Current Rhodium Price and Rhodium Rate with Chart

The best known rhodium quotation in the world is the Johnson Matthey Base Price. Johnson Matthey defines it as "the company’s quoted offer prices for our customers of wholesale quantities of platinum group metals set by our trading desks in the USA, Hong Kong and the UK", and specifies the product: metal in sponge form with a minimum purity of 99.9% for rhodium (99.95% for platinum and palladium).

Umicore is equally explicit about the status of its three daily quotations: "Prices shown on our websites thus are of pure statistical nature and must be looked at as indications only." Heraeus Precious Metals publishes a table with the columns Bid <1 kg, Bid, Offer Unfabricated and Offer Fabricated for gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium — populated only during the opening hours of its German trading desk.

One step towards standardisation has been taken. In January 2023 the London Platinum and Palladium Market introduced a Rhodium Sponge Accreditation scheme, under which accredited refiners submit to periodic sample testing against LPPM standards. That gives rhodium a delivery standard — it does not give it a reference price. The difference matters: a buyer can now verify what they are receiving, but still not what it is objectively worth.

In a three-way catalytic converter, rhodium performs a task the other platinum group metals do not do as well: it reduces nitrogen oxides to nitrogen, while platinum and palladium oxidise carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons. There is no equivalent substitute metal for the reduction step, which is why the industry has historically reduced loadings when prices spiked rather than switching away.

The substitution risk that does exist is long term and comes from the drivetrain, not from another metal. The IPA names it explicitly: the long-term risk is driven by the powertrain change from internal combustion engines to battery electric powertrains. A battery electric vehicle has no three-way catalyst at all. Regionally the exposure is concentrated: in Europe, 93% of rhodium processing goes into catalytic converters, predominantly for gasoline passenger cars, and Europe accounts for roughly 15% of global rhodium demand.

The share has already begun to move. The automotive share stood at around 90% from 2019 onwards and fell to 84% in 2025. Johnson Matthey’s forecast for 2026 is total demand of a little over one million ounces, which would be a ten-year low.

• ◆ Pt-Rh gauzes for the oxidation of ammonia to nitric acid — the feedstock for fertilisers and explosives. The alloy typically contains 3% to 10% rhodium, and the IPA rates the substitution potential as low: Pt-Rh gauzes are still regarded as the optimum.
• ◆ Homogeneous rhodium catalysts for hydroformylation, the oxo synthesis route to aldehydes, and for carbonylation in the Monsanto process to acetic acid.

Pt-Rh alloys form the stirrers, plungers, feeder systems and fibreglass bushings used to make optical and technical glass, glass fibre, medical vials, solar modules and display glass. The decisive detail for an investor is that the rhodium content of these alloys is adjustable: it typically ranges from 5% to 20%, depending on the price difference between platinum and rhodium. Palladium is only a limited alternative because its melting point is lower.

That makes glass the one place where a higher rhodium price measurably reduces rhodium consumption — and where a lower one increases it. For 2026 Johnson Matthey expects stable loadings but sees upside potential as capacity for specialist E-glass fibre is added.

Pt-Rh thermocouples (types R, S and B) are the standard for precise high-temperature measurement in steel, glass and ceramics, usable to roughly 1,700 °C. Rhodium and rhodium-ruthenium coatings are applied to contacts and connectors; in some demanding consumer electronics applications they are regarded as superior to gold-plated contacts.

Rhodium plating of jewellery — the thin electroplated layer on white gold and silver — is the application most readers will have touched. It is worth being precise about the evidence here: rhodium is electroplated, not alloyed, which is why there is no rhodium equivalent of 585 gold or 925 silver. In the Johnson Matthey statistics this use falls under "Other" (26,000 ounces in 2025) and is not reported separately, and the IPA does not list it among the main applications. No substantiated volume figure for jewellery plating exists, so this page does not give one.

One figure often quoted elsewhere is deliberately missing here: a crustal abundance specific to rhodium. The IPA gives around 1.5 ppb in the upper continental crust for all platinum group metals combined, and the widely cited per-element value is identical for rhodium, ruthenium and iridium, which indicates a placeholder rather than a measurement. A number that cannot be told apart from two other elements is not a fact about rhodium.

