtailed output.

For US buyers, trade policy matters as much as the international price. Tariffs on imported aluminum, first in 2018 and raised sharply in 2025, have lifted the delivered US premium to record levels, one reason US prices can move differently from London prices. As of October 2026, the Stockatomics benchmark price is $3.63 per kg contained.

Bauxite, the ore of aluminum, is mined mainly in Guinea and Australia, with China, Brazil and Indonesia also major sources. China refines most of the world's alumina and smelts more than half of its primary aluminum, followed by India, Russia, Canada and the Gulf states. The United States produces only a small share of the primary aluminum it uses and imports most of the rest, largely from Canada.

Aluminum is on the US critical minerals list, and bauxite, alumina and aluminum are on the EU critical raw materials list. It runs through almost every industrial sector and through defence, grids and transport. Primary smelting is concentrated where power is cheap, above all in China, and the United States now produces only a small share of the primary metal it uses, which leaves it reliant on imports and exposed to energy shocks abroad.

Stockatomics publishes a monthly US benchmark price for aluminum in US dollars per kg contained, reading as of October 2026. It is a price for aluminum metal traded into the United States, not for bauxite or alumina, and because it is a US price it can move differently from exchange prices quoted elsewhere.

Converting the price

• Per tonne: multiply the price per kg by 1,000
• Per pound: multiply the price per kg by 0.4536