Valuation Guide
Scrap value vs. resale value
A transformer can be sold as a pile of metal or as a working machine. The difference is not a few percent — it is often the difference between a few hundred dollars and a number with more digits in it. Here is how each path actually prices.
Two pricing paths
Material or machine — pick the right one first
Sellers lose money at this fork more often than anywhere else in the process. A working padmount taken to a scrap yard is weighed, graded, and paid by the pound, and the yard is not doing anything wrong by doing that — it is a scrap yard. But the same unit sold as equipment is priced against a replacement that may take a long time to arrive.
Priced as material (scrap)
- When it applies
- The unit failed, is beyond economic repair, or has no resale market left.
- How the number is built
- Your payout is weight times a per-pound rate. The rate is set by the grade the yard assigns — for a whole transformer, that grade is dominated by steel, not copper.
- What the sources say
- Published benchmarks for whole copper transformers cluster around $0.15–$0.30/lb, with one undated source quoting up to $0.60/lb.
Priced as equipment (resale)
- When it applies
- The unit passes electrical testing, has common voltages, and is a size someone still needs.
- How the number is built
- Your payout is negotiated against what a buyer can resell or redeploy it for — which is anchored to new-unit cost and new-unit lead time, not to metal weight.
- What the sources say
- Maddox, a remanufacturer, publicly states it pays 2–5 times the scrap value for units it can rebuild.
These are reference figures, not quotes. Every price on this page is attributed to a named third party with the date it was published. Scrap and equipment prices move constantly, vary by region and by yard, and no yard or buyer is obliged to honor a price published anywhere else. We do not operate a price feed. For a number you can act on, send us your nameplate details.
Why the per-pound rate looks so low
You are not selling copper. You are selling a steel box with copper in it.
This is the part that surprises most first-time sellers. On Rockaway Recycling's posted price list (July 27, 2026), #1 bare bright copper wire was $5.35 per pound while whole copper transformers were $0.21 per pound. Same metal. A rate roughly twenty-five times apart.
The gap exists because the yard is buying the entire assembly: laminated core steel, a heavy tank, bushings, radiators, and oil — with the copper wound tightly inside a core it has to be cut and separated from. The yard pays for total weight and absorbs the processing labor, the fluid handling, and the risk that the copper content is lower than it looks.
Two practical consequences. First, a heavier unit is not automatically worth more per pound — the grade matters more than the mass. Second, if your unit still works, every pound of that steel is working against you in a scrap transaction, because none of it captures the value of the machine functioning.
Scrap benchmarks, by source
Whole copper transformers, per pound. Not blended into an average.
Rockaway Recycling
price list last modified July 27, 2026
iScrap App
user reports dated May 2026
MyScrapStop
range published without a date
ScrapMonster
quoted July 9, 2026
Figures referenced as of July 31, 2026. Regional and daily variation is large.
The resale case
What the resale multiple is, and what it is not
You will see "3–5x scrap value" repeated across this industry, usually with no source attached. We used to have a version of that claim on this site ourselves, and we removed it, because we could not point to where it came from.
Here is what can actually be sourced. Maddox, a transformer remanufacturer, published an article titled "Recycle Surplus Transformers for 5X Their Scrap Value" on October 31, 2023, stating that it pays 2–5 times the scrap value for surplus units it can rebuild and resell. The same article describes payouts ranging from a couple hundred dollars for some low-voltage dry-type transformers to up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for some substation transformers.
Read that carefully, because the framing matters. It is a buyer describing its own purchasing on its own website. It is not an index, not an audited figure, and not a promise that applies to your unit. It is, however, a specific and checkable public statement from a company in the business of buying these units — which makes it far better evidence than an unattributed multiple, and it points the same direction as what we see in our own transactions.
The mechanism behind the premium is straightforward: a remanufacturer or an end user buying your unit is comparing it to the cost and the wait for a new one. When new-unit lead times are long, a tested used unit that can ship now is worth considerably more than its metal. When you sell to a scrap yard, none of that enters the calculation.
So the practical rule is not "expect 5x". It is: find out whether your unit is resaleable before you accept a per-pound price, because only one of those two paths can be reopened after the fact.
Figures referenced as of July 31, 2026. No figure on this page is our quote for your equipment.
Find out which path your unit is on
Send a nameplate photo and tell us whether the unit was working when it came out of service. If resale is the better outcome for you, we will say so. If scrap genuinely is the right answer, we will tell you that too — and we still buy it.
Sources
- [1]Rockaway Recycling — Copper Transformers scrap price — Posted yard price of $0.21/lb for whole copper transformers alongside $5.35/lb for #1 bare bright copper wire on the same list (price list last modified July 27, 2026)
- [2]iScrap App — Copper Transformers prices — User-reported yard prices of $0.15–$0.25/lb, published as reference prices only (reports dated May 2026)
- [3]MyScrapStop — Copper transformer scrap prices — Published national range of $0.20–$0.60/lb (no date published on the source page)
- [4]ScrapMonster — Transformer scrap prices — U.S. average of about $0.30/lb for large transformer scrap, with the site's own note that public prices lag subscriber data (quoted July 9, 2026)
- [5]Maddox — Recycle Surplus Transformers for 5X Their Scrap Value — The remanufacturer's own statement that it pays 2–5 times scrap value for rebuildable units, with described payouts from a couple hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands (published October 31, 2023)