September 9, 2025:  U.S. Spot Prices Show Limited Upside

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U.S. hot-rolled coil (HRC) spot prices remained soft with major indexes in the range of $805-820 per ton. Despite signs of market weakness, Nucor has sustained its Consumer Spot Price at $875 per ton for the third consecutive week.

Scrap price settlements further highlighted the market’s softness entering the Fall. As of early this week, prices for prime grade scrap are down $20 per ton across all U.S. regions.

Futures trading also reflected bearish sentiment, with the CME U.S. Midwest Domestic HRC Index for September 2025 closing at $799. The forward curve, however, indicates some modest recovery later in the year, with prices climbing to $822 per ton in October, $842/ton in November, and $855/ton in December.

WSD Take:

Downstream markets remain tepid, as country level tariffs have continued to sow uncertainty into the marketplace. It is becoming increasingly likely that Federal reserve will lower interest rates in the coming weeks, piggybacking off of weak economic data, particularly in the jobs market, where unemployment remains low but hiring is virtually nonexistent. Economic uncertainty is extending well past the steel industry, with new job openings at their lowest levels since the beginning of 2020 and economic sentiment among consumers and businesses proving to be relatively soft.

Lead times remain stranded in the 3.5-4.5-week radius, with mill order books showing signs of weakness. It is now confirmed that mill outages will amount to over 750k tons for flat rolled steel producers from September to November.

This represents a nearly 100k ton increase over last year’s seasonal outage levels. In addition to the outages, U.S. Steel has announced the halting of flat rolled processing at its Granite City facility.

WSD’s opinion remains that the only saving grace for steel pricing in the coming weeks and months will be if inventory liquidations put buyers in need of re-entering the market amid robust closures. In the absence of an improvement in real demand, this could push lead times up a few weeks (particularly for cold rolled and coated materials, which are rumored to have lower inventories than HRC). Ultimately, this could result in prices rebounding to $850 per ton by the end of October.

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