Everything Holds: Nucor Stays at $1,135 While Production Slips to a Three-Month Low

Last week the story was divergence — mills pushing price into a softening scrap market. This week the story is that everything stopped moving at once. Finished steel held, scrap held, and the only number that budged was production, which drifted down to its lowest point since spring. Flat weeks are easy to skip past, but a market that goes quiet after a run of increases is telling you something about where the pressure has gone.

Nucor holds at $1,135

After breaking its three-week pause with a $5 increase, Nucor turned around and held its consumer spot price at $1,135 per short ton for the week of July 20, unchanged from the prior week. Lead times stayed at three to five weeks, and the joint-venture CSI price on the West Coast held flat at $1,185/ton. SMU’s own weekly assessment put HR coil at an average of $1,160/ton as of July 14.

So the mid-July hike was a single step, not the start of another climb. One raise, then a hold — the same rhythm we’ve seen most of this summer.

Production eases to a three-month low

The output data kept drifting the wrong way for anyone expecting mills to press their advantage. AISI reported 1.830 million net tons of raw steel for the week ending July 18, at 79.3% capacity utilization — down 0.5% from the 1.840 million tons and 79.7% posted the week before. Steel Market Update called it a three-month low for domestic mill production.

By district, the South did most of the work at 829,000 tons, followed by the Great Lakes at 483,000 and the Midwest at 324,000. The Northeast contributed 124,000 and the West 70,000.

That’s now two straight weeks below the 80% mark. It’s a slow drift rather than a cliff, and summer maintenance season explains part of it — but a mill holding price while trimming output is a mill managing supply, not one fighting for volume.

Scrap goes sideways across the board

The scrap market did nothing at all, and did it consistently. The weekly report for July 17–23 had #1 HMS, shredded auto scrap, HMS 80/20 and #1 busheling all trading sideways with no notable movement — a balanced market where neither supply nor demand is pushing hard, and one expected to stay range-bound absent a real shift in mill demand or export activity. Internationally, scrap CFR Turkey settled at $388 per tonne on July 23.

For shredded specifically, the flatness fits a structural pattern that’s been building for a while. An Argus viewpoint from December 2025 laid out how tariff-protected domestic demand pulled scrap away from export markets — US ferrous scrap exports projected down 15% to 11.7 million tonnes, the lowest since 2016 — leaving more material at home. That piece is seven months old now, but the effect it described is exactly what a sideways shredded market looks like.

What this means for your pins

• Input costs are as predictable as they’ve been all year. Flat scrap and flat coil mean the steel side of a pin quote isn’t moving under you. If you’ve been putting off pricing out a rotor’s worth of pins waiting for a better window, this is a stable one.
• Easing utilization is worth watching, not worrying about. Mills running a little softer consume a little less scrap. That’s mild downward pressure on what your yard sells, not on what your pins cost.
• A quiet domestic market is the whole argument for domestic steel. Two weeks of no drama, no tariff surprises, and no supply scramble is unremarkable — and that’s the point. Imported pins are exposed to lead times and origin questions that a flat week here never touches.