Palladium Has Quietly Surged 90% and Russia Tariffs Could Push It Further
Palladium Has Quietly Surged 90% and Russia Tariffs Could Push It Further
Palladium has surged almost 90% over the past year to trade near $1,348 an ounce, quietly outrunning gold and silver. Bank of America now targets $2,200 by the end of 2026, and pending U.S. tariffs of over 100% on Russian palladium could tighten the supply squeeze even further.
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alladium's rally is real, but the Russia tariff trigger isn't. The U.S. trade case against Russian palladium died in May, so the metal now has to stand on supply deficits, hybrid demand and investor appetite.
Gold and silver have hogged the headlines all year. Palladium, the industrial metal that lives inside your car's exhaust system, has recently traded around $1,350 an ounce, according to Kitco pricing data. That's still a sharp move from last year's lows, and it's the sort of rally investors tend to notice only after the easy part has already happened.
Nobody talks about palladium first. That's the strange part.
The stronger case rests on physical supply, not a live tariff threat. Metals Focus expects the palladium market to post a 376,000-ounce deficit in 2026, a fifth straight annual shortfall, according to reporting cited by Tradingpedia and FXStreet. Total demand is forecast at 9.56 million ounces, down only 1%, while supply is projected at 9.19 million ounces as weaker mine output is offset by more recycling. That's tight enough to matter.
Russia is still central to the story. Norilsk Nickel remains one of the world's dominant palladium producers, and Russian supply has not been sanctioned outright by Washington. The Commerce Department's own trade data show why buyers care: U.S. imports of unwrought palladium from Russia rose to 27.6 million grams in 2024, up from 23.8 million grams in 2023 and 20.4 million grams in 2022. If you're buying the metal for catalytic converters, that flow is not some abstract geopolitical footnote. It's inventory.
The demand story also refused to follow the neat script. Electric vehicles don't use catalytic converters, so the old forecast was simple: palladium would fade with the internal combustion engine. That hasn't happened fast enough. Hybrids have kept gasoline powertrains in the mix, and those vehicles still need platinum group metals to meet emissions rules. In the LBMA's 2026 forecast survey, several analysts pointed to hybrids, Russian supply risk, substitution and investor flows as reasons palladium could stay firmer than the long-term EV story suggests.
One number shows the split. The LBMA survey's average palladium forecast was about $1,740 an ounce for 2026, while individual high-end forecasts ran as far as $2,900. That's not consensus. That's a market arguing with itself in public.
The tariff case no longer carries the trade
Here's the part that needed cleaning up. The U.S. Department of Commerce did make affirmative final findings against unwrought palladium from Russia, including a 132.83% dumping margin and a 109.10% countervailing subsidy rate. Those numbers were real. But they were not the final word.
On May 29, 2026, the U.S. International Trade Commission determined that imports of unwrought palladium from Russia did not materially injure or threaten the U.S. industry. As a result, the USITC said Commerce would not issue antidumping or countervailing duty orders. That's not a pending catalyst. It's a dead one, unless Washington opens a different case or changes policy through another route.
That doesn't make palladium boring. It makes the rally harder to justify with one headline. Bank of America has still kept a bullish view on platinum group metals, with Kitco reporting in June that the bank expected palladium to average about $2,200 an ounce in the fourth quarter of 2026 while platinum moved toward $3,000. You can believe that call only if you believe investors return to a small, thin market where supply has little room for error.
Frankly, palladium has burned bulls before. It hit a record near $3,429.50 an ounce in March 2022, when Russia-supply fear was at its loudest, then collapsed as the worst-case sanctions trade failed to arrive. The metal doesn't do gentle.
That history should make you careful, not dismissive. A market can be wrong on timing and still right about tightness. Palladium has real support from supply deficits and from gasoline-heavy hybrid production, but the easy tariff story is gone for now. If prices keep climbing from here, they will need buyers in the physical market to do more work than Washington.