Rhodium is nowhere mined as a main product. The IPA states it directly: rhodium is always considered a by-product of mining the PGM basket, which is dominated by platinum and palladium production, though its contribution by value is generally much higher than its contribution by mass. By mass, rhodium is only about 5% of the PGM basket, while platinum and palladium together make up 86%. For scale: against the 21.8 tonnes of primary rhodium in 2025 stand an estimated 170 tonnes of platinum and 190 tonnes of palladium from mining in the same year.

What decides rhodium availability is which reef is being mined. In South Africa’s Bushveld Complex there are two principal horizons:

• ◆ Merensky Reef — typical mill grades of 4 to 7 g/t on a 6E basis (4 to 6 g/t on 4E), with a platinum-to-palladium ratio of roughly 2.0 to 2.5 to one. Comparatively poor in rhodium.
• ◆ UG2 Chromitite Reef — lower overall grades of 2.5 to 4 g/t on 4E, but markedly higher contents of rhodium, ruthenium and iridium; those three can exceed 20% of the total PGM content. The UG2 is regarded as the largest known PGM reservoir in the world and has the highest rhodium concentration of any PGM-bearing ore globally.

This is the detail that is almost never told: rhodium availability depends on the depth and the reef the platinum producers are working — a mine plan written for platinum economics, in which rhodium is a passenger.

Even when capital does respond, time does not. The IPA gives concrete lead times: 8 to 18 months for brownfield restarts and shallow mechanised declines, 3 to 4 years for shallow mechanised greenfield projects, and 6 to 8 years for large deep shafts — plus up to six months from mining the ore to refined metal, and permitting cycles running from eight months to eight years. A price signal can produce additional supply after months at the earliest, realistically after years.

Primary supply in 2025 came to 701,000 ounces, or 21.8 tonnes. The IPA puts it at about 22 tonnes and notes that output "has remained at around 22 tonnes for the past three years". For an investor the relevant point is not the exact figure but the flatness: three price regimes passed over this market between 2023 and 2026 without changing what came out of the ground.

What did constrain output in 2025 was weather and mine closures. Extreme rainfall in the first quarter shut parts of Valterra’s Amandelbult mine for months, and mining and milling at the "early ounce" project at the Bokoni mine (African Rainbow Minerals) were halted around mid-year. On the other side of the ledger, one new operation started up: Ivanplats’ Platreef delivered its first PGM concentrate to Northam in the fourth quarter of 2025, with a phase one target of around 100,000 ounces of PGMs a year taking effect from 2026.

For producers themselves, 2025 was a good year irrespective of rhodium: the typical South African 4E basket (platinum, palladium, rhodium, gold) rose from around 24,000 ZAR per ounce in January 2025 to over 40,000 ZAR by the year end.

Secondary supply in 2025 was 312,000 ounces, or 9.7 tonnes, and came entirely from spent autocatalysts. Against total supply of 1,013,000 ounces (31.5 tonnes), that is 30.8%. Recovery is efficient: modern refining processes recover around 95% of the PGM content of spent catalytic converters, rhodium included.

One qualification is almost always missing from popular accounts: these figures are open-loop recycling only, the material that is collected, refined and sold on the open market. On estimates from Johnson Matthey’s circularity work published in 2024, closed-loop recycling accounts for about 75% of all rhodium recycling — metal that stays with its original owner and never reaches the market at all. So the familiar line "about a third of rhodium comes from recycling" describes only the part that is traded. The real recycling share is far higher; the tradable share is the one that moves the price.

• ◆ The spread is the main cost. Measured over 142 quotation days from 1 April to 23 October 2026, a refiner’s rhodium purchase price sat 15.0% below its sales price. Buying and selling on the same day costs that 15% — before tax. For platinum the same measurement gives 7.0%.
• ◆ No government bullion coins exist. None of the primary sources consulted lists one; the trade runs in bars, grains and sponge. That also removes the coin-specific tax route available for other metals (see the tax section).
• ◆ Purity and form matter at resale. Johnson Matthey quotes wholesale rhodium as sponge at a minimum 99.9%; the LPPM sponge accreditation introduced in January 2023 applies to refiners, not to a retail bar. Documentation of the refiner is what a buyer will ask for.
• ◆ Selling means finding the one buyer. There is no exchange to sell into. The realistic counterparty is a refiner or specialist dealer, at their purchase price on the day.

Unlike platinum or palladium, rhodium has essentially one well-documented physically backed product: the 1nvest Rhodium ETF, listed in Johannesburg. The figures below are from its factsheet as at 31 December 2025.

