Ask five scrap yards what they pay for aluminium and you’ll get five different answers, all of them honest. That isn’t evasion. The price depends on what grade you’re holding, how much of it there is, what’s stuck to it, and what the metal was doing on the London Metal Exchange that morning.
This guide breaks the number down so you can walk into a weigh-in knowing roughly what your load is worth, and spot a quote that doesn’t add up.
Start with the world price
Aluminium is a globally traded commodity. On 16 September 2026, the benchmark price sat at about US$3,273 per tonne, up close to 22% on the same time last year. Every scrap rate in Melbourne is derived from that figure, discounted for the cost of collecting, sorting, melting and re-refining second-hand metal.
That said, local scrap rates don’t move in lockstep with the exchange. OzScrap, which tracks published rates across 25 Australian yards, had domestic and mixed aluminium averaging $1.93/kg in late August 2026, down about 12% over the preceding 90 days, even while the world price was climbing. Currency, local demand and how much scrap is sitting in yards all pull in their own directions.
So use the world price as a direction indicator, not a calculator.
Indicative Melbourne rates by grade
The table below is drawn from rates published by Melbourne yards between April and August 2026. Treat it as a ballpark. Rates published online tend to be optimistic top-of-range figures, and they go stale fast.
| Grade | Published Melbourne range |
| Clean extrusion | $1.80 – $3.50/kg |
| Clean sheet and cuttings | $1.40 – $3.00/kg |
| Wheels and rims | $1.50 – $3.50/kg |
| Cast aluminium | $0.90 – $2.20/kg |
| Stripped cable and wire | $1.20 – $2.00/kg |
| Cans (UBC) | $0.80 – $1.50/kg |
| Mixed, painted or iron | $0.50 – $1.50/kg |
Look at the width of those ranges. Clean extrusion spans nearly two dollars a kilo between the lowest and highest published Melbourne figure, which tells you something useful: a headline rate on a website is close to meaningless until someone has actually seen your metal. Ring for today’s rate rather than budgeting off a table, including this one.
Grade does most of the work
Extrusion is the top of the tree. Window frames, door tracks, shopfitting sections, bull bars, ladder rails. It’s a known alloy family; it melts predictably, and refiners pay up for it. Clean and unpainted pays best, though painted extrusion still does well.
Sheet and cuttings are offcuts from fabrication, signage, panel work and litho plates. New, clean, unpainted sheet sits just under extrusion. Thin gauge and foil are worth less because they burn off more in the furnace.
Wheels are cast alloy and usually attract a good rate, but only once the tyre, the steel wheel weights and the brass valve stem are off. Chromed rims are often knocked back or downgraded.
Cast aluminium covers gearbox housings, engine parts, pump bodies, old cookware. Mixed alloys, often with steel inserts or oil in them, so it sits lower.
Irony aluminium is anything where the aluminium is bolted, riveted or bonded to steel. Ute trays, some window frames with steel reinforcing, machinery frames. Yards typically price it on estimated recoverable aluminium, sometimes around half the weight, so the rate reflects what they can actually get out of it.
What quietly costs you money
Contamination is the main one, and it’s mostly avoidable.
Steel screws, hinges and brackets left in window frames. Rubber seals and glazing strips. Plastic end caps. Insulation still on cable. Tyres still on rims. Oil and coolant in engine castings. Wet or dirty cans. Each of these either drops your load into a lower grade or gets deducted as weight the yard can’t use.
Turnings and swarf are their own problem. They’re oily, they oxidise fast, and they’re graded well below solid metal even though they’re the same alloy.
Volume matters too. Twenty kilos of extrusion in the boot won’t attract the rate a tonne on a truck does, and a lot of yards set a minimum weight before they’ll send a vehicle out for a pickup.
Sorting is the best-paid hour of work on the job
Here’s the part worth acting on. A mixed bin gets priced at, or near, the value of its worst component. Aluminium thrown in with steel offcuts is an irony load. Aluminium mixed with copper is neither.
Twenty minutes separating a demolition load into clean extrusion here, cast there, irony in a third pile, can move the whole lot up a grade band. On a few hundred kilos that’s real money for very little effort. If you’re stripping a site or a factory, sort as you go rather than sorting a heap at the end.
The same logic runs across every non-ferrous metal in the load. Copper and brass are worth several times aluminium, and they don’t get that rate sitting in a mixed skip.
Three questions that sanity-check any quote
Which grade are you quoting? A rate with no grade attached is not a quote. If the answer is vague, so is the price.
Is that picked up or delivered? Collection costs come out of nowhere. A slightly lower rate with free pickup can beat a higher rate you have to drive to.
Is it weighed on a certified weighbridge? You’re entitled to see the weight. Any yard worth dealing with will show you without being asked.
Aluminium is one of the few things in a demolition pile that genuinely holds its value, and it doesn’t degrade in the recycling. Melted, cast, used again, no loss of quality. The metal in a window frame you pull out this week could be back on a shelf as a can inside two months.
Johnny Metal Recycling buys aluminium in every grade above, from single-boot loads to factory strip-outs, right across Melbourne.