Author: Aymeric Halvarsson
Volatility in construction material prices: How can material suppliers future-proof their business?
Material costs in 2025 have increased by 3.4% since 2024. But the real story is that monthly increases ranged from 3.24% in January to 1.5% in March. That translates to roughly anywhere from $0.34-$0.71 per cubic yard, a significant amount in an industry with historically low margins.
It’s part of a broader upward trend, a signal that prices are not calming, but creeping.
From diesel to cement, costs swing wildly based on geopolitical shocks, supply chain disruptions, and unpredictable demand spikes. For suppliers, this means constantly quoting in the dark, reacting late, and watching margins disappear.
In this blog, we break down what’s driving this turbulence, how it’s impacting suppliers on the ground, and what they’re doing to future-proof their pricing and quoting operations.
Key takeaways
- Construction material prices are rising again in 2025, with volatility likely to return, making this a critical time for suppliers to prepare.
- Relying on static price sheets or delayed approvals leads to lost deals, eroded margins, and frustrated customers.
- Smart suppliers are adopting real-time pricing, quote escalation and expiry rules, and margin visibility to stay ahead.
- Platforms like Slabstack help automate these strategies, making quoting faster, more accurate, and more profitable.
What’s driving fluctuations in the price of construction materials?
To understand why prices of construction materials can be so volatile, let’s look at past events that caused these fluctuations.
In 2022, a confluence of post-Covid demand spikes, logistical bottlenecks, and geopolitical tensions—like the war in Ukraine—created a perfect storm.
Demand for construction materials drove through the roof while suppliers scrambled to fill orders, triggering widespread shortages in cement, steel, and aggregates. In some incidents, suppliers had to import cement from countries like Turkey, and the cost of imported cement jumped 20% overnight due to war-related constraints.
And these weren’t isolated incidents.
In 2022-2023, the entire supply chain was also reacting to shocks like:
- Fuel price volatility affecting freight and diesel-heavy operations
- Shortages of aggregates and SCMs due to global shipping constraints
- Unpredictable demand from mega-projects and infrastructure stimulus
Fast forward to today, while material cost fluctuations have eased recently, this isn’t true calm—it’s a holding pattern. As one of our experts at Slabstack, Matt Jetmore observed:
“Prices have stabilized, and everybody’s just stopped. Because while prices are not volatile right now, it’s sort of the calm before the storm.”
This pause masks uncertainty.
New tariffs, interest rate shifts, and geopolitical tensions, especially around steel, copper, lumber, and SCMs, remain.
In the first quarter of 2025, input prices began climbing again, rising at a 9.7% annualized rate. Even moderate tariff changes or policy updates can flip this equilibrium at any moment, hurting suppliers.
How does construction material price volatility hurt suppliers?
Volatile construction material prices don’t just cause short-term headaches: they erode profitability, delay projects, and damage customer relationships. Here’s how:
1. Fixed-bid jobs become profit traps
On paper, locking in prices might seem like a hedge against volatility. In practice, it often turns into a liability.
Because construction projects can scale rapidly, and suppliers are expected to honor bids written months or weeks ago, even if cement or diesel costs have surged since then. Without dynamic pricing adjustments, your profit disappears as the gap between the quoted price and the actual cost comes straight out of your margins.
2. Outdated price lists lead to underquoting or losing deals
Many quoting workflows still rely on spreadsheets or last month’s price sheets. By the time those quotes go to customers, they’re already outdated.
Your sales teams end up in a lose-lose situation:
- Underquote and win the deal, only to realize too late that the margin is gone.
- Overquote using stale, inflated prices and lose to a competitor with fresher data.
Either way, trust erodes both internally and with customers.
3. Quote delays cause missed opportunities
Approval delays, often caused by back-and-forths to verify costs, can cause you to miss your window. Without real-time visibility into fluctuating material inputs, like fuel surcharges, freight costs, or mix designs, quotes get delayed.
And in fast-moving markets, time kills deals. A delay of even a day can mean materials go out of stock or prices shift again. Customers get frustrated and turn elsewhere.
4. Margin erosion is hard to spot until it’s too late
Without live tracking of cost inputs and margins, many suppliers don’t realize they’re bleeding profit until months or even years later, when the finance team does a post-mortem review.
Our experts highlight that even small price differences across multiple quotes can quietly compound into large-scale losses. And by then, there’s no opportunity to course correct.
5. Sales teams get stuck in manual loops
Sales reps often become their own data analysts—spending hours pulling prices from emails, double-checking costs with production teams, or updating internal sheets. It’s a huge drain on productivity.
Your reps end up spending more time double-checking numbers than actually selling. This manual work kills productivity, creates errors, and saps morale.
While your business doesn’t have control over the current price of construction materials
Here’s how smart suppliers protect themselves against market uncertainty.
How are smart suppliers future-proofing themselves against market uncertainty?
The most resilient suppliers are shifting their mindset from reactive to proactive. That means:
- Monitoring market trends daily, not monthly
- Setting quote escalation and expiry rules to reduce risk
- Training sales teams to understand how fuel, freight, and blend costs affect pricing
- Creating internal pricing cadences with guardrails for margin protection
As Matt Jetmore puts it,
“If I bake those price increases in and they don’t materialize, I look like a fool. But if I don’t—and they do—I’m upside down. That’s why I keep telling people: we can’t control the market, but we can stay on top of it and build that into our pricing.”
That’s why future-ready teams are turning to building material supplier software that allow forecasting, track real-time costs, and connect pricing logic directly into the quoting workflow.
And that’s exactly what Slabstack helps you with.
How Slabstack helps building material suppliers stay ahead of market uncertainty
Slabstack gives material suppliers the tools they need to respond with agility, no matter where prices go next. Here’s how:
- Live material pricing feeds: Get real-time updates on costs directly within the quoting workflow—no more manual lookups or surprises.
- Dynamic pricing: Automatically factor in fluctuations in diesel, freight, and mix designs to ensure every quote protects your margin.
- Forecasting and demand insights: Predict future sales volumes based on pipeline and historical data
- Margin analytics and quote visibility: Track profit performance in real time, not weeks later. Spot patterns, fix leaks, and optimize faster.
- Sales and dispatch integration: Sync your quotes with fulfillment data so that what you sell aligns with what you can deliver, at the right cost.
While price volatility might be out of your control, your quoting strategy isn’t.
Whether prices swing up or down, the suppliers who thrive are those who stay agile, act fast, and protect every point of margin. Slabstack makes that possible.
Explore how Slabstack helps you future-proof your pricing and quoting, so you’re ready for whatever the market throws your way.