Three construction details decide what an investor actually owns. The metal is segregated, individually identified and allocated in secured vaults, and the issuer may not introduce additional risks — in particular it may not lend the metal out. The metal entitlement factor falls every day to reflect the management fee, so one unit represents slightly less metal with each passing day. And the reported return is a rand return while rhodium is quoted in US dollars: the holder carries two currency effects on top of the metal price.

The size of this market should also be kept in proportion. Johnson Matthey reported rhodium ETF holdings of around 22,000 ounces at the end of 2025, the highest for more than five years after South African investors added modestly, while noting that rhodium ETFs "have seen little activity in recent years". Palladium ETFs held 1.14 million ounces at the same date — more than fifty times as much.

The IPA names the integrated producers: in South Africa, Valterra Platinum, Sibanye-Stillwater and Impala Platinum operate full mine-to-metal processing, while Northam ships high-grade concentrate to Europe for final refining; in Russia the metal from Norilsk Nickel is refined by a third party, Krastsvetmet.

Two caveats apply to anyone using equities as a rhodium proxy. First, the share price follows rhodium only indirectly, because rhodium is one component of the 4E basket: in 2025 producers benefited additionally from unusually elevated ruthenium and iridium prices, while chrome and copper were also firm. Second, the risks that dominate these shares have nothing to do with rhodium at all — power supply, deep-level labour costs, exchange rates and permitting cycles that run from eight months to eight years.

• ◆ Illiquidity. No exchange trading, no futures, no hedging instrument. Industrial consumers secure supply through contracts, not futures — and a private investor has neither.
• ◆ A trading spread of 15.0%, measured over 142 quotation days in 2026, constant and not a matter of negotiation.
• ◆ No VAT exemption. The EU exemption covers investment gold only (see the tax section).
• ◆ Single-source pricing. Johnson Matthey states that it does not administer a benchmark; two dealers can quote differently on the same day.
• ◆ A structural break in the drivetrain. Battery electric vehicles need no three-way catalyst, and the IPA names this as the long-term substitution risk.
• ◆ Documented drawdowns. Minus 90% in about four and a half months in 2008, and minus 77% in the annual average between 2021 and 2024.
• ◆ Not a crisis metal. No central bank reserves, and total exchange-traded holdings of around 22,000 ounces at the end of 2025. Rhodium has no safe-haven bid to fall back on.

Physical rhodium is subject to the full German VAT rate of 19%. The reason is worth stating precisely, because it is frequently garbled: the exemption that makes investment gold VAT-free was introduced by Council Directive 98/80/EC and now sits in Articles 344 and 346 of Directive 2006/112/EC, and it is implemented in Germany in Section 25c of the VAT Act (UStG). Article 344 defines investment gold as bars or wafers of a weight accepted by the bullion markets and a fineness of at least 995 thousandths, plus gold coins of at least 900 thousandths minted after 1800 that are or have been legal tender and whose price does not exceed the gold value by more than 80%.

Every word of that definition is about gold. There is no equivalent provision for rhodium, platinum, palladium or silver, so rhodium is taxed at the standard national rate like any other industrial good. This applies to bars, grains, sponge and fabricated items alike.

For platinum and silver, German investors often reduce the VAT burden through the margin scheme under Section 25a UStG: a dealer buying pre-owned goods may charge VAT on the trade margin instead of the full selling price. In practice that route runs through pre-owned investment coins.

For rhodium that route is largely closed, for two independent reasons. First, rhodium investment coins effectively do not exist — the trade runs in bars, grains and sponge — so the second-hand coin market the scheme relies on is absent. Second, Section 25a (1) no. 3 UStG excludes precious metals in raw form, which is precisely the form rhodium is traded in; German practice for collector coins has been handled differently, but a rhodium bar or sponge lot is not a collector coin.

We therefore do not quote an effective rate for margin-taxed rhodium, because there is no settled practice to quote. Anyone who is offered rhodium under Section 25a should ask in writing which goods the scheme is being applied to and have the treatment confirmed by a tax adviser before paying.

Physical rhodium is a private asset in the sense of Section 23 (1) sentence 1 no. 2 of the German Income Tax Act (EStG). A gain on sale after a holding period of more than one year is not taxable, regardless of the amount. Sold within the year, the gain is taxed at the personal income tax rate. Note how the deadline is computed: it runs by calendar year, not 365 days, and a sale on the anniversary itself is still inside the period — the first tax-free day is the day after.