Non-grain-oriented electrical steel (NGOES, also sold as CRNGO) is the silicon steel used in motor and generator cores because its magnetic properties are close to uniform in every direction — unlike grain-oriented steel, which is optimized for one direction and built for transformers instead.
As of this month, the honest answer to “can NGOES still get a motor to IE5?” is: often yes, in the lower and mid power ranges, with a tighter grade and gauge spec than an IE4 design needs — but for some designs, the material alone won’t do it anymore.
That question just became a lot less theoretical. IE5 stopped being a marketing label for niche synchronous reluctance motors and became a formally defined class in IEC 60034-30-1:2025, the international standard that motor manufacturers actually design against — with new Tables 11 and 12 setting nominal IE5 efficiency limits for single-speed motors from 0.12 kW to 1,000 kW. Nobody has to hit it yet. But buyers can now specify it, and that changes the conversation with your steel supplier.
We got a version of this question from a pump-motor customer in July, before the standard’s update was even widely reported: their design team had written “IE5” into a spec, and when we asked which table they were testing against, nobody on their side actually knew — the number had come from a competitor’s brochure, not a standard. That gap is exactly what this article is trying to close.
Key Takeaways
- IEC 60034-30-1:2025 (edition 2.0) formally added IE5 nominal efficiency limits in new Tables 11 and 12, covering motors from 0.12 kW to 1,000 kW — a change reported industry-wide as recently as August 19, 2026.
- IE5 targets roughly 30–40% lower energy loss than IE3, depending on the application — a bigger jump than IE3-to-IE4, which was itself a material and design change, not a software tweak.
- Reaching IE5 with conventional non-grain-oriented electrical steel means stacking every available lever at once: higher-silicon grades, sub-0.20mm gauges, and larger cores — and at the top of the power range, those levers run out of headroom.
- Amorphous alloy cores cut no-load loss further, but the material is roughly ten times thinner than standard NGOES and too brittle to punch — it has to be wound or laser-cut, which is a different manufacturing process, not a drop-in substitute.
- China’s GB 18613-2020 has quietly had an IE5-equivalent voluntary tier (Grade 1) since 2020; the IEC’s 2025 codification is catching global buyers up to where Chinese efficiency labeling already was.
What Non-Grain-Oriented Electrical Steel Actually Is
NGOES is a cold-rolled silicon-iron alloy, typically 1.5–3.5% silicon by weight, processed so its grain structure carries magnetic flux roughly equally in every in-plane direction. That isotropy is exactly what a rotating field inside a motor or generator needs — a transformer core, by contrast, only ever sees flux in one direction, which is why grain-oriented steel is used there instead and NGOES would underperform it badly in that role.
We supply our non-oriented steel line across three tiers: standard gauges from 0.35–0.65mm for general industrial motors, high-strength variants above 600 MPa yield for high-speed EV traction rotors, and ultra-thin 0.05–0.20mm grades for high-frequency and premium-efficiency designs. Which tier a design needs depends almost entirely on the target efficiency class — which is where IE5 changes the math.
IE5 Just Became a Real IEC Class — What Changed
Efficiency classes for AC motors have run IE1 through IE4 since the 2014 edition of IEC 60034-30-1. IE5 existed informally before that — mostly as a term vendors used for synchronous reluctance and premium permanent-magnet designs that beat IE4 by a wide margin — but it had no standardized efficiency table to test against, which made “IE5” more of a claim than a spec.
That changed with IEC 60034-30-1:2025 (edition 2.0, dated December 2025), which added Tables 11 and 12 defining nominal IE5 efficiency limits for single-speed, line-operated motors rated 0.12 kW to 1,000 kW, at 50–1,000 V, with 2, 4, 6, or 8 poles. Trade press coverage of the update — including an August 19, 2026 report — describes it as the standard finally “catching up” with technology that manufacturers were already building but couldn’t formally certify against a common benchmark.
