Current Ruthenium Price and Ruthenium Rate with Chart

The best known ruthenium quotation is the Johnson Matthey Base Price. Johnson Matthey defines its Base Prices as the company’s quoted offer prices to customers for wholesale quantities of platinum group metals, set by its own 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%.

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 bid and offer columns for gold, silver, platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium and ruthenium — populated only during the opening hours of its German trading desk.

Ruthenium is also a step less formalised than rhodium in market infrastructure. In January 2023 the London Platinum and Palladium Market introduced an accreditation scheme for rhodium sponge, giving that metal a delivery standard verified by periodic sample testing. No equivalent scheme for ruthenium is named in any of the primary sources consulted for this page — Johnson Matthey, the IPA, the USGS, Umicore or Heraeus. That is the absence of a mention rather than positive proof that none exists, but it is the state of the evidence, and it means a ruthenium buyer relies on the refiner’s own documentation.

• ◆ Caprolactam, the precursor to nylon 6. This is what drove the increase from 426,000 ounces in 2023 to 567,000 in 2025, and the capacity behind it was Chinese. For 2026 Johnson Matthey expects a double-digit decline in Chinese chemical demand, "as the domestic caprolactam market moves into oversupply, triggering the postponement or cancellation of planned capacity additions".
• ◆ Acetic acid, using ruthenium-iridium systems. Here the platinum group metals compete with each other inside the plant: because iridium and ruthenium became so expensive, Johnson Matthey reports that this has "made the alternative rhodium-catalysed Monsanto process more competitive" again. The cheapest of the three wins the next reactor.
• ◆ Catalytic wet air oxidation for industrial effluent treatment — and the one place where the price rise has demonstrably destroyed demand. Johnson Matthey: "With the price almost quadrupling between January 2025 and March 2026, there has been some demand destruction, for example in catalytic waste-water treatment processes", which face increased competition from alternative non-PGM processes.
• ◆ Ammonia cracking in the hydrogen chain: ruthenium is, in the IPA’s words, "a highly active catalyst for ammonia decomposition". Cheaper nickel catalysts exist but need higher temperatures and therefore more energy.
• ◆ Asymmetric and transfer hydrogenation and further homogeneous catalysis round out the category.

• ◆ Ruthenium oxide resistor pastes. The IPA puts the reach of this one application starkly: they are "used in resistor components for almost every chip device, hybrid integrated circuitry, and arrays". Johnson Matthey expects "very strong demand from the electronics industry" in 2026, both for these pastes and for hard disks.
• ◆ Hard disk drives. Ruthenium plays, in the IPA’s formulation, "a significant role, albeit in relatively small quantities, in current hard disk drive technologies"; the driver is data centre construction, and Johnson Matthey named "strong demand for hard disks for data centre expansions" for 2025.
• ◆ Semiconductor interconnects. Ruthenium precursors are used for chemical vapour deposition of nanometre-thin ruthenium films "used as interconnect materials in very small device architectures. Ruthenium is expected to play an increasing role as device miniaturisation continues."
• ◆ Contacts and wear protection. Ruthenium is "one of the most effective hardeners for platinum and palladium contact alloys, providing high wear resistance", and rhodium-ruthenium coatings are regarded in some demanding consumer electronics applications as superior to gold-plated contacts.

The smallest of the three main categories is the steadiest, and the technical reason is a property no other platinum group metal shares to the same degree: ruthenium dioxide conducts electricity and resists corrosion. Ruthenium is the platinum metal whose oxide keeps working instead of insulating — which is why it ends up on electrodes and in resistor pastes rather than only in catalysts.

• ◆ Chlor-alkali electrolysis. Ruthenium oxide and mixed metal oxide coatings on dimensionally stable anodes, which the IPA describes as "widely recognised in chlorine evolution and chloralkali systems". The substitution potential is rated "relatively low" because the technology is "deeply embedded in a capital-intensive process". Electrodes are recoated on a cycle, so this is a base load tied to the installed plant base rather than to this year’s order book.
• ◆ Gas diffusion electrodes, seawater chlorination and electrochemical ballast water treatment use the same coating family.
• ◆ PEM water electrolysis, increasingly with ruthenium and iridium together. The IPA gives the precise division of labour: "ruthenium confers higher activity while iridium confers higher durability, so a well-designed combination has the potential to be optimal for commercial electrolyser operation".

The residual category, "Other" at 11.9% or 150,000 ounces in 2025, includes jewellery and the anti-reflective coatings on vehicle mirrors. Hardening additions to platinum and palladium alloys do not appear as a separate line in the Johnson Matthey statistics; the IPA counts them under electrical uses as contact alloys.

