Reading the figures

Every figure on this site comes from one publication: the U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, version 1.3 of May 27, 2026. Each of its 89 chapters covers one commodity; 75 of them include a table of world production by country. This page explains how to read those tables and how the site turns them into shares, ranks and comparisons.

The years

World tables give 2024 and 2025. USGS marks the 2025 figures as estimates, made late in 2025, and some 2024 figures were revised from the previous edition. The U.S. statistics run from 2021 to 2025, again with 2025 estimated. Nothing here is a forecast.

Symbols kept as published

W (shown as “withheld”) means USGS withheld the figure to avoid disclosing company data. NA (“not available”) means no figure exists. A dash in the source means zero. “In other” marks a country whose figure USGS folded into “Other countries”. Text entries such as “large” or “moderate” appear in some reserve columns. None of these are replaced with a number, and none count toward a rank.

Units

Each commodity keeps the unit of its own table: metric tons of contained metal for most metals, gross weight for many industrial minerals, kilograms for gallium, germanium and the platinum-group metals, carats for diamonds, cubic meters for helium. Some tables report a different basis per column, for example iron ore in usable ore and in iron content. Tonnages are therefore only compared inside one table. Across commodities the site compares only unit-free measures: shares, percentage changes and reserve-to-output ratios.

Shares

A country’s share is its 2025 figure divided by the USGS world total for the same column. If the world total is missing, given as “large”, or written as a lower bound such as “more than 75 million”, no share is shown. For boron and kyanite USGS lists countries in different forms (crude ore, refined borates, andalusite, kyanite), so neither shares nor ranks are given. Where the U.S. figure is withheld, some world totals exclude U.S. output; the commodity page says so.

Ranks

A rank counts only the countries with a positive published figure in that column. “3rd of 12” means two listed countries had higher figures and twelve had figures at all. Countries grouped into “Other countries” are not ranked, so a rank describes position among listed producers, not among every producer on earth.

Indexes computed here

Top-producer share: the largest single-country share in a table. It is compared across the 72 commodities whose lead table has a numeric world total. Top-three share: the sum of the three largest shares. Change on 2024: the 2025 figure minus the 2024 figure, divided by the 2024 figure; shown only when both are published numbers. Reserve years: the world (or a country’s) reserve figure divided by its 2025 production, in years; calculated only where reserves and production describe the same material, after converting thousand or million metric tons to metric tons. It is a ratio of two snapshots, not a forecast of when anything runs out. Tables listed in: the number of world production tables in which USGS names a country separately with a 2025 figure or a withheld entry.

U.S. statistics

Net import reliance is imports minus exports, adjusted for stock changes, as a percentage of apparent consumption, as USGS defines it. “E” means net exporter. Import shares cover 2021–24 and refer to the product named on the page (for example ores and concentrates, or refined metal). Price rows from the USGS salient statistics are not reproduced.

What this site leaves out

World resources, tariff schedules, depletion allowances, stockpile tables and the narrative sections of each chapter are not reproduced. Cesium, Iron and steel slag, Quartz crystal (high-purity and cultured), Heavy rare earths, Rubidium, Scandium, Thallium, Thorium, and Wollastonite have no world production table and too few published U.S. figures (no reliance figure or no import breakdown) to support a page of their own. For anything not shown here, the USGS chapter is the reference; every page names it.