What this does not mean: no regulator has made IE5 mandatory anywhere yet. What it means is that a buyer can now write “IE5 per IEC 60034-30-1:2025” into a purchase spec and get a testable, comparable answer from any compliant motor manufacturer — instead of a vendor-specific efficiency claim with no shared reference point.
| Efficiency Class | Typical Loss Reduction vs. IE3 | How It’s Usually Achieved | Regulatory Status (mid-2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| IE3 | Baseline | Standard NGOES grades, established core geometry | Mandatory in EU and China for most 0.75–1000 kW motors |
| IE4 | ~15–20% lower loss | Lower-core-loss NGOES grade, thinner laminations, or a larger core | Mandatory in EU for the 75–200 kW band; incentivized in China |
| IE5 | ~30–40% lower loss | Premium NGOES + design changes, or a topology/material shift | Not yet mandated; now formally definable and testable |
IE3 to IE4 Was a Steel Problem. IE5 Is a Different Kind of Problem
We’ve written before about the IE3-to-IE4 steel changes manufacturers had to make — lower-core-loss grades, thinner gauges, or bigger cores, in some combination. That jump was real engineering work, but it stayed inside the boundaries of conventional NGOES: better grades of the same material, in a motor of largely the same architecture.
IE5 asks more of the same three levers, and that is exactly the problem. Each lever has a ceiling:
- Higher-silicon grades (above roughly 3.0% Si) cut core loss further but get harder to cold-roll and more brittle to punch — yield and formability trade off against magnetic performance past a point most mills won’t push past for standard production runs.
- Thinner gauges reduce eddy-current loss roughly with the square of thickness, which is why sub-0.20mm gauge steel shows up in premium designs — but thinner strip costs more to roll, slit, and stack, and stacking factor drops as layers of insulation coating make up a larger share of the total thickness.
- Larger cores buy efficiency by spreading the same flux over more cross-section, but a motor’s frame size is usually fixed by the application — you can’t make an IE5 motor 20% bigger and call it a drop-in replacement.
Stack all three levers at once and mid-size industrial motors (roughly 7.5–75 kW) can often reach IE5 with premium conventional NGOES. Above that range, or in compact high-speed designs where frame size is already constrained — the same territory where high-strength CRNGO grades are used for rotor strength — the material alone increasingly needs help from the motor’s magnetic circuit design, not just its steel spec.
Can Non-Oriented Steel Actually Reach IE5? Three Paths Buyers Are Weighing
Talk to enough motor manufacturers chasing IE5 right now and the conversation splits into three camps, not one.
Path 1: Push conventional NGOES as far as it goes. Combine a high-silicon, low-core-loss grade with sub-0.20mm gauge and accept the cost premium. This works for a meaningful share of the market — especially where frame size has some flexibility — but it’s a diminishing-returns game. Each additional 0.02mm of gauge reduction buys less efficiency than the last, while cost keeps climbing linearly with processing complexity.
Path 2: Switch the core material to amorphous alloy. Amorphous ribbon can cut no-load loss to roughly a third of what grain-oriented steel achieves in transformer service, and the physics that makes that true — an amorphous, non-crystalline structure with very low hysteresis loss — applies to motor cores too. The catch is manufacturability, covered in detail below.
Path 3: Change the motor topology instead of the steel. Synchronous reluctance motors (SynRM) and premium permanent-magnet designs can hit IE5 efficiency using conventional NGOES, because the efficiency gain comes from the magnetic circuit’s geometry and control strategy rather than from squeezing more performance out of the lamination material itself. This is arguably the path with the least steel-sourcing risk, but it requires a different motor design — not a spec change on an existing one.
Most manufacturers we talk to are running some blend of Paths 1 and 3: keep the steel spec as conventional as the target allows, and lean on topology changes to close whatever gap remains. Path 2 stays reserved for applications where the efficiency requirement is severe enough, or the duty cycle long enough, that the manufacturing complexity pays for itself.
| Path | Efficiency Ceiling | Manufacturing Risk | Best Fit For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Premium conventional NGOES | Reaches IE5 for most mid-size, frame-flexible designs | Low — existing stamping lines, established supply base | General industrial motors with some frame-size margin |
| 2. Amorphous alloy core | Highest theoretical no-load loss reduction | High — wound or laser-cut construction, narrow supplier base | Long-duty-cycle, high-efficiency-premium applications |
| 3. Topology change (SynRM/PMSM) | Reaches IE5 using conventional NGOES | Moderate — new motor design, not a spec swap | Frame-constrained or compact high-speed designs |
Laid out this way, the decision isn’t really “which material is more efficient” — it’s “which risk is your program better positioned to absorb: a pricier steel spec, a new manufacturing process, or a redesigned motor.” Most sourcing teams find that question easier to answer than the raw efficiency comparison alone.
