Scrapping circuit boards pays anywhere from $0.10 per pound for low-grade brown boards to $90 per pound for clean gold fingers as of August 2026. Most of what comes out of a desktop tower is mid-grade motherboard at $1.25–$3.15/lb, while telecom and cell phone boards run $8–$24/lb. The single biggest mistake is throwing every board in one bucket — that gets you low-grade money for high-grade material.
| Grade / Item | Low | High | Unit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low-grade / brown boards | $0.10 | $1.15 | USD/lb |
| Mid-grade motherboards | $1.25 | $3.25 | USD/lb |
| Server boards | $1.85 | $4.25 | USD/lb |
| Telecom boards, high grade | $12.00 | $14.00 | USD/lb |
| Cell phone boards, clean | $14.00 | $24.00 | USD/lb |
| Gold-cap memory (RAM) | $23.00 | $58.00 | USD/lb |
| Gold fingers, trimmed | $50.00 | $90.00 | USD/lb |
| Country | Typical Range | Per Tonne | Cur. |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $0.10 – $24 /lb by grade | — | USD |
| Germany / EU | €0.20 – €45 /kg by grade | — | EUR |
| India | ₹20 – ₹4,500 /kg by grade | — | INR |
What board grade actually means
Boards are priced on precious metal content per pound, not on what the board did for a living. Gold plating, gold bond wire in the chips, palladium in the capacitors, and silver in the solder are what a refiner pays for. A board covered in black IC chips and gold-plated connectors is worth ten times a board of the same weight covered in transformers and heat sinks.
Yards sort into anywhere from three to twenty grades. A small local yard may only offer boards and low grade. Mail-in e-scrap buyers publish twenty or more categories and pay accordingly. That difference is the main reason quoted prices vary so much.
The color rule and where it fails
Scrappers use board color as a first sort. Green boards with heavy chip population are usually mid to high grade. Brown, tan, or single-sided phenolic boards are almost always low grade. It is a decent rule of thumb but it breaks often — some high-value telecom boards are blue or black, and plenty of cheap consumer boards are green. Judge by what is mounted on the board, not just the substrate color.
Circuit board prices by grade, August 2026
| Grade | Price range per lb | Typical source |
|---|---|---|
| Low-grade / brown boards | $0.10 – $1.15 | TV, printer, monitor, appliance boards |
| Power supply boards (stripped) | $0.10 – $0.60 | ATX supplies, wall bricks |
| Whole power supplies (in case) | $0.10 – $0.18 | Sold as-is with steel case |
| Mid-grade / standard motherboards | $1.25 – $3.25 | Modern small-socket desktop boards |
| Large-socket / early motherboards | $3.00 – $10.00 | Slot 1, P3, socket 775 green boards |
| Server boards | $1.85 – $4.25 | Rackmount and multisocket server |
| Multisocket motherboards | $6.50 – $12.00 | Dual and quad CPU boards |
| Laptop motherboards | $10.00 | Notebook mainboards, no shields |
| Telecom boards, low grade | $3.50 – $8.25 | Switch and line cards |
| Telecom boards, high grade | $12.00 – $14.00 | Heavily gold-populated backplanes |
| Cell phone boards, clean | $14.00 – $24.00 | Boards only, no screens or batteries |
| Hard drive boards | $4.20 – $24.00 | Logic boards off HDDs |
Those spreads are real, not sloppiness. The low end is a walk-in scrap yard paying one flat rate for a mixed bucket. The high end is a graded mail-in buyer paying by sorted category after they weigh and inspect. Sources genuinely disagree here — ScrapMonster shows telecom boards at $3.50/lb nationally while Cash for Computer Scrap’s published list runs $8.25–$14.00/lb for the same family of material. Both numbers are accurate for their own channel.
Low-grade boards are barely worth hauling
Low-grade board pricing has been flat. The national reference price sat at $0.12/lb on 21 August 2026, unchanged over 45 days, with yard quotes from $0.10/lb in Arkansas, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Indiana up to $0.18/lb in Gurnee, Illinois. At a dime a pound, a hundred pounds of TV boards is $10. Factor in fuel and it is close to break-even.
