The Biggest Month in Forty-Three Years of Coatings Prices

BLS put the August producer price data out at 8:30 this morning. The index for special purpose coatings, the line that carries marine, industrial and construction finishes, rose 8.4% in a single month.

That is the largest monthly move in the series in forty-three years. BLS has published it without a gap since June 1983, which is 518 month-over-month changes, and August 2026 beats every one of them in either direction.

Second place is +7.4%, in August 1996.

Architectural coatings sit one branch over in the same family. They printed 539.817 in July and 539.817 in August (chart below).

"What raises a coating 8.4% in a month when its pigments and its resins got cheaper?"

The Input Basket Had a Quiet August

Paint materials, which in the PPI resolves almost entirely to pigment lines, came in at -0.04% on the month and -5.8% against last August. The inorganic pigment line that carries TiO2 was flat in August and sits 9.2% below where it was a year ago.

Resins went the same way. Thermoplastics -0.9% on the month, thermosets -1.7%.

The pigment side and both resin families were flat or cheaper in the month the finished product set its record.

Not everything fell. Gum and wood chemicals rose 5.3%, fatty acids 5.6%, carbon black 2.4%.

Rosin, tall oil derivatives and blacks all had a real month, and anyone buying alkyds or heavily tinted dark systems felt it.

The feedstock story underneath all of this is genuine too. Aromatics are up 43.1% over twelve months.

That move happened in the spring. Aromatics ran from 199.0 in November to 360.8 in June, and August added another 1.9%.

April Is What Landed

On April 15, PPG told the market it was taking up to 20% across its paints, coatings and specialty products portfolio, citing volatility and supply constraints in global petrochemical, energy and transportation markets.

The sentence that matters to a buyer is the implementation one. The increases go in "on a customer-by-customer basis or as existing contracts allow."

Read the two coatings lines forward from that April date:

Marine, industrial and construction: +11.5%
Architectural: +0.95%

Architectural coatings move through a store at a posted price, and a posted price can be nudged in small steps every month or two.

Protective and industrial coatings go out on project quotes and annual agreements. Those hold for their term and then reset in one step.

What It Does to Your Next Letter

If you hold a protective coatings agreement that resets in the fourth quarter or in January, this print is the number your counterparty is going to put in front of you.

Two things are worth checking before you take it at face value:

Raw materials are the weakest part of that case this month. Pigments are 9.2% cheaper than a year ago and both resin families fell in August. An increase letter built on TiO2 is arguing against the published series.
Pine chemicals, fatty acids and carbon black are a real case, and a narrow one. They point at alkyds, rosin-modified systems and dark colors, and a portfolio-wide number covers a good deal more than that.

The other thing the August print hands you is timing. The index has now taken the increase.

The next one has to be argued on something that happened after August.

Final Thoughts

This is a first print, and PPI recalculates four months after publication, so the December release is where 598.243 becomes final. This morning's file already carried revisions to April through July.

Two weeks ago we wrote that the spring feedstock spike had stopped at the formulator. One formulated line just took four months of it in a single print, in a month when its own measured inputs were flat, which tells you the pass-through runs on the contract's calendar rather than the index's.

Thanks for reading.