Copper alone has pushed past $12,000 a ton, with steel and aluminum trending the same direction. Here's what's driving it and why it shows up in your quote.
A residential heat pump or AC system is built around three commodity metals — steel for cabinets and structural components, copper for refrigerant tubing and motor windings, and aluminum for fins and, increasingly, entire coils — and all three have gotten more expensive and more volatile at the same time the industry is absorbing refrigerant and efficiency-driven redesigns.
Copper is the standout. Prices pushed past $12,000 per metric ton by late 2025 and analysts at major brokerages were projecting a further run toward $13,000–$15,000 per ton in 2026. The drivers are stacking up rather than any single cause: production problems at major mines in Chile and Peru, US traders stockpiling roughly 650,000 tons of refined copper in 2025 to capture arbitrage opportunities, and steadily rising baseline demand from data centers, grid buildout, and electrification generally — HVAC is competing for copper against industries that weren't major buyers a decade ago.
Refined copper itself got a tariff exemption in mid-2025, but that doesn't fully insulate the HVAC supply chain: fabricated copper products — line sets, tubing, electrical wire — remain under separate, steeper tariffs, which is the form copper actually reaches an HVAC manufacturer in. The result has shown up directly in supplier price sheets: component makers like Refco announced increases of 4–18%, and Legend Valve announced increases up to 25% in select categories, both citing raw material costs.
Steel (cabinets, chassis, structural framing) and aluminum (fins, and now entire microchannel coils — see the related article) haven't moved as sharply as copper, but both are trending the same direction under similar pressure: tariffs on imported metal, tight domestic capacity, and, for aluminum specifically, growing competition from other industries substituting aluminum in for copper wherever engineering allows it, which pulls on the same global aluminum supply.
You're not shopping for raw metal — you're shopping for a finished system. But finished-system prices are downstream of exactly this: every 10% move in copper or steel eventually shows up as a line-item price increase from the manufacturer, which shows up in your contractor's cost, which shows up in your quote. It's one of the reasons two quotes for what looks like "the same" system pulled a few months apart can differ meaningfully — it isn't always markup, sometimes it's the market underneath the equipment.
Metal costs are a real, structural reason equipment prices have been trending up independent of anything your contractor is doing — worth knowing so a rising quote doesn't automatically read as a red flag on its own. It's also one more factor, alongside the refrigerant-price trend and the tariff picture (next article), that argues for not letting an aging, failing system limp along indefinitely if a planned, well-timed replacement is realistically on your horizon anyway.
HVAC Referee checks your actual quote against equipment, installation, and pricing standards — including which refrigerant and efficiency tier you're being quoted.