Copper theft in the US: insurance claims, the copper price link and 50 state scrap metal laws

50-state scrap metal law ledger for copper

Checked quarterly against ReMA's compendium and state legislature sites, and after each legislative session. Last checked 2026-10-27. Entries are neutral records of public data; each links to its source record.

Copper theft claims fell 80% from 2011 to 2018, the last year of national data

The only national, repeated count of copper theft is NICB's analysis of insurance claims in ISO ClaimSearch. It rose to a 2011 peak, fell steeply after states tightened scrap laws, and stops in 2018.

NICB identified 13,861 metal theft claims from January 2006 to November 2008, 25,083 for 2009 to 2011 and 33,775 for 2010 to 2012, with copper in 96% of the 2010 to 2012 claims (NICB, May 2013).

Annual counts peaked at 14,676 claims in 2011 and fell every year after 2013, reaching 2,887 claims in 2018 (NICB, October 2019). The fall from 2011 to 2018 is 80.3%.

Claims capture insured losses only. A theft from an uninsured vacant house, or one absorbed by a utility or carrier, never reaches the database, and NICB itself says comprehensive empirical data is elusive (NICB, 2013).

The widely repeated cost of about $1 billion a year comes from a 2007 U.S. Department of Energy estimate cited by NICB (NICB, 2019). We could not open the 2007 DOE original, so the figure is shown as a secondary citation only.

New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ohio filed the most metal theft claims in 2017 to 2018

The claims cluster in older industrial metros of the Northeast and Midwest. Per resident, Connecticut, New Jersey and Rhode Island rank highest.

The New York-Newark-Jersey City metro area had the most claims of any metro in 2017 to 2018 with 415 (NICB, 2019). The median state rate was 1.6 claims per 100,000 residents over the two years.

NICB's October 2019 release and chart give Connecticut 13.8 claims per 100,000 residents, the report text says 23.0, and the state table says 6.8. Only the table value can be reproduced from the published counts (244 claims, 3,572,665 residents), so the map and table use the table values.

Telecom carriers now report more copper theft incidents than insurers once did

Since NICB stopped publishing, the largest current numbers come from communications providers. Electric utility figures are older, and federal agencies have issued statements rather than counts.

Communications providers reported 5,770 intentional theft and vandalism incidents from June to December 2024, an average of 824 a month or 27 a day, and the attacks disrupted service for more than 1.5 million customers (NCTA, 2025). Ten states accounted for 93% of the incidents.

The NCTA survey covers participating providers only and its authors say the true number is likely higher. On average each outage affected about 2,000 customers and lasted 138 hours (NCTA, 2025).

AT&T said it logged more than 10,400 copper theft incidents in 2025, about 200 a week, with losses of about $82 million (Light Reading, April 2026). That is roughly $7,885 per incident. These are company figures reported by trade press and are Tier 3 here.

For electric utilities, the Department of Energy's 2010 assessment found 25 of 2,021 large outages (10,000 or more customers) over five years were caused by copper wire theft, about 1% (DOE, 2010). A thief typically took copper worth several hundred dollars while the utility spent just over $1,000 on repairs.

• FBI (2008, via NICB 2012): an unclassified intelligence assessment said copper thieves threaten US critical infrastructure and present a risk to public safety and national security.
• DOE (2010): copper theft legislation had passed in all but five states, 45 in total, by August 2010.
• DOE Inspector General (2011): one investigation found up to 30,000 pounds of copper stolen by contractor employees at a Los Alamos National Laboratory facility.
• FCC (October 2025): Commissioner Olivia Trusty called theft and vandalism of communications networks a growing epidemic and cited at least 5,770 incidents in 2024.

Outage effects on the grid are tracked separately in our power outages by state report, and electrocution risks to people who cut live conductors are covered in electrical injury statistics.

Claims tracked the copper price until state laws took hold

Insured theft claims and the copper price fell together from 2014 to 2016, which produces a high correlation. The short-run link is weak, and claims kept falling when the price recovered in 2017 and 2018.

Across 48 months from January 2014 to December 2017, monthly NICB claims and the IMF global copper price correlate at r = 0.56 (NICB dataset; FRED). NICB, using a different price source, reported 0.55 for the same period.

Month-to-month changes correlate at only r = 0.11. With the price leading by three months the level correlation rises to 0.75. On eight annual points for 2011 to 2018 it is 0.77. NICB's earlier report for 2014 to 2016 found 0.902, and its 2017 to 2018 report found 0.47.

The price has since moved far above the range in the claims data. The annual average was $8,824 per metric ton in 2011, the peak claims year, and $9,947 in 2025; January to September 2026 averaged $13,419. Monthly price history and wire cost effects are in our copper wire price index.

