Reserves vs. Resources
A "reserve" is the portion of a known mineral deposit that can be economically extracted under current prices, technology and regulations — a working, present-tense estimate, not a fixed physical quantity. A "resource" is a broader category: material that's been identified geologically but hasn't necessarily been shown to be economically extractable yet. This site displays reserve figures only. No resource data is currently imported or shown, and a reserve figure is never presented as if it were a resource figure or vice versa.
Why Some Countries Have No Figure
USGS does not independently measure every country's mineral reserves — figures come from a mix of national surveys, company disclosures and USGS's own analysis, and for many metal/country combinations no country-level reserve figure is compiled at all, even where the country clearly produces the metal. Where that's the case, this site shows "Not reported," never a fabricated or estimated number, and never "0" unless USGS's own data genuinely states zero reserves.
Global Percentages Are Not Recalculated
The global reserve-share and production-share percentages shown throughout this section come directly from the source dataset — they are not recalculated by summing the countries shown here. This matters for one specific case: platinum and palladium. USGS reports one combined "Platinum-Group Metals" reserve figure per country covering both elements together, with no per-element reserve split — only production is reported separately for each. Because of that, this site never shows a reserve-share percentage for platinum or palladium individually (a notice appears on both metals' pages explaining why), while production shares for each remain fully reported.
Reserve Figures Are Never Summed Across Commodities
This site does not publish a single "total global reserves" number anywhere, because the underlying units differ by commodity — some are reported in tonnes of contained metal, others in tonnes of ore, others in kilograms — and adding figures across different units and reporting bases would produce a meaningless number, not a genuine total.
Units
Every quantity is displayed exactly as reported in the source, in the source's own unit — this site does not convert reserve or production figures into a different unit system. Where a value looks unusually large or small, that's a reflection of the commodity's own reporting convention (for example, iron ore reserves are reported in million metric tons of contained iron, while several other metals are reported in metric tons or kilograms of contained metal).
Data Vintage and Updates
The reserve and production figures currently shown are for data year , from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 release. This is annual reference data, not a live feed — expect it to update roughly once a year when USGS publishes its next edition, not daily like this site's metal price pages.