NGOES vs. Amorphous Cores for Motors: A Straight Comparison
The physical numbers behind Path 2 are worth seeing side by side, because “amorphous is more efficient” undersells how different the two materials are to actually build with.
| Property | Conventional NGOES | Amorphous Alloy |
|---|---|---|
| Typical strip thickness | 0.20–0.65mm | ~0.025mm (roughly 1/10 as thick) |
| Core-loss advantage | Baseline | Meaningfully lower no-load loss at equivalent frequency |
| Manufacturing method | Punched/stamped laminations, stacked | Wound continuous ribbon, or laser/wire-cut — cannot be stamped without cracking |
| Relative material cost | Baseline | Roughly 1.3x conventional silicon steel today, down from ~4.5x thirteen years ago |
| Stacking factor | 92–97% typical | Meaningfully lower — more physical volume needed for equivalent steel content |
| Supply base | Broad, multiple mills globally | Narrow — a handful of producers worldwide |
The cost gap has closed dramatically, which is the real story of the last decade. But “cheaper than it used to be” and “interchangeable with stamped NGOES” are different claims.
We’ve covered amorphous core’s punching problem in detail on the transformer side, and the same brittleness applies to a motor stator: amorphous ribbon doesn’t tolerate a conventional stamping die, so building an amorphous stator means wound or laser-cut construction with different tooling and a narrower supplier base — not a material swap on an existing production line.
For most motor manufacturers evaluating IE5, that manufacturing gap — not the raw efficiency number — is what decides whether amorphous is actually on the table for a given program, or a longer-term option to revisit once tooling and supply mature further.
China and the EU Are Not on the Same IE5 Timeline
One detail gets lost in coverage that treats IE5 as a single global milestone: China’s own motor efficiency standard, GB 18613-2020, already defines a Grade 1 tier requiring roughly 20% lower losses than Grade 2 (IE4-equivalent) — a threshold that maps closely to what IEC now calls IE5. That grade has existed as a voluntary top tier in China’s labeling system since 2020, well before the IEC gave the rest of the world a standardized way to test for it.
The EU’s Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2019/1781 tells a different story. IE3 has been mandatory for most three-phase motors from 0.75–1000 kW since 2021, and IE4 is already required for motors in the 75–200 kW band — but the regulation has no IE5 mandate, and the European Commission’s review of the rule is running as an evaluation and impact-assessment study through spring 2027 before any expansion is decided.
The practical effect for buyers: a Chinese-market motor spec sheet claiming the top domestic grade may already be IE5-equivalent by the new IEC definition, even though no EU or US regulation requires it yet. That’s worth checking explicitly rather than assuming “IE5” means the same regulatory weight in every market a buyer ships to.
Where Market Demand Is Actually Headed
None of this is happening against a flat demand backdrop. The non-grain-oriented electrical steel market is estimated at roughly USD 20 billion in 2026, with most published forecasts putting it in the USD 25–30 billion range by the early 2030s — growth concentrated specifically in motor applications rather than the broader steel market.
- Motors already account for close to half of total electrical steel demand as of 2025, with EV traction motors and IE4/IE5-class industrial drives cited as the two fastest-growing segments within that share.
- EV-specific demand is growing faster than the NGOES market overall, reflecting how many individual motors a modern EV platform uses compared with a conventional vehicle.
- None of the market forecasts we reviewed model amorphous cores displacing a significant share of motor demand in this window — the growth story is squarely about better grades of conventional NGOES, not a material substitution wave.
That last point matters for sourcing strategy: the near-term IE5 opportunity is overwhelmingly a “better steel spec” problem for most buyers, not a “different material” problem — Path 2 above stays a minority path for the foreseeable future, not an imminent mainstream shift.
| Demand Segment | Direction Through Early 2030s | What’s Driving It |
|---|---|---|
| EV traction motors | Fastest-growing segment | More motors per vehicle platform, rising EV penetration |
| Industrial IE4/IE5 drives | Growing, tied to regulatory phase-ins | EU and China efficiency mandates expanding by power band |
| Generators and gensets | Stable, steady replacement demand | Less sensitive to efficiency-class shifts than motors |
| Transformers (GOES, separate market) | Constrained by capacity, not demand | Grid buildout and AI data center load growth |
Reading across that table, the interesting takeaway isn’t which segment is biggest — it’s that three of the four growth drivers are regulatory or infrastructure-driven rather than purely commercial, which means they’re relatively insulated from short-term price swings in a way that makes long-range capacity planning with a supplier more reliable than it might first appear.