11 states ban cash for copper and 48 require a seller ID

Every state regulates scrap buyers, but the rules differ widely. The ledger above codes each state's ID, record, hold, cash and penalty rules from ReMA's November 2025 compendium, with key statutes checked on official legislature sites.

Cash limits for copper range from a ban in states such as Georgia, Louisiana, Minnesota and Tennessee to caps of $25 in South Carolina, $50 in Alabama and Iowa, and $1,000 in Florida and North Dakota (ReMA, 2025; Fla. Stat. 538.235).

The heaviest penalties we found tie the sentence to infrastructure or to repair costs rather than to the scrap value of the metal:

• Mississippi: 3 to 20 years when the value of the metal plus repair costs exceeds $25,000.
• South Carolina: up to 15 years if a nonferrous metal violation causes great bodily injury; up to 3 years for disrupting service to critical infrastructure or more than 10 customers.
• Montana: up to 10 years and a $50,000 fine when damage reaches $1,500 or more.
• Texas: damaging a copper or brass component of a critical infrastructure facility is a third degree felony, and theft of such copper is graded one level higher.
• West Virginia: disrupting utility service to 10 or more households is a felony on a second offense, with 1 to 10 years for a third (W. Va. Code 61-3-49b).
• Missouri: stealing wire or transformers used for telecom or electricity is a class C felony at any value (RSMo 570.030).
• Hawaii: theft of 1 pound or more of copper is a class C felony (HRS 708-835.7).

Colorado is the newest change in the ledger: HB26-1101, signed May 7, 2026, extends the state's commodity metal rules to critical infrastructure material and bars cash unless the seller is photographed or the sale is under $300 (Colorado General Assembly). Code adoption and licensing questions are covered on our code pages.

Jobsite theft: 11,574 pieces of heavy equipment stolen in 2016 and 21% recovered

There is no national count of building wire stolen from construction sites. The closest public measures are NCIC heavy equipment theft reports and the commercial share of NICB metal theft claims.

NCIC received 11,574 heavy equipment theft reports in 2016 and recorded 2,442 recoveries, a 21% recovery rate; Texas alone had 2,375 thefts, 20.5% of the total (NER and NICB, 2016 report). Estimates of the annual cost of equipment theft range from $300 million to $1 billion, most near $400 million, excluding stolen tools and building materials.

Wire is a minority of insured metal theft. Loss descriptions mentioned wire or wiring in 773 of 5,904 claims in 2017 to 2018 (13.1%) and in 3,527 of 27,514 claims in 2014 to 2017 (12.8%); pipe and plumbing terms were more common (NICB, 2019).

NICB has named construction sites as frequent victims because metal is often left on site unguarded (NICB, 2019). Builder's risk and inland marine cover for stored wire is discussed in our electrical contractor insurance requirements report, and business-side context is on our business pages.

Counts from the ledger

Get the calculations (CSV)

The numbers that matter

1. NICB counted 2,887 metal theft insurance claims in the US in 2018, down 4% from 3,017 in 2017; 2018 is the last loss year NICB has published.^[1][4]
2. US metal theft claims fell from 14,676 in 2011 to 2,887 in 2018, a decline of 80.3% across NICB report vintages.^[9][1]
3. Copper was named in 95% of the 5,904 US metal theft claims filed for 2017 to 2018, and 41% of those claims were on commercial policies.^[1]
4. New Jersey (570), Pennsylvania (488), Ohio (410), New York (405) and Illinois (333) filed the most US metal theft claims in 2017 to 2018, 37.4% of the national total.^[1]
5. Connecticut had the highest metal theft claim rate in 2017 to 2018 at 6.8 claims per 100,000 residents in NICB's state table; the same report also prints 13.8 and 23.0.^[1]
6. Ohio's metal theft claims fell from 1,485 in 2014 to 208 in 2017, a drop of 86.0%, the steepest among the top five states.^[2]
7. Monthly US metal theft claims and the IMF global copper price correlated at r = 0.56 over January 2014 to December 2017, matching NICB's own 0.55.^[2][13]
8. On month-to-month changes the same correlation is only r = 0.11 (2014 to 2017), so the level correlation mostly reflects both series falling together.^[2][13]
9. US metal theft claims per $1,000 per metric ton of copper price fell from 1,858.6 in 2013 to 442.1 in 2018, a decline of 76.2%.^[7][1][13]
10. Communications providers reported 5,770 intentional theft and vandalism incidents from June to December 2024, affecting more than 1.5 million US customers; California and Texas accounted for 51%.^[19]
11. AT&T logged more than 10,400 copper theft incidents in 2025 with about $82 million in losses; more than 7,300 incidents (70.2%) were in California.^[20]
12. In a 2008 survey of 618 US electric utilities, ESFI counted 18,400 copper theft incidents with $22 million in repair costs, about $1,200 per incident (DOE, 2010).^[16]
13. 11 states ban cash for copper at any amount and 12 cap cash payments, from $25 in South Carolina to $1,000 in Florida and North Dakota (ReMA, November 2025).^[14][15]
14. 14 states carry a criminal penalty tied specifically to utility, telecom or critical infrastructure metal, including Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Nevada and Colorado.^[14][28][30]
15. NCIC logged 11,574 US heavy equipment thefts in 2016, 14.3% fewer than the 13,511 in 2008; only 21% of the 2016 thefts were recovered.^[21][23]

