Global Metal Reserves

Reserves are economically recoverable quantities under current conditions — not the same as broader geological resources, and not a forecast of how long a metal will last. A resource is the wider category: material that's been identified in the ground but hasn't necessarily been shown to be worth extracting at today's prices and technology. A reserve is the narrower, working subset of that — the part a mining company could actually book and mine profitably right now. Reserve totals move with metal prices and mining costs, not just with new discoveries, which is why the same deposit can look larger or smaller in reserve terms from one year to the next without a single new tonne being found.

Every figure here comes from the U.S. Geological Survey's Mineral Commodity Summaries, published annually and used as the standard public reference for national-level mineral reserve data by governments, miners and analysts worldwide. MetalsCost imports USGS's numbers as reported — it does not recalculate, interpolate or smooth them.

Some countries show no figure for a given metal. That isn't an oversight: USGS compiles country-level reserve breakdowns from a mix of national surveys, company disclosures and its own analysis, and it doesn't produce one for every metal/country pair, even where a country is a known producer. Where that's the case, this section says "Not reported," never a guessed or zeroed-out number. Read the full methodology · View sources.