Mills Ran at 82% Last Week, Coil Keeps Climbing — and Scrap Still Isn't Budging

Last week’s post was about where 2027 contracts are heading. This week the story is what mills are doing right now: running hard, charging more for coil, and still watching their own costs climb.

Mills jumped to 82% utilization

Steel output bounced back in a big way. For the week ended September 12, U.S. mills produced 1.900 million net tons at 82.3% capacity utilization, up 5.1% from the week before. Year to date, output sits at 66.537 million net tons and 79.1% utilization, 5.5% ahead of the same stretch of 2025, when utilization was 77.2%. That is a lot of steel going through a lot of furnaces, and it is the demand signal behind everything else this week.

Nucor raised coil again

Nucor bumped its hot-rolled coil consumer spot price another $10 to $1,200 per short ton, with delivery running three to five weeks. The same source notes September 2025 spot prices were $875 a ton, so coil is roughly 37% higher than a year ago. Mills are still writing price increases, not discounts.

Rising costs are eating into those prices

Higher prices haven’t translated into an easy quarter. Nucor guided Q3 earnings to $5.55 to $5.65 per diluted share against a $6.17 consensus, and the steel mills segment cited higher costs of products sold offsetting the benefit of higher average selling prices. Steel Dynamics also missed consensus. Even so, Nucor’s range is more than double the $2.63 it earned in Q3 2025. Mills are profitable, but their input and operating costs are moving up too, and that pressure tends to flow downstream to the people buying steel products.

Scrap is the quiet corner

Despite the surge in melting, scrap isn’t running away. Fastmarkets’ September outlook puts its trend indicator at 49.5, which it calls a sideways market, with a modeled month-over-month price change of just +0.7% after a 0.8% decline in August. Buyers are the most cautious group at 45.8, sellers are slightly firmer at 52.7, and respondents’ consensus hit 74%, the highest ever recorded. In plain terms, nearly everyone expects flat. One respondent flagged higher energy costs as a factor.

The labor question is still open

The USW contracts with U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs expired September 1, and the parties agreed to keep bargaining under 30-day extensions. Nothing new has been settled that changes the picture from last week, so the deadline to watch is still around the start of October.

What this means for your pins

There is a useful pattern here for anyone running a shredder. Finished steel is climbing and mills are busy, while your scrap prices look flat. That squeeze is about the best-case scenario for a shredder’s raw material side, but it does nothing to hold down what you pay for wear parts. Alloy bar and forging costs follow the mill side of the market, not the scrap side.

The practical takeaway is to budget wear parts on the steel curve, not the scrap curve. Every unplanned stop to swap a failed pin costs you tons you didn’t shred, and with mills this busy and lead times stretched, a rushed replacement order is the expensive kind. Domestic pins keep you off the import side of the tariff picture entirely, so your price risk is just the steel market itself. Set your change schedule, hold a buffer of spares, and keep your cost per ton shredded, wear parts included, in front of you as the steel market keeps running hot.