Scrap Metal Prices in Toronto (2026): What Every Metal Pays

Short answer: in the Toronto and GTA market in 2026, clean copper pays roughly $3.50–$4.80/lb, brass $1.80–$3.10/lb, aluminum $0.25–$0.90/lb, stainless steel $0.20–$0.70/lb, and ordinary steel $0.04–$0.25/lb. Which end of each range you get depends almost entirely on one thing: how clean and how well sorted the material is when it hits the scale.

This page is the single reference for every metal we get asked about — what each grade pays, how to tell the metals apart without any equipment, where each one hides in a Toronto house, and when hauling it to a yard yourself actually beats booking a free pickup. It replaces the separate copper, brass, aluminum and stainless guides we used to run.

How to read these numbers: scrap prices move daily with the London Metal Exchange, and every yard sets its own spread under that. The ranges below are the Toronto-area buying prices we see across GTA yards — they are a planning tool, not a quote. Phone the yard the morning you go.

Scrap metal prices in Toronto — 2026 at a glance

Two things fall out of that table immediately. First, copper is worth roughly forty times what plain steel is worth per pound — which is why sorting matters more than volume. Second, the difference between the top and bottom of each metal's own range is 30–80%, and that gap is entirely under your control.

Copper: the grades and what separates them

Copper is the most valuable metal most people will ever pull out of a house, and it is graded strictly on purity and condition.

Bare bright — $4.00–$4.80/lb

Clean, uncoated, unalloyed copper wire, 16 gauge or larger, with no insulation, solder or coating. This is stripped wire from electrical work and it is the top of the market. Stripping wire yourself to reach this grade is slow, but on heavy-gauge wire it pays: moving 10 lbs from insulated ($1.80/lb) to bare bright ($4.20/lb) is about $24 for maybe twenty minutes of work.

#1 copper — $3.50–$4.20/lb

Clean copper pipe and solid wire, cut free of fittings, solder and paint, with no heavy corrosion. Old residential plumbing that has been cut cleanly lands here. This is the most common "good copper" a homeowner brings in.

#2 copper — $3.00–$3.60/lb

Copper with minor contamination: light oxidation, solder residue, paint, or brass fittings still attached. Most pipe pulled during a renovation is #2 until somebody spends ten minutes on it. A wire brush and a pipe cutter will move a good share of it up to #1.

Insulated wire — $1.20–$2.50/lb

Priced on the copper recovery inside, so heavy-gauge appliance and service cable pays far better than thin stranded wire. Thin wire is generally not worth stripping — the labour exceeds the gain.

Copper gutters and flashing — $3.00–$3.80/lb

Usually grades as #1 or #2. Older Toronto homes with original copper eavestrough are carrying real money on the roofline.

Brass: yellow, red, and everything with steel in it

Brass is copper alloyed with zinc, so its price tracks copper — at roughly 60–70% copper content, it lands at roughly 60–70% of the copper price. The grades that matter:

• Red brass ($2.50–$3.10/lb) — about 85% copper, a deeper reddish-gold. Pre-1980s plumbing bodies, water meter housings, fire hose couplings. The best brass you'll find.
• Yellow brass, clean ($2.20–$2.80/lb) — about 65% copper, bright golden. Fittings, valves, door hardware, keys, instruments.
• Plumbing brass, mixed ($1.80–$2.40/lb) — tap bodies and shut-off valves with iron still attached.
• Brass turnings ($1.40–$1.80/lb) — machine shop shavings.
• Brass with steel ($0.80–$1.40/lb) — ball valves with steel handles and stems. Pulling the steel out roughly doubles the rate.

Brass hides in more places than people expect: gate and ball valves on supply lines, compression fittings, faucet bodies, shut-offs under sinks and toilets, pressure reducing valves, radiator and bleed valves on hydronic heat, circulator pump housings, boiler drains, zone valves, lamp sockets, door knobs and knockers, lock cylinders, cabinet hardware, and brass instruments. An old hot water heating system is one of the densest brass sources in a house.

One caution: a water meter itself usually belongs to the municipality, not to you. Leave it.

Aluminum: light, plentiful, and easy to downgrade

Aluminum pays a fraction of copper per pound, but renovations produce it in bulk — a full window replacement, a siding tear-off, a garage door swap.