In short

• NICB counted 14,676 insured metal theft claims in 2011 and 2,887 in 2018, a fall of 80.3%; 95% of the 2017 to 2018 claims involved copper.
• We found no national claims series after 2018: NICB's latest metal theft release we found is dated October 29, 2019, so current copper theft counts come from utilities, carriers and police.
• Monthly claims and the IMF copper price moved together from 2014 to 2017 (r = 0.56), but month-to-month changes barely line up (r = 0.11), so most of the link is a shared downward trend.
• Claims per $1,000 per metric ton of copper price fell from 1,858.6 in 2013 to 442.1 in 2018, a drop of 76.2%: theft claims fell much faster than the price did.
• The copper price reached $14,473 per metric ton in September 2026, 2.22 times the 2018 average, yet no national claims data exist to show whether insured thefts followed.
• Telecom carriers report the largest current numbers: 5,770 theft and vandalism incidents in seven months of 2024 (NCTA survey) and more than 10,400 AT&T copper theft incidents in 2025.
• Our 50-state ledger of ReMA summaries finds 48 states require a seller ID, 11 ban cash for copper, 30 allow a hold that can cover copper and 14 carry an infrastructure-specific penalty.
• On construction sites, NCIC logged 11,574 heavy equipment thefts in 2016 and only 21% were recovered; there is no national series for stolen building wire.

Common questions

Keep reading

• Copper wire price index
• Business and Exits guide
• Copper Wire Prices: The US Producer Price Index for Copper Wire and Cable Against Copper Metal, 2016 to 2026
• Data Center Electrician Pay, Jobs and Where the Work Is Growing
• Data center power consumption in the US: official estimates, state sales and grid forecasts
• All electrical contractor data

How we built this report

Selection: we used every NICB metal theft release and ForeCAST report we could open (2009 to 2019), the NICB 2019 monthly and state dataset, the IMF global copper price (FRED PCOPPUSDM, monthly, updated 2026-10-22), DOE and FCC documents, the NCTA 2025 industry report, and NER/NICB equipment theft reports. NICB pages block scripts, so most NICB documents were read as Internet Archive copies, labeled in the references.

Claims series: ISO ClaimSearch is a live database and NICB changed its keyword filters between reports, so the same loss year carries different counts in different releases. We used the latest published vintage for each year and list the alternatives in table t1. All counts are insured claims, not incidents.

Correlation: we matched NICB's 48 monthly claim counts for 2014 to 2017 to the monthly IMF price and computed Pearson r on levels, on first differences, with a three-month price lead, and on eight annual points (2011 to 2018). The calculations are in scripts/compute_corr.py and derived_metrics.csv. Correlation is reported without any causal claim.

State law ledger: each state was coded from ReMA's State Metals Theft Statutes compendium (compiled November 11, 2025; per-state summaries current as of 2019 to 2025) and ReMA's payment, hold and statute workbooks. Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Missouri and West Virginia were checked against official legislature text on 2026-10-27. Statutes amended after a state's ReMA summary date may not be reflected, except Colorado HB26-1101 (2026). The infrastructure penalty column reflects criminal provisions included in the compendium or checked statutes; states may have separate critical infrastructure laws not covered by ReMA.

Conflicts: where one NICB report prints different figures for the same measure (Connecticut's per-capita rate appears as 13.8, 23.0 and 6.8), we used the value reproducible from the published counts and flagged the others. The FCC speech and NCTA report give different start months for the 5,770 incidents; we used NCTA's June to December 2024.

Exclusions: vendor blogs, roundup pages and unsourced figures were excluded, including a widely repeated FBI incident count for 2019 that we could not trace to a primary source. Company figures from AT&T are Tier 3 because the company's own post could not be opened. See excluded.md.

