The Tradesperson's Guide to Scrap Income

Most trades generate scrap as a byproduct of the main job. Copper offcuts from a bathroom refit. Cable reels from a rewire. Lead flashing strips from a roof job. A stack of stripped radiators in the back of the van after a boiler swap. And for most tradespeople, most of that metal ends up in the skip, or if they're organised, in a corner of the yard that gets cleared out "some time".

That's free money being thrown away. Not life-changing amounts, but not nothing either. A working plumber who sells his scrap properly is quietly pocketing £2,000–£5,000 a year in addition to his regular income, tax-free up to the trading allowance if he's careful about it. An electrician doing rewires can add more. A roofer on flashing-heavy jobs more still.

This is the full guide to turning trade scrap into a real secondary income, what to keep, how to sort it, what it's worth, and the mistakes that leave money on the table.

The baseline: what tradespeople actually earn from scrap

Let's start with realistic numbers so you know what we're talking about. These are rough annual scrap incomes for a one-person operation, assuming you collect consistently and sort properly:

• Jobbing plumber (boiler swaps, bathrooms, maintenance): £2,000–£4,000/year
• Heating engineer (more boilers, copper cylinders): £2,500–£5,000/year
• Electrician (rewires, commercial installs): £1,500–£4,500/year, higher if you get commercial jobs with big cable runs
• Roofer (flashing-heavy work): £1,000–£3,000/year from lead alone
• Builder (mixed work, house clearances, strip-outs): £2,000–£6,000/year
• Kitchen fitter (old appliances, stainless, fittings): £800–£2,000/year

These numbers assume you're driving to the yard every 4–8 weeks with a reasonable load. They go up significantly if you're doing one or two commercial strip-outs a year, where the scrap from a single job can run into four figures.

The three categories of trade scrap

Everything you pull off a job falls into one of three buckets, and you should treat them differently.

High-value (copper, brass, lead): Always worth keeping, always worth sorting. Never throw this in a skip.

Medium-value (aluminium, stainless steel, mixed non-ferrous): Worth keeping when you've got a reasonable amount. Not worth a special trip for a single offcut.

Low-value (ferrous, steel, iron, appliances): Worth taking when you've already got a yard trip planned. Not worth driving specifically for.

The mistake most tradespeople make is treating all three the same, either chucking everything or keeping everything. The right strategy is aggressive on the high-value stuff, opportunistic on the medium, and lazy on the low-value.

What each trade should be keeping

Plumbers and heating engineers

The biggest earners on scrap, by a long way, because copper is both expensive and everywhere in your work.

Keep: - All copper pipe, clean lengths and offcuts. Strip any insulation. - Copper hot water cylinders, a single old Fortic cylinder can be 15–25 kg of heavy copper, worth £100–£200 by itself. These are the single most valuable item you'll pull out of an average house. - Brass fittings, valves, and taps, elbows, tees, isolating valves, radiator valves, old mixer taps. Keep a separate bag. - Old radiators, steel panels are low-value but easy money when you've already got a load. Aluminium rads are better. - Boiler cases and internals, mixed ferrous plus a bit of copper. Worth taking if you've got the vehicle space. - Central heating copper from microbore systems, often thin but adds up.

Sort on the job by having three bags in the van: one for clean copper, one for braziery (copper with solder, paint, or fittings), one for brass. Labelling saves time at the yard.

Rough value per average domestic boiler swap: £30–£60 in copper and brass scrap alone, assuming you take the old cylinder too.

Electricians

Cable is the main earner, and how you handle it determines whether electrical scrap is a modest side income or a significant one.

Keep: - All cable offcuts and reels, SWA (armoured) cable, T&E (twin and earth), mains cable. Grade by thickness. - Copper busbar from commercial strip-outs, this is gold. Clean copper at the top grade. - Old consumer units and fuse boxes, mixed ferrous and brass, worth taking. - Brass accessory backboxes and switches from strip-outs, small amounts but worth it if you've got volume.

The cable question, strip or don't strip? This is the eternal debate and the answer depends on the cable. Thick armoured cable and mains feeders are worth stripping because the copper-to-sheath ratio is high and the copper is easy to get at. Thin house wiring (1.0mm or 1.5mm T&E) isn't worth stripping, the time it takes to get the copper out is worth more than the price uplift. Full breakeven numbers in our cable stripping guide.

Rough value from a domestic rewire: £40–£120 in mixed cable scrap, higher if you strip the thick stuff.

Roofers

Lead. Lead, lead, lead.

