Neodymium Price History — September 17, 2026

Neodymium Price History: the Short Version

Today's reference point in that history is ₹12.41 per gram, recorded on September 17, 2026. Neodymium's story as a traded commodity is short compared with gold or copper's centuries-long record, but it has already produced one episode every serious account of this market has to include. Around 2010 and 2011, China sharply tightened export quotas on rare earths during a period of diplomatic tension, and because China controlled the overwhelming majority of global processing capacity at the time, prices for neodymium and related rare earths spiked to levels that were, at the time, without precedent.

That spike didn't hold. Prices retreated substantially over the following years, as new supply outside China began to come online and manufacturers in magnet-consuming industries found ways to use less of the metal per unit of output. The episode remains the clearest single illustration of what happens when a commodity's supply is concentrated this tightly in one country's processing capacity.

What That Episode Actually Changed

The 2010-2011 rare-earth shock did more than move prices for a few years — it changed how governments and manufacturers outside China thought about this metal entirely. Countries including the United States and Australia began seriously investing in mining and processing projects of their own, explicitly citing supply-security concerns that the episode had made impossible to ignore. That policy shift is real and ongoing, even though it remains modest next to China's established scale.

Processing, not just mining, was the real lesson

The sharpest lesson from that period wasn't really about mining at all — it was about processing. China's dominant position came from decades of investment in the difficult, environmentally intensive chemical separation processes that turn mixed rare-earth ore into usable individual elements. Building a mine outside China is one thing; building the processing capacity to match is a much longer, harder undertaking, and that gap is a large part of why the world's response to 2010-2011 has taken so long to materialise at meaningful scale.

Where to Find the Actual Numbers

This page is deliberately a narrative, not a data table — it explains what happened and why it matters, rather than listing every historical price point. For the real recorded daily and monthly figures, MetalsCost's dedicated year archive covers the exact data rather than a general account of it; the link sits in the resources section below and in the history table above.

The honest takeaway from neodymium's price history isn't a prediction about what comes next — that belongs on the forecast page, not here — but a sense of how this particular metal behaves under supply-policy stress. A processing bottleneck concentrated in one country made 2010-2011 possible, and that same structural feature of the market hasn't disappeared.