• Extruded, clean ($0.65–$0.90/lb) — window and door frames, architectural extrusion. Pull the plastic thermal break inserts before you go.
• Sheet ($0.55–$0.80/lb) — siding, fascia and soffit, roofing panel, car hoods and doors. Paint is fine; yards expect it.
• Cast ($0.50–$0.75/lb) — engine blocks, transmission housings, mower decks, BBQ bodies.
• Rims ($0.50–$0.80/lb) — alloy wheels, better with the tire off. Steel belts in the rubber contaminate the load and some yards discount heavily rather than refuse.
• Mixed / irony ($0.25–$0.45/lb) — anything with steel hardware still on it. This is where most aluminum ends up by default, and it's roughly half price.

Reality check on volume: a full-house window replacement yields somewhere around 80–120 lbs of frame. At $0.70/lb that's $56–$84 — worth a yard trip only if you already have a truck and a short drive. As part of a bigger mixed cleanout, it isn't worth handling separately at all.

Stainless steel: worth 5–10x plain steel

Stainless looks like ordinary steel and gets thrown in the same pile constantly, which is an expensive habit — it's worth five to ten times more per pound.

• 316 ($0.45–$0.70/lb) — higher nickel plus molybdenum. Marine, industrial, some food processing.
• 304 ($0.35–$0.55/lb) — the everyday grade: kitchen sinks, appliance panels, cookware, commercial kitchen equipment, medical gear.
• 430 ($0.20–$0.35/lb) — low nickel, magnetic. Budget appliances and automotive trim.
• Mixed / unidentified ($0.20–$0.40/lb) — the default when nobody can confirm the grade, which is why it pays to know.

A commercial kitchen cleanout is where this genuinely matters — ten or fifteen stainless prep tables, sinks and shelving units sorted properly, against being weighed in as light iron, is a difference of hundreds of dollars.

How to tell these metals apart without any equipment

Four tests, in the order that eliminates the most confusion fastest.

1. The magnet test

Any fridge magnet works. If it grabs firmly, you have steel, cast iron, or 430 stainless — the cheap end. If it doesn't stick at all, you're in non-ferrous territory: copper, brass, bronze, aluminum, lead, or 304/316 stainless. This one test separates the $0.05/lb material from the $3.00/lb material in about a second, and it also catches steel that has been plated or painted to look like brass.

2. Colour, on a cleaned surface

Oxidation lies. Sand or wire-brush a small patch and look at the metal underneath.

3. Weight in the hand

Copper and brass are dense — noticeably heavy for their size. Aluminum is startlingly light. If something looks like brass but feels like nothing, it's gold-anodised aluminum, which is common in cheap decorative hardware and worth a tenth as much.

4. Sound

Tap it with something hard. Brass rings — it's what bells and instruments are made of. Steel sounds duller and tinnier, aluminum gives a flat thud, and cast iron gives a short dead clunk.

Why this is worth ten minutes: 50 lbs of clean copper wire is $175–$225. The same 50 lbs weighed in as mixed brass and copper is $100–$150. Misidentification costs about $75 on a single bag.

Where each metal actually hides in a Toronto house

• Copper — supply plumbing (heavy in pre-1970s homes), electrical wire in panels and junction boxes, HVAC coils and refrigerant lines, motor windings inside washers, dryers and fridges, water heater supply lines, occasionally eavestrough.
• Brass — everything that shuts water off, plus door and cabinet hardware, lock cylinders, lamp bodies, and the valve set on any hydronic heating system.
• Aluminum — window and door frames from the 1960s–90s, siding, fascia and soffit, storm doors, screen frames, ladders, lawn furniture, garage doors, engine components.
• Stainless — sinks, dishwasher and range panels, exhaust hoods, laundry tub inserts, exhaust systems, and the entire contents of a commercial kitchen.
• Cast iron — radiators, claw-foot tubs, old drain stacks, sewer pipe, cookware, and vintage machinery bases.
• Lead — old drain bends and stack flashing, wheel weights, and roofing details around chimneys.