One figure often quoted elsewhere is deliberately absent: the claim that a fraction of a per cent of ruthenium measurably hardens platinum. The primary sources consulted do not support any such percentage. The IPA states only, qualitatively, that ruthenium is "one of the most effective hardeners" for platinum and palladium contact alloys. A specific percentage that no primary source carries does not belong on a page about prices.

The IPA gives a reason that applies to ruthenium and iridium together and is rarely quoted: "Ruthenium and iridium share many properties and so are frequently used together. Their synergy can increase performance, especially the industrially important combination of activity plus durability, even at low metal loadings. This reduces the risk of substitution to other metals and technologies, so supporting demand despite high prices."

The mechanism is worth spelling out, because it explains the demand table. Where the amount of ruthenium per device is tiny — a resistor, a disk platter, a chip interconnect — even a quadrupled metal price barely moves the unit cost, so nobody redesigns the product. Demand destruction appears only where ruthenium is used in bulk, which is exactly where Johnson Matthey found it: in catalytic waste water treatment. A high price does not thin out this demand evenly; it cuts off the heavy users first.

The IPA states it without qualification: "ruthenium is not mined as a standalone metal but is recovered together with the other PGMs from the same ore deposit, either as a by-product of platinum- or palladium-led operations or from nickel-copper sulphide deposits." By mass, ruthenium is about 7% of the PGM basket, while platinum and palladium together make up 86%. For scale: against the 30.2 tonnes of primary ruthenium in 2025 stand an estimated 170 tonnes of platinum and 190 tonnes of palladium from mining in the same year.

What decides ruthenium availability is which reef is being mined. In South Africa’s Bushveld Complex, the UG2 chromitite reef contains markedly more rhodium, ruthenium and iridium than the Merensky reef; in the UG2 those three can exceed 20% of the total PGM content, while in platinum-palladium ores elsewhere their share "rarely exceed[s] a few per cent". The geology, not the price, sets the ratio.

The physical effort behind each ounce is worth stating once. South African PGM mines work at depths from under 500 metres to around 2.2 kilometres; the ore typically contains 2 to 6 grams of PGM per tonne; and depending on grade, 10 to 40 tonnes of ore must be moved to win a single troy ounce of platinum — with ruthenium coming along as a passenger in that same tonnage.

Even when capital does respond, time does not. The IPA gives lead times of 8 to 18 months for brownfield restarts, 3 to 4 years for shallow mechanised greenfield projects and 6 to 8 years for large deep shafts. A price signal can produce additional ruthenium after years at best, and only if a platinum mine plan makes sense on platinum economics.

Beyond South Africa, the IPA names Zimbabwe and Russia, with small quantities from North America, and adds a point with direct relevance for European industrial buyers: "There is essentially no primary supply from EU27/European countries." The ores matter as much as the countries — the operations at Norilsk-Talnakh in Russia and in Zimbabwe, Canada and the United States "contain much lower concentrations of ruthenium than in South African orebodies". Concrete tonnages for those countries were not available from either source.

For rhodium, roughly a third of total supply comes from scrapped catalytic converters, and that flow responds to price with a delay of months. For ruthenium, Johnson Matthey’s May 2026 report shows no open-loop secondary supply at all — the table has a primary line and nothing else. The IPA describes the consequence for Europe: "With negligible primary supply or open-loop recycling in the EU, the region is reliant on imports of ruthenium to provide new metal for industrial uses."

The reason is physical rather than economic. Ruthenium sits in chip resistors, hard disk layers and electrode coatings in minute quantities and in mixtures. There is no collection system comparable to the one for spent autocatalysts, where a single component in a single product carries grams of metal and a scrapyard knows exactly what it has. What does come back is mostly closed loop: metal that never leaves its original owner, for instance when electrodes are stripped and recoated.

Johnson Matthey reports that "Chinese export controls on ruthenium and ruthenium-containing materials, imposed in February 2025, may have intensified shortages in other regions". The same report names ruthenium’s "status as a critical mineral with a geographically limited resource base" as a motive for strategic buying in China.

We could not confirm the legal basis for the export controls, and rather than repeat the claim as fact we state what the documents say. The MOFCOM and customs administration announcement no. 10/2025 of 4 February 2025 imposes export controls on items related to tungsten, tellurium, bismuth, molybdenum and indium. Ruthenium is not listed in it. It is possible that Johnson Matthey is referring to a different measure, or that ruthenium is caught indirectly through precursors or technology items. Until that is resolved, the correct form of the sentence is the one used here: a market report says so, and the published announcement does not name the metal.

