Palladium
LPPM / NYMEX
The metal that rode the gasoline engine from $200 to $3,400 and is now riding it back down.
Top Producers
share of 2025 mine production
Top Consumers
share of 2025 gross demand by region
Main Uses
share of 2024 gross demand by end use (Johnson Matthey, WPIC)
Top Exporters
share among palladium exporters by 2024 export value (UN Comtrade); Russia's Nornickel and South Africa's Bushveld back the metal, with the US, UK, and Germany as refiners and re-exporters
Top Importers
share among palladium importers by 2024 import value (UN Comtrade); China leads autocatalyst demand and became Russia's largest customer, ahead of the US and Germany
Annual mine supply
roughly 6.5 million ounces, plus roughly 2.5 to 3 million recycled
as of 2024
Russian share of mine supply
roughly 40 percent, almost all Nornickel
as of 2024
Autocatalyst share of demand
roughly 80 percent
as of 2024
Record price
roughly $3,440 per ounce, March 7, 2022
Price
roughly $1,250 per troy ounce, roughly 65 percent below the 2022 record
as of June 2026
Palladium is the purest single-story commodity in the precious complex: roughly 80 percent of demand is gasoline-engine autocatalysts, so the price is a leveraged bet on internal combustion. Supply is the mirror-image concentration. Russia's Nornickel produces roughly 40 percent of the world's palladium as a by-product of Arctic nickel mining, South Africa roughly 35 percent, and nothing else matters much. By-product economics make supply almost completely price-inelastic: Nornickel mines nickel, and palladium comes out regardless of whether it fetches $400 or $3,000. When demand outruns that fixed supply, only price rationing and Russian state stockpile sales can balance the market, and the size of those stockpiles has been a state secret since the Soviet era.
That structure produced two of the great commodity squeezes. In 2000-2001, chaotic Russian export licensing drove palladium to roughly $1,090 and panicked Ford into stockpiling near the top; Ford wrote off $952 million in January 2002 when the price collapsed. The longer squeeze ran from 2016 to 2022: tightening Chinese and European gasoline emissions standards raised per-vehicle loadings into eight straight years of supply deficit, palladium passed platinum in 2017, passed gold in 2019, and on March 7, 2022, days after Russia invaded Ukraine, spot palladium hit a record near $3,440 on fears that sanctions would cut off Nornickel. The fears proved wrong: Russian metal kept flowing, Western sanctions never barred it, and the panic marked the exact top.
The descent since has been brutal and structural. Battery EVs need no autocatalyst, automakers substituted cheaper platinum into gasoline catalysts at scale, and recycled metal from scrapped cars grew into roughly a quarter of supply. Palladium fell back below platinum in February 2024 for the first time since 2017 and traded near $1,000 through mid-2025 before the broad precious metals rally lifted it to roughly $1,400 by late 2025; at roughly $1,250 in June 2026 it remains roughly 65 percent off the 2022 record. The market's remaining questions are how fast combustion-engine production fades, whether hybrids (which still need catalysts) cushion the decline, and what happens to the high-cost South African shafts that cannot survive on these prices.
