How these prices are calculated

Every number on this site is arithmetic on public data. There is no panel, no survey, no proprietary assessment, and nothing that cannot be reproduced from the same source in an afternoon.

The source

National customs authorities record the declared value and the declared net mass of every shipment crossing their border, classified by the Harmonized System code. Those records are compiled and published by the United Nations Statistics Division as UN Comtrade. This site reads the annual series for a set of steel headings and a set of reporting countries, and stores the result as static files.

The arithmetic

For each reporter, each HS heading and each direction of trade:

unit value (USD/tonne) = declared value (USD) ÷ declared net mass (tonnes)

Partner rows are summed after removing the reporting duplicates that appear when a shipment is split by mode of transport or by second partner country. Rows with less than one tonne of declared mass are dropped, because a unit value computed on a few kilograms is noise. The top five partner countries by tonnage are kept for the lane tables.

What the number includes

• Imports are usually valued CIF — cost, insurance and freight to the border — so ocean freight and insurance are inside the figure. On a typical lane that is 4–12 % of the value.
• Exports are usually valued FOB at the port of loading, so they exclude freight.
• Neither figure includes import duty, safeguard levies, anti-dumping duty, demurrage or inland haulage at destination.
• Valuation practice varies by country; a handful of reporters publish imports FOB, which makes their import column look low against neighbours.

Where the number cannot be used

• As a spot price. These are annual averages published months in arrears. They describe a year, not a week.
• As a specification price. One HS heading contains many grades, thicknesses and surfaces. A galvanized heading holds Z100 commodity coil and Z275 painted material in the same average.
• As a benchmark in a contract. Contracts need a defined assessment with a published methodology and a fixed publication date. A customs average has neither.
• For countries with thin reporting. Where a market declares only a few thousand tonnes in a heading, the unit value swings on a single shipment.

What we do not publish

This site does not reproduce, paraphrase or derive figures from licensed price assessments — Platts, Argus, MEPS, Kallanish, SteelBenchmarker or any other subscription service. Those datasets are contractually restricted and, in the EU, protected by database rights; rewording a number does not change that. Where a published assessment is genuinely newsworthy it is cited with attribution and a link, as a fact, not as a feed.

Update cycle

Comtrade publishes annual data with a lag of several months, and reporters revise their figures afterwards. The files behind this site are regenerated when a new annual series lands, and each page states the year it describes and the date the file was last written.

Reproduce it yourself

Every figure can be checked directly at comtradeplus.un.org by selecting the reporter, the year, the HS code and the trade flow, then dividing the trade value by the net weight. If a number here disagrees with the source, the source wins — tell us and we will fix it.