Before You Send Your Next Motor Core RFQ
A spec sheet that just says “IE5” without more detail leaves your supplier guessing which of the three paths above you actually need — we’ve had to send more than one quote back to a buyer this year just to ask which table or grade they meant. Before the RFQ goes out:
- Confirm which standard “IE5” refers to. IEC 60034-30-1:2025, GB 18613-2020 Grade 1, and a vendor’s internal efficiency claim are not automatically the same threshold — ask for the specific table and test method.
- Check frame-size tolerance before assuming a steel-only fix. If the application allows a larger core, Path 1 (premium NGOES) usually gets there. If frame size is fixed, ask your motor designer whether a topology change is realistic before over-specifying the steel.
- Ask for actual core-loss test data, not just a grade name. Two mills’ “35W250”-class products can differ meaningfully in real-world loss depending on annealing and coating — request Epstein or single-sheet tester results from the batch you’d actually receive, not a catalog figure.
- Separate the gauge decision from the grade decision. A thinner gauge in a mediocre grade can underperform a thicker gauge in a premium grade at the same frequency — the two variables need to be optimized together, not chosen independently off two separate spec sheets.
- If amorphous is even on the table, budget the tooling conversation early. A wound or laser-cut stator is a different manufacturing line, not a substitution on an existing stamping press — get that conversation started with your supplier months before it becomes a schedule risk.
Our own full gauge thickness guide breaks down the eddy-current and stacking-factor tradeoffs referenced above in more depth, and verifying supplier test data covers what documentation should actually accompany a batch before it ships, which becomes more important, not less, as the spec gets tighter.
FAQ
Is IE5 mandatory yet anywhere?
No. As of mid-2026, IE5 is not a regulatory requirement in the EU, US, or China. IEC 60034-30-1:2025 made it a testable, standardized class for the first time, and China’s GB 18613-2020 has had a roughly equivalent voluntary top grade since 2020, but no jurisdiction currently mandates it.
Can standard non-grain-oriented electrical steel reach IE5 at all?
For many mid-size motors, yes — with a premium low-core-loss grade, a thinner gauge, and sometimes a larger core than an IE4 design would use. At the high end of the power range or in frame-constrained designs, conventional NGOES alone often isn’t enough without a topology change or an amorphous core.
What’s the real difference between chasing IE4 and chasing IE5?
IE3-to-IE4 was mostly a steel-spec upgrade within the same motor architecture. IE5 asks for another 30–40% loss reduction versus IE3, which pushes past what grade and gauge changes alone can reliably deliver in every power range — for some designs it now requires a motor topology change, not just a better lamination.
Does amorphous alloy make sense as a near-term alternative to NGOES for motors?
For most standard motor programs, not yet. Amorphous ribbon can’t be punched — it has to be wound or laser-cut, which means different tooling and a narrower supplier base. It’s a real option for applications with severe efficiency requirements or long, continuous duty cycles where the manufacturing complexity is worth it, not a general-purpose substitute.
If my motor spec says “IE5,” does that mean the same thing in China as in Europe?
Not automatically. A Chinese motor rated to GB 18613-2020 Grade 1 may already meet or exceed what IEC 60034-30-1:2025 defines as IE5, but always confirm which standard and table a supplier is testing against — the labels aren’t interchangeable without checking.
Bottom Line
IE5 spent years as a claim without a shared yardstick. IEC 60034-30-1:2025 gave it one, and that turns “can we hit IE5?” from a marketing question into a spec conversation your steel supplier needs to be part of from the start — not after the motor design is locked. For most programs, the answer still runs through better non-grain-oriented electrical steel, not a material change. For the rest, knowing that early is worth more than finding out at prototype stage.
References
- Envirotec Magazine — IE5 motor efficiency class enters IEC standard
- IEC Webstore — IEC 60034-30-1:2025
- EUR-Lex — Ecodesign requirements — electric motors and variable speed drives
- Design Solutions Magazine — Updated IEC 60034-30-1 framework provides clearer guidance on specifying high-efficiency motors
- MDPI, Machines — Overview of Amorphous Soft Magnetic Materials for Electric Vehicle Motors: Performance, Challenges, and Future Directions