• ◆ The spread is the dominant cost, and it is the largest in the group. Measured over 142 quotation days from 1 April to 23 October 2026, a refiner’s ruthenium purchase price sat 30.0% below its sales price. Buying and selling on the same day costs almost a third of the stake — 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, sponge and powder. That also removes the coin-specific tax route available for other metals (see the tax section).
• ◆ Purity and documentation carry the resale. Johnson Matthey quotes wholesale ruthenium as sponge at a minimum 99.9%, and the IPA gives typical refined purities above 99.95%. Unlike rhodium sponge, ruthenium has no LPPM accreditation scheme named in the sources consulted, so the refiner’s own paperwork 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 — and on 30% of days that price is simply yesterday’s.

This is where ruthenium differs from every other precious metal on this site. In its May 2026 report, Johnson Matthey reports exchange-traded holdings for platinum (quarterly in- and outflows), palladium (1.14 million ounces at the end of 2025) and rhodium (around 22,000 ounces at the end of 2025). For ruthenium it reports no exchange-traded holdings, and the IPA factsheet names no investment product either.

The honest way to put that is as the state of the evidence, not as a verdict: the two authoritative market reports for this sector do not show exchange-traded ruthenium holdings, which is the absence of a mention rather than positive proof that no product exists anywhere. For a prospective buyer the practical consequence is the same — there is no documented, physically backed, listed vehicle to compare against physical metal.

A basket product is not a substitute. Platinum and palladium make up 86% of the PGM basket by mass and ruthenium about 7%, so a basket tracks platinum and palladium and tells an investor almost nothing about the ruthenium price.

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.

For ruthenium specifically there is an objection that applies to no other metal on this site quite so sharply. The headline South African revenue metric is the 4E basket — platinum, palladium, rhodium and gold. Ruthenium and iridium are not in it; they appear only in the 6E content. Johnson Matthey treats their contribution as an additional effect for 2025: producers benefited "from unusually elevated ruthenium and iridium prices" on top of a 4E basket that rose from around 24,000 ZAR per ounce in January 2025 to over 40,000 ZAR by the year end. Anyone buying these shares as a ruthenium proxy is buying a position in which ruthenium does not even appear in the standard figure.

• ◆ A trading spread of 30.0%, measured over 142 quotation days in 2026, constant to the decimal place and not a matter of negotiation. The single largest cost item, and the highest of any PGM.
• ◆ Illiquidity. No exchange trading, no futures, no hedging instrument, and a quotation that is revised on only 70% of trading days.
• ◆ No VAT exemption. The EU exemption covers investment gold only (see the tax section).
• ◆ A narrow circle of buyers at resale — in practice the same specialist dealers, and powder or sponge requires an assay.
• ◆ Technology risk on a product timescale. HAMR hard disks use "much lower amounts of ruthenium", and the IPA expects the ruthenium content of new media to be lower than in current technologies. Rhodium’s drivetrain risk runs over decades; this one runs over a product cycle.
• ◆ Demand destruction has demonstrably already happened — in catalytic waste water treatment, as a consequence of the price move between January 2025 and March 2026.
• ◆ Single-source pricing. Johnson Matthey states that it does not administer a benchmark; two dealers can quote differently on the same day.
• ◆ Not a crisis metal. No central bank reserves, no reported exchange-traded holdings, no investment tradition — and documented falls: minus 73% within 2008, followed by a decade of annual averages below 600 USD per ounce.

Physical ruthenium 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%. Article 346 then obliges member states to exempt the supply, intra-Community acquisition and import of investment gold.

Every word of that definition is about gold. There is no equivalent provision for ruthenium, rhodium, iridium, platinum, palladium or silver, so ruthenium is taxed at the standard national rate like any other industrial good. This applies to bars, grains, sponge, powder 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 ruthenium it is largely closed, for two independent reasons. First, ruthenium investment coins effectively do not exist — the trade runs in bars, grains, sponge and powder — 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 ruthenium is traded in; German practice for collector coins has been handled differently, but a ruthenium sponge lot or powder consignment is not a collector coin.

We therefore do not quote an effective rate for margin-taxed ruthenium, because there is no settled practice to quote. Anyone who is offered ruthenium 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 ruthenium 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 date, not 365 days, and a sale on the anniversary itself is still inside the period — the first tax-free day is the day after.