lead-sash-weight-cost-analysis

leadsashwindowweights.co.uk

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P R I C I N G A N A LY S I S · L E A D S A S H W E I G H T S

What Influences the Cost of a Lead Sash Weight?

The same cast bar of soft grey metal costs one buyer £55 and another £130. Here's what actually moves the price — with real numbers and 15 years of UK history.

£1.50

£3.00–£7.41

2–3.5×

RAW LEAD, PER KG (LME)

FINISHED WEIGHT, PER KG

SPREAD, SAME METAL

UPDATED 24 JUNE 2026 · PRICES TRACKED WEEKLY

LEADSASHWINDOWWEIGHTS.CO.UK

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T H E M E TA L

T H E S U R P R I S I N G PA RT

First — the metal is the cheap bit A lead sash weight is one of the simplest things you can buy: a cast bar of soft grey metal that does nothing but hang in a box frame and balance a window. So why does the same weight cost one person £55 and another £130 — and why has the price wandered up and down over the years rather than just sitting still?

Lead is a traded commodity, priced on the London Metal Exchange in US dollars per tonne.

In mid-2026 it sits around $1,900–2,000 a tonne — only about £1.50 per kilogram of actual metal.

Raw lead (left) and the finished sash weight it becomes (right). It's roughly the same ~£1.50/kg of metal either way — almost everything else you pay for is the work of turning the bar on the left into the weight on the right.

Yet across the UK suppliers we track, full-size square weights run from about £3.00/kg to £7.41/kg ex VAT — a 2.47× spread for the same metal.

The lead (~£1.50)

Conversion, VAT, margin & carriage

metal

everything that happens after the smelter

The lead itself is maybe a third of the cheapest price and less than a quarter of the dearest. Everything above that £1.50 is conversion, VAT, margin and carriage — and that's exactly where the price differences live.

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DRIVER 1

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THE COMMODITY

THE LEAD COMMODITY PRICE

It's cyclical — not a one-way climb The LME lead price is the single biggest macro force under everything. When metal goes up, the floor under retail prices rises with it; when it falls, that floor drops. But the thing most people get wrong is assuming lead “only ever goes up.” It doesn't.

LME LEAD PRICE, 2010–2026 · US$ / TONNE typical band ~$1,700–$2,700/t

2,400

2,200

2,000

1,800

1,600

dip ~$1,626

2010

2015

2018

2020

2022

Year

Approx LME lead (USD/t)

What was happening

2010–11

~$2,070 → $2,410

Post-financial-crisis recovery

2015–16

~$1,820–1,850

The soft patch

2018

~$2,260

Firm

2020

~$1,820

Covid low (dipped near $1,626)

2021–22

~$2,130–2,210

Post-Covid surge, energy crisis

2023

~$2,136

Easing back

2025

~$1,963

Drifting down

mid-2026

~$1,920

Today

2026

Approximate annual averages; the LME cash price is what suppliers ultimately buy against.

Over 15 years lead has mostly traded in a band of roughly $1,700–$2,700 a tonne, with most years clustered around $1,800–$2,200. It rose after the crash, sagged in 2015–16, dipped in Covid, spiked in 2021–22, and has drifted back down since.

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DRIVER 2

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STICKY PRICING

RETAIL PRICES ARE “STICKY”

What suppliers used to charge Because suppliers buy stock in batches, hold inventory and reprice infrequently, shelf prices lag the metal — they rise slowly and fall even more slowly. A 10% move on the LME almost never shows up as a clean 10% move at the checkout. We can prove it from the suppliers' own archived pages.

3 8 M M S Q U A R E , ~ 9 K G W E I G H T · R E D U C E D T O £ / K G E X VAT

Supplier

~2015–16

~2019–20

~2022–23

Today

Draftfix

£2.12

£2.78

£3.26

£3.26

IronmongeryDirect

£2.96

£3.86

—

£3.30

Reddiseals

—

£2.79

£3.45

£3.11

SD Hardware

—

£3.89

£3.61

£4.42

Derived from archived supplier pages (Internet Archive); today's figures from our live data.

Draftfix climbed steadily

Reddiseals peaked higher than now

About +54% from £2.12/kg in 2015 to £3.26/kg today — and held that price unchanged since 2023.

Ran to £3.45/kg through 2022–25; today's £3.11/kg is a recent cut below that peak.

SD Hardware went the other way

IronmongeryDirect: the cautionary tale

£3.89/kg in 2019, down to £3.61 in 2022, then up to £4.42/kg by 2025.

The same SKU was £5.48/kg in 2010 — and is ~40% cheaper today. Prices don't only rise.