Keep: - Lead flashing offcuts, every single strip, no matter how small. Lead is currently around [INSERT CURRENT PRICE]/tonne, that's £1.50–£1.80 per kg. A day's offcuts from a flashing-heavy job can easily be 20 kg, which is £30–£40 in your pocket. - Old lead flashing pulled off, worth far more than the new stuff per kilo because you're saving the yard the time of sorting it. - Old lead pipe if you find it in Victorian houses during a conversion. - Copper roofing where you run into it (rare but valuable). - Zinc sheet and flashing, decent price per kilo, often overlooked.

The biggest mistake roofers make: letting the lead go in the general waste because "it's just offcuts." A single week's offcuts from a busy flashing job can be £60–£100. Over a year, that's a family holiday.

Builders and general contractors

The jackpot is strip-outs and renovations where you might pull out copper, brass, steel, lead, and aluminium all from the same job.

Keep: - Everything above from the other trades, because you'll encounter all of it - Aluminium window frames and guttering from replacement jobs - Steel structural offcuts, lintels, beams, mesh reinforcement - Radiators and boilers from strip-outs - Old metal roofing (corrugated iron, zinc, etc.)

The strip-out goldmine: a full kitchen, bathroom, and boiler strip-out from a single Victorian terrace can yield £150–£400 in mixed scrap if you take everything. Most builders let their labourers chuck it all in the skip. Don't.

Sorting: where the real money is made

Here's the uncomfortable truth about trade scrap: two identical-looking loads can be worth 20% different amounts at the yard based purely on how well they're sorted.

Yards pay a premium for clean, graded metal because it saves them the sorting work. If you turn up with one bag of mixed scrap, they'll grade it down to the lowest-value metal in the mix. If you turn up with three bags, clean copper, braziery copper, brass, they'll pay the correct top-grade price for each.

Five minutes of sorting on the job is typically worth £100–£200 per trip to the yard. That's a labour rate of £1,200–£2,400 an hour. No job you do for actual customers pays that.

The three-bag system

Keep three labelled bags or bins in the van at all times:

1. Clean copper, bare, unpainted, unsoldered copper pipe and wire
2. Braziery copper, copper with solder, fittings, paint, or mixed contamination
3. Brass and non-ferrous, brass fittings, aluminium, lead (lead gets a separate bag if you've got a lot)

Heavy ferrous scrap (radiators, boilers, cable reels) goes in the back of the van loose or in a single large bin.

At the end of each day, the bags come out, get consolidated, and get stored somewhere secure until you've got a yard-worthy load.

Timing your yard trips

There's no point driving to a yard with a single bag of copper every fortnight, the fuel and time will eat most of the value. But leaving scrap sitting for too long is also a mistake because scrap prices move, and copper especially has been volatile through 2025.

Sweet spot: every 4–8 weeks, with a decent load. For most jobbing tradespeople that means £100–£300 per trip, which is worth the drive and gives you frequent enough cashflow to notice.

Exception: when prices spike. If copper jumps 5% in a week (check our weekly price updates), consider taking what you've got in sooner rather than waiting. Scrap prices can move the other way just as fast.

Worst habit: the annual clearout. Letting scrap accumulate for a year means you're getting last year's prices on a load that's had its grade degraded by sitting outside in the rain. Don't do it.

The tax question

Scrap income counts as taxable trading income if you're selling regularly and at volume. But most tradespeople have a £1,000 trading allowance that covers incidental income, which means the first £1,000 of scrap sales per tax year is tax-free without needing to declare it. Beyond that, it goes on your self-assessment as miscellaneous trading income.

If you're running a limited company, scrap income from company vans and company jobs belongs to the company and goes through the books as other income. Don't be tempted to pocket it personally, HMRC is aware of the scrap industry as a source of undeclared income and yards report transaction volumes to them.

Our advice: track your yard receipts like any other income. The tax bill on an extra £3,000/year isn't significant, but the audit risk of hiding it is. Keep the receipts from the yard, they count as evidence of the sale.

ID and compliance

Every yard trip requires photographic ID (passport or driving licence) and proof of address. If you're going to the same yard repeatedly they'll usually set you up as a trade account, which speeds the process considerably on return visits. Trade accounts also tend to get better grades because the yard knows your material and trusts the sorting.

Full ID rules are in our dedicated guide: Do I need ID to sell scrap metal in the UK?.

The trades-specific guides

This is the pillar article. For trade-specific deep dives, see:

• [Copper scrap for plumbers: grades, prices, and how to sort](/for-trades/copper-scrap-plumbers), the definitive plumber's guide
• [Cable stripping: when it's worth your time and when it isn't](/for-trades/cable-stripping), the breakeven numbers for electricians
• [Lead flashing offcuts: the roofer's overlooked payday](/for-trades/lead-flashing-offcuts), for the roofers still putting lead in the skip

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