How It Trades
| Venue | OTC loco London/Zurich under LPPM good delivery standards; NYMEX (CME Group) for futures |
| Benchmark contract | NYMEX Palladium Futures (PA); LBMA Palladium Price auction as the OTC reference |
| Contract size | 100 troy ounces |
| Price terms | USD per troy ounce |
| Settlement | PA is physically delivered into exchange-approved depositories; OTC settles loco London or loco Zurich; the LBMA Palladium Price auction prints twice daily in London |
| Typical curve | Historically backwardated during the 2016-2022 deficit years, with lease rates occasionally spiking above 10 percent; reverted toward contango as the market swung to surplus after 2023 |
| Liquidity | The thinnest of the four exchange-traded precious metals: NYMEX PA trades only a few thousand contracts per day, and the metal is notorious for outsized daily moves on small flow |
Where It Trades
approximate share of global daily traded volume across futures and OTC, 2025; the listed futures market is unusually thin, so most flow is OTC and unreported
Supply and Demand
Top producers
- Russia: roughly 2.6 million ounces per year, roughly 40 percent of mine supply, almost entirely Nornickel nickel by-product
- South Africa: roughly 2.3 million ounces per year from the Bushveld Complex
- North America: roughly 600,000 to 700,000 ounces per year (Sibanye-Stillwater in Montana, Canadian nickel by-product)
- Zimbabwe: roughly 400,000 ounces per year
- Recycling from spent autocatalysts: roughly 2.5 to 3 million ounces per year and growing with the scrappage of the 2016-2022 high-loading vehicle fleet
By-product supply does not respond to the palladium price. The marginal balancing items are Russian stockpile sales of undisclosed size and the flow of end-of-life vehicles into recyclers.
Top consumers
- China: the largest gasoline vehicle market and the largest palladium consumer
- United States: gasoline and hybrid autocatalyst demand
- Europe: gasoline catalyst demand that grew as diesel's share collapsed
- Japan: autocatalysts and electronics
Major uses
- Gasoline and hybrid autocatalysts: roughly 80 percent of demand
- Electronics: multilayer ceramic capacitors and plating: roughly 10 percent
- Chemical catalysts and dentistry: roughly 5 to 10 percent
- Jewellery and investment: marginal since the price decoupled from retail in the 2019-2022 spike
Battery EVs eliminate the autocatalyst entirely; hybrids retain it. The demand trajectory is therefore a race between EV penetration and the hybrid bridge.
What Moves the Price
- Gasoline and hybrid vehicle production, especially in China and the US
- EV penetration rates, which determine the speed of structural demand decline
- Platinum-for-palladium substitution economics in catalyst formulations
- Russian supply continuity: Nornickel output, export routes, and sanctions risk
- Recycled supply from end-of-life vehicles, the fastest-growing source
- Emissions standards (China 6, Euro 7), which set per-vehicle loadings
- South African cost-curve attrition: shaft closures remove the high-cost supply tail
- Lease rates, the cleanest read on physical availability in a thin market
Moments That Made the Market
1803
William Hyde Wollaston discovers palladium, naming it for the asteroid Pallas
1989
Three-way catalytic converters spread with tightening US emissions rules; palladium's gasoline-catalyst era begins
2001
Chaotic Russian export licensing squeezes palladium to roughly $1,090; Ford stockpiles near the top and writes off $952 million in January 2002
2017
Palladium overtakes platinum for the first time since 2001 as gasoline engines displace diesel after the Volkswagen scandal
2019
Palladium passes the gold price; eight consecutive annual supply deficits are under way
2022
Russia invades Ukraine in February; palladium spikes to a record near $3,440 on March 7 on Nornickel cutoff fears, then retreats as Russian supply keeps flowing
2024
Palladium falls back below platinum in February for the first time in seven years as substitution and EV growth bite
2025
The metal rallies from near $1,000 to roughly $1,400 as the whole precious complex reprices, with recycling supplying roughly a quarter of the market
What Changed Since the 2010 Handbook Era
- The 2010s diesel-to-gasoline rotation that made palladium the best-performing major commodity has fully reversed: EVs are now shrinking the entire autocatalyst pie
- Palladium went from half the platinum price in 2010 to triple it in 2021 and back below it in February 2024
- The March 2022 Norilsk panic spike to roughly $3,440 marked the structural top; sanctions never actually stopped Russian palladium
- Automakers re-engineered catalysts to swap cheaper platinum in, reversing the substitution direction of the 2000s
- Recycled autocatalyst metal grew into roughly a quarter of supply, a flow that did not exist at scale in the 2010 handbook era
- The London palladium fix became an LBMA-administered electronic auction in 2014-2015