The clearest cycle is Power Fixings, who sell cut-to-size lead by the kilo: £7.59/kg in late 2023 → £6.33 → £5.69 → £3.81 by Aug 2025 — roughly halving in under two years as the post-2022 spike unwound.

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DRIVERS 3–6

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T H E S U P P LY S I D E

METAL, MONEY & THE RULES

Four forces under the headline price Beneath the LME number sit the quieter drivers — where the metal comes from, the currency you pay in, the energy to cast it, and the tax written into the quote.

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Recycled lead & the battery cycle

The pound

The UK runs almost entirely on secondary (recycled) lead, mostly from spent lead-acid batteries. When battery scrap is plentiful, supply is good and prices soften; when scrap tightens, the metal firms up. It's the quiet supply side of the LME number.

Lead is priced in US dollars but you pay in sterling, so the exchange rate bites even when the dollar price is flat. In 2022 the pound fell to ~$1.07 — part of the 2022–23 bump in the table is currency, not metal.

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Energy & the cost of casting

VAT & who the price is for

Smelting and re-casting lead at 300°C+ is energyintensive. The 2021–2023 European energy crisis pushed production costs up and kept retail prices elevated into 2023–24, even after the metal had started easing.

UK lead carries 20% VAT. Trade sites headline exVAT; consumer sites headline inc-VAT — a flat 20% gap before anything is weighed. A “£3.00” and a “£3.60” can be the identical price.

“ $

None of these four is the metal itself. They're the forces that decide what that ~£1.50/kg of lead actually costs you by the time it reaches a shelf — and why a calm LME number can still sit under a rising price.

Currency & commodity

The pound and the LME set the floor the metal is bought against.

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%

Energy & VAT

Casting power and a flat 20% tax sit on top before anything ships.

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DRIVERS 7–10

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THE WORKSHOP

CASTING, CARRIAGE & COMPETITION

Where suppliers price differently 07

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Casting, cutting & finishing

Delivery — lead is heavy

A sash weight is cut to size, sometimes drilled, in small made-to-order batches. That fixed handling cost spread over a small order makes the per-kilo conversion cost far higher than for a tonne of plain lead.

At ~11.3 g/cm³ lead is one of the densest things you can post, and carriage scales with weight. Free delivery often kicks in only above ~500 kg; below that, postage can be a meaningful slice of a small order.

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Shape & size

How few firms still cast them

Geometry moves the per-kilo cost. Full-size square bars cluster near £3/kg; round and small “makeweight” pieces run to a median of ~£5.56/kg and beyond — same labour, far less metal. Compare within the same bucket.

Only a handful of UK firms still cast weights to order.

In bespoke and cut-to-size niches that limited competition means pricing isn't strongly disciplined — one reason the spread stays as wide as 2–3.5×.

T O D AY ' S C H E A P E S T F U L L - S I Z E S Q U A R E , BY S U P P L I E R · £ / K G E X VAT Power Fixings

£3.05

Reddiseals

£3.11

Draftfix

£3.26

IronmongeryDirect

£3.30

SD Hardware

£4.42

Builders' merchant

£7.41

£3

£4

£5

£6

£7

Every supplier buys lead at roughly the same ~£1.50/kg. On top of that they each stack their own casting cost, VAT basis, carriage and margin — and because the metal is the small part, those choices dominate the final number.

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FAQ

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QUESTIONS

THE QUESTIONS BUYERS ASK

Quick answers Are lead sash weights getting more expensive?

Not in a straight line. Prices track the lead commodity market, which is cyclical — it rose into 2011, dipped in 2015–16, spiked in 2021–22 and has drifted down since. Some suppliers are dearer than five years ago; others, like IronmongeryDirect, are actually cheaper than they were in 2010.

What is the biggest factor in the price?

The supplier's pricing, not the metal. Raw lead is only ~£1.50/kg, so the gap between a cheap and a dear weight comes from casting cost, VAT basis, carriage, batch size and margin — which is why the same weight can vary by 2–3.5×.

Does the spot price change what I pay tomorrow?

Rarely overnight. Retail prices are “sticky” — suppliers buy in batches and reprice infrequently, so an LME move takes weeks to filter through, if at all. A rising market rewards buying sooner; a falling one rewards waiting, modestly.

Why is cut-to-size lead priced per kilo?

Because cut-to-size suppliers sell you the exact length you need rather than fixed weights, so per-kg is the natural unit — and the common denominator we convert every supplier to, whether they quote per piece, per pound or per kilo.

Compare before you buy

The cost of a lead sash weight is mostly not the lead — it's the layer of casting, VAT, carriage and margin on top, and every supplier stacks it differently. The one move that beats all of it is to compare suppliers on the same £/kg, on the day you buy.

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