Last updated 2026-10-27. Data and tables are licensed CC BY 4.0. This page is research, not legal advice.

This report presents published data with its limitations. It is not legal, financial or investment advice.

Sources by tier

Tier 1: primary and official sources (26)

• [1] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Metal Theft Claims from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018 (ForeCAST report, public dissemination). 2017 to 2018. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [2] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Metal Theft Claims from January 1, 2014 through December 31, 2017 (ForeCAST report) and 2019 release dataset. 2014 to 2017. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [3] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Metal Theft Claims from January 1, 2014 through December 31, 2016 (ForeCAST report). 2014 to 2016. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [4] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). NICB Sees Decline in Metal Thefts (news release, Oct. 29, 2019). 2017 to 2018. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [5] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Metal Thefts Continue Downward Trend (news release, April 4, 2019). 2014 to 2017. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [6] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). NICB Reports Steep Drop in Metal Theft Claims (news release, Nov. 21, 2017). 2014 to 2016. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [7] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Insured Metal Theft Claims Take Dramatic Dive (NICB blog of the 2016 release). 2013 to 2015. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [8] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Metal Theft Claims Down 8% Since 2012 (NICB blog of the 2015 release). 2012 to 2014. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [9] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Insured Metal Theft Claims See Three-Year Decline (news release, May 8, 2014). 2011 to 2013. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [10] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). 2013 Metal Theft Report (news release, May 1, 2013). 2010 to 2012. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [11] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Metal Theft Report: NICB Reports Metal Thefts Increase 81 Percent Since 2008 (news release, March 8, 2012). 2009 to 2011. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [12] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). Base and Semi-Precious Metal Theft Claim Report (news release, March 3, 2009). Jan 2006 to Nov 2008. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [13] International Monetary Fund via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Global price of Copper (PCOPPUSDM), monthly, U.S. dollars per metric ton. Jan 2011 to Sep 2026 (updated 2026-10-22). Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [16] U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. An Updated Assessment of Copper Wire Thefts from Electric Utilities (October 2010). 2000 to Aug 2010. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [17] U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Inspector General. Impact of Copper Thefts on the Department of Energy (OIG Case No. I11IG002, Aug. 17, 2011). 2006 to 2011. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [18] Federal Communications Commission. Remarks of Commissioner Olivia B. Trusty, Copper Theft Crisis summit (Oct. 7, 2025). 2024 to 2025. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [21] National Equipment Register (Verisk) and National Insurance Crime Bureau. 2016 Equipment Theft Report. 2016. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [22] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). NICB releases 2014 heavy equipment theft report (news release, Oct. 1, 2015). 2013 to 2014. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [23] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). NICB releases 2012 heavy equipment theft report (news release, Oct. 10, 2013). 2008, 2011 to 2012. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [24] National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB). NER and NICB release 2010 heavy-equipment theft report (news release, July 21, 2011). 2010. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [25] Florida Legislature. Florida Statutes 538.235 Method of payment and 538.26 Certain acts and practices prohibited (2026 Florida Statutes). 2026. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [26] Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Statutes 325E.21 Scrap metal dealers; records, reports, and registration. current. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [27] Hawaii State Legislature. Hawaii Revised Statutes 708-835.7 Theft of copper. current. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [28] Missouri Revisor of Statutes. Revised Statutes of Missouri 570.030 Stealing, penalties (effective Aug. 28, 2025). effective 2025-08-28. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [29] West Virginia Legislature. West Virginia Code 61-3-49b Disruption of communications and utilities services. current. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [30] Colorado General Assembly. HB26-1101 Criminal Offenses Related to Critical Infrastructure Metals (became law; signed 05/07/2026). 2026 regular session. Accessed 2026-10-27.

Tier 2: trade bodies, market research, company data (3)

• [14] Recycled Materials Association (ReMA, formerly ISRI). State Metals Theft Statutes (compendium, compiled as of November 11, 2025). State laws, per-state summaries current as of 2019 to 2025. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [15] Recycled Materials Association (ReMA). State Metals Theft Law Database: common reports (payment, hold, statute reference workbooks). State laws. Accessed 2026-10-27.
• [19] NCTA, The Internet and Television Association, with telecom industry partners. Protecting the Nation's Critical Communications Infrastructure from Theft and Vandalism (Spring 2025 update) and April 9, 2025 release. June to December 2024. Accessed 2026-10-27.

Tier 3: journalism and expert commentary (1)

• [20] Light Reading (Informa). AT&T averaged 200 copper theft cases per week in 2025 (Light Reading, April 6, 2026), reporting an AT&T Global Security blog post. 2025. Accessed 2026-10-27.