How to sort so you get the top of every range

Sorting is the whole game. Yards pay the lowest rate present in any unsorted pile, so a single steel bracket in a bin of clean brass can reprice the entire bin.

• Keep grades in separate containers. Bare bright, #1 and #2 copper never go in the same bag. Same for red versus yellow brass, and extruded versus cast aluminum.
• Take the steel off. Steel handles on brass valves, steel hardware on aluminum window frames, mounting brackets on stainless sinks. Minutes with a screwdriver, roughly double the rate on that piece.
• Strip the heavy wire, skip the thin wire. The break-even is roughly at appliance-cord thickness.
• Brush off corrosion and paint on pipe. That's the #2 to #1 upgrade — about $0.50/lb on copper.
• Pull plastic, rubber and thermal breaks. They're weight you don't get paid for and contamination you get penalised for.
• Know when to stop. Disassembling one fridge to recover its stainless panels isn't worth the afternoon. Ten commercial units is a different calculation entirely.

Yard trip or free pickup? An honest comparison

We run a free pickup service, and it is genuinely not the right answer for every load. Here's the split as we'd advise it:

The rule of thumb: if you could carry it in one trip and it's already sorted, the yard pays you more. If it takes a truck or it needs sorting, the pickup is worth more than the cheque.

What a real load is actually worth

Applying the table above to the loads we handle most often, so the numbers mean something concrete:

• A standard 40–50 gallon steel water tank — roughly 110–150 lbs, almost all light steel, with a few pounds of brass fittings. Around $6–$18 in steel, plus maybe $8–$15 if the fittings come off clean. This is why removal is a service, not a payday.
• A cast iron radiator — commonly 250–500 lbs depending on section count. At $0.08–$0.15/lb that's $20–$75, for something that takes two people and usually a stair descent.
• A full-house copper repipe — often 60–100 lbs of pipe. Cleaned to #1 that's $210–$420, and it is the one job where sorting genuinely pays for the afternoon.
• A mid-efficiency furnace — mostly sheet steel with a stainless or aluminized heat exchanger and a copper-wound blower motor. Typically $10–$25 total.

The pattern is consistent: the heavy things people most want gone are worth the least, and the light things people overlook are worth the most. That is the reason we can take the heavy items at no charge — the value is in the mixed load as a whole, not in any one appliance.

Selling scrap in Ontario: what the yard will ask for

Ontario regulates scrap sales to deter metal theft, so expect the yard to require valid government photo ID, and for larger loads, your vehicle information and the source of the material. Payment on higher-value non-ferrous loads is often by cheque or transfer rather than cash. Hours are shorter than you'd think and many yards close early on Saturdays — call before you drive.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most valuable scrap metal?

For anything you'd find in a house, copper — specifically bare bright wire at $4.00–$4.80/lb in Toronto in 2026. Brass is second at $1.80–$3.10/lb. Precious-metal-bearing electronics can beat both by weight, but not in any quantity a homeowner accumulates.

Why do scrap prices change so much?

Base metal prices are set on global commodity exchanges, primarily the London Metal Exchange, and move daily. Each yard sets its buying price below that, adjusted for processing costs and current demand. Two yards ten minutes apart can differ by 15%.

Is it worth stripping copper wire?

On heavy-gauge wire, yes — the jump from insulated to bare bright is roughly $2.00–$2.50/lb. On thin stranded wire, no; you'll spend an hour to gain a few dollars.

Do you pay for scrap metal pickup?

We pick up scrap metal free in Toronto and Vaughan when it's outside at ground level (curb, driveway or garage), on a day we're already in your area. Anything else is quoted before we book. For large, clean, high-value non-ferrous loads it's worth asking us directly, because the arithmetic changes. See what's free.

Will a scrap yard take appliances?

Most take appliances, but many will not accept anything containing refrigerant — fridges, freezers, air conditioners — unless it has been professionally evacuated and tagged. That's one of the most common reasons a load gets turned away at the gate.

How do I tell stainless steel from regular steel?

The magnet test gets you most of the way: 304 and 316 stainless are non-magnetic or barely magnetic, while carbon steel and 430 stainless grab firmly. If a magnet slides off, you likely have the $0.35–$0.70/lb material instead of the $0.05/lb material.