Components pay better than the boards they sit on
The highest-value material is not board at all. It is the connectors, memory and processors bolted to the board. Pulling them takes minutes and multiplies the return.
| Component | Price range per lb | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Gold fingers, clean cut | $50.00 – $90.00 | Trimmed edge connectors only |
| Gold-cap memory (gold RAM) | $23.00 – $58.00 | Older gold-plated modules |
| Silver / tin memory | $6.50 – $23.00 | Modern DDR sticks |
| IC chips / EPROMs | $17.00 | Pulled black chips |
| Modern CPUs, mixed | $3.25 – $12.00 | Fiber and plastic-body chips |
| AMD ceramic, clean | $105.00 | Sorted ceramic bodies |
| Pentium Pro gold cap | $240.00 | Vintage, sorted |
| Intel 386 / 486 ceramic | $350.00 | Vintage, sorted |
The memory spread is the one that trips people up. A buyer quoting $58/lb means gold-plated contacts on older modules, trimmed and sorted. A buyer quoting $6.50/lb means whole modern sticks with tin contacts. They are not the same material. Check what the grade actually describes before you ship.
Sorting rules that hold at most yards
- Pull RAM, CPUs and gold-fingered cards before the board goes in the bucket.
- Strip steel brackets, heat sinks and mounting hardware. Aluminum heat sinks pay their own aluminum rate.
- Keep batteries off the board. A CMOS battery can drop a whole lot to a downgrade.
- Separate cell phone boards. They are worth more per pound than anything else in a mixed e-scrap pile.
- Do not break boards up. Refiners buy on assay of the whole lot, and fragments look like low grade.
Why home gold recovery loses money
Gold closed at $4,538 per troy ounce on 21 August 2026, which works out to about $145.90 per gram. That number is what pulls people toward acid recovery. Run the arithmetic all the way through and it stops looking good.
| Item | Gold content | Gross gold value at $145.90/g |
|---|---|---|
| Cell phone board | 0.025 – 0.034 g | $3.65 – $4.96 |
| Laptop motherboard | 0.12 – 0.28 g | $17.51 – $40.85 |
| Desktop RAM stick | 0.06 – 0.11 g | $8.75 – $16.05 |
| CPU | 0.08 – 0.14 g | $11.67 – $20.43 |
Those are gross figures for gold that is physically present. Here is what happens when you try to get it out at a kitchen sink.
Your recovery rate is bad. Commercial refiners running hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical processes recover 94–98% of the gold in a lot. Even optimized industrial processes lose 5–12% during leaching, filtration and precipitation. DIY methods commonly lose 25–60% to incomplete dissolution or premature precipitation. Half your gold goes down the drain, and that is on a good day.
The reagents cost more than the gold. A home setup runs $120–$300 in chemicals, filters and safety gear and typically recovers about $35 worth of gold per batch. That is a loss before you count your time.
Disposal is a real bill. Spent solutions carry lead, tin and other heavy metals. Lawful hazardous-waste disposal runs $200–$500 per drum. Pouring it out is a felony-grade environmental problem in most states, not a shortcut.
You throw away everything else. Boards carry copper, silver, palladium and tin. A refiner pays you for the whole basket. Acid gold recovery targets one metal and destroys the rest. That is why the graded price of a telecom board at $14/lb often beats what a home refiner nets from the same pound.
The fumes are the actual danger. Aqua regia releases nitrogen dioxide and chlorine. Cyanide leaching is acutely toxic and tightly regulated. There is no efficient, genuinely non-toxic chemical route. People have been hospitalized doing this in a garage.
The honest comparison
Take ten pounds of mid-grade motherboards. Sold graded to a mail-in buyer at $3.15/lb, that is $31.50, no cost, no risk. Run the same ten pounds through acid at home and you spend $120–$300 on materials, recover somewhere between 40% and 75% of the gold, still owe a disposal bill, and lose the copper and palladium value entirely. Scale is the whole business. Commercial operations need roughly 500 kg per month just to cover lab assay and waste treatment. You are not going to beat that with a five-gallon bucket.
Getting the most for your boards
- Weigh before you ship. Mail-in buyers pay on their scale, not yours. Know your weight so you can check the settlement.
- Accumulate before you sell. Full-truckload pricing can roughly double per-pound payouts versus small LTL lots. Fifty pounds of sorted boards beats five pounds five times over.
- Ask about sorting fees. Some headline prices, like hard drive boards at $24/lb, assume you delivered them already sorted. Unsorted material gets a deduction.
- Get the grade in writing. Published lists carry a prices-subject-to-change clause. Confirm the rate the day you ship.
- Do not sand or burn boards. Burning destroys value, releases dioxins, and is illegal nearly everywhere.
Prices move. Reference sites are not binding on any yard, and every published list reserves the right to change without notice. Call your buyer the day you sell.