USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Rare Earths

Abstract

The rare-earths chapter of USGS's annual Mineral Commodity Summaries (published February 2026, covering 2025 data). The single most authoritative annual US-government dataset on rare-earth production, trade, pricing, and reserves — the primary source the KB's IEA/S&P/CSIS secondary analyses have all been citing indirectly.

Key Contributions / Findings

Domestic production & trade:

• US mined 51,000 tons REO-equivalent mineral concentrates in 2025 (up from 45,500 in 2024), valued at $240M — mined at Mountain Pass, CA (bastnaesite) plus monazite from SE US heavy-mineral-sand concentrates.
• US net import reliance (compounds & metals) rose to 67% in 2025, up from 53% in 2024 — a reversal worth flagging against the "de-risking is working" narrative in the KB's existing CSIS/S&P sources. (US imports of compounds/metals increased 169% in 2025 even as their total dollar value fell slightly, reflecting a shift to lower-value imported inputs.)
• Import sources 2021-24: China 71%, Malaysia 13%, Japan 5%, Estonia 5%, other 6%.

Global production & reserves (2025):

• World mine production: 390,000 tons. China: 270,000 tons (~69% of world total) — unchanged from 2024.
• World reserves: >75,000,000 tons. China: 44,000,000 tons (~59% of world reserves). US reserves: 1,900,000 tons; "measured and indicated resources" (a broader, less-certain category) are separately estimated at 3.6M tons US / 14M+ tons Canada.

Pricing (average $/kg, 2025):

• NdPr oxide (99% min): $69/kg — down from $75 (2023) but up from $55 (2024); five-year series: 92 (2021) → 124 (2022) → 75 (2023) → 55 (2024) → 69 (2025).
• Praseodymium oxide: $74/kg; Neodymium oxide: $73/kg; Dysprosium/Terbium not separately tabulated in this chapter (see the "Rare Earths (Heavy)" USGS chapter — not yet ingested).
• Employment in US rare-earth mine/mill: 670 (up from 293 in 2021 — nearly 2.3x growth over 4 years).

Policy timeline (USGS's own framing, consistent with existing KB sources):

• April 2025: China adds controls on Sm, Gd, Tb, Dy, Lu, Sc, Y.
• October 2025: China expands controls to Eu, Ho, Er, Tm, Yb.
• November 2025: China suspends the October controls for one year; the April controls remain in effect, though China began issuing general export licenses to selected exporters.

Why It Matters (lens: critical-materials — required numeric cells)

Directly populates several LENS-required numeric cells with primary-government data rather than summary-derived secondary reporting: NdPr oxide price, China's share of processing/production (mine + reserves), and US import-reliance. The import-reliance uptick (53%→67%) is a genuinely new, potentially thesis-complicating data point: it cuts against the "onshoring is closing the gap" framing currently dominant in the KB (from CSIS/S&P) and should be weighed against MP Materials' own production growth (see mp-materials-q1-2026-earnings.md) — the two can both be true if US consumption (driven by magnet/defense demand) is growing faster than US production.

Limitations

• This chapter covers "Rare Earths" (lanthanides + yttrium, excluding most scandium) — heavy rare earths (Dy, Tb specifically) have their own separate USGS chapter ("Rare Earths (Heavy)") not yet ingested; flag for next pass.
• FY2026 government stockpile "Annual Materials Plan" was not released as of publication — stockpile acquisition/disposal targets for the current fiscal year are unavailable.
• 2025 production/consumption figures are USGS estimates (marked "e"), not final audited figures.

Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Rare Earths — U.S. Geological Survey, February 2026. Fetched via curl (declared User-Agent); a prior IEA/S&P WebFetch attempt on adjacent 2026 critical-minerals data had 403'd — USGS's own pubs.usgs.gov host did not require the same workaround but curl was used defensively given the pattern with other .gov/IEA hosts.