Rare Earth Producing Countries — Neodymium Rate on September 17, 2026

Six Countries Account for Nearly All Rare Earth Mining

Ask where rare earths actually come from and most people guess one country and stop there. That's not far wrong — China does dominate — but it isn't the whole answer either. A handful of other countries mine meaningful volumes too, and understanding that spread matters if you're trying to gauge how exposed the world's supply of neodymium really is to a single source. Today's benchmark sits at ₹12.41 per gram, September 17, 2026, a figure ultimately shaped by exactly the production geography this page covers.

Before getting into who mines what, here's today's rate converted across the weights buyers actually deal in:

• Per gram: ₹12.41
• Per 10 grams: ₹124.07
• Per kilogram: ₹12,407.36

That number traces back to international rare-earth spot pricing converted through the prevailing USD/INR rate — there's no domestic Indian exchange quoting neodymium the way MCX quotes gold, so this is an industrial benchmark rather than a retail bullion price.

Rare Earth Mine Production by Country

The table below is built from the U.S. Geological Survey's Mineral Commodity Summaries 2024 — the most recent full-year dataset USGS has published, covering 2023 mine production on a rare-earth-oxide-equivalent basis. It's not a live number and it never will be; countries report annual mining statistics, not daily ones, so treat this as the structural backdrop behind the price above rather than something that shifts day to day.

Rank	Country	Mine Production (2023)	Share of World Total
1	China	240,000 tonnes	68.6%
2	United States	43,000 tonnes	12.3%
3	Myanmar	35,000 tonnes	10.0%
4	Australia	18,000 tonnes	5.1%
5	India	2,900 tonnes	0.8%
6	Russia	2,600 tonnes	0.7%
—	Smaller producers (incl. Brazil, Madagascar)	—	~2.5%
—	World total	~350,000 tonnes	100%

China's mining share is the smaller half of its dominance

Read that table on its own and China already looks overwhelming — nearly seven out of every ten tonnes mined worldwide. But the mining share actually understates how concentrated this market really is. China also processes and refines an even larger share of world rare earth output than it mines, regardless of where that ore was originally dug up. Ore mined in the United States or Australia often still gets shipped to China for the separation and refining step, because comparable processing capacity elsewhere is limited. The mining table above is real and useful, but it's only the first half of the supply-chain-concentration story — the fuller picture is covered on this site's China rare earth dominance page.

The rest of the field is smaller than many assume. The United States, anchored almost entirely by the Mountain Pass mine in California, holds the second spot at a little over 12% — respectable, but not remotely close to China's share. Myanmar's 10% surprises people who don't follow this market closely, and Australia, India and Russia round out the list at single-digit shares apiece.

What the Non-China Buildout Actually Looks Like Today

None of this concentration has gone unnoticed. The United States, Australia and other governments have publicly committed real investment toward mining and processing rare earths outside China, and that effort is genuine — Mountain Pass itself has drawn fresh investment in recent years specifically because of supply-security concerns, not despite them. Reading a table like this one, it's tempting to treat "non-China supply" as a single growing bloc, but it's really six-plus separate national efforts, each moving at its own pace and starting from a very different base.

What's honest to say is that this buildout remains modest set against China's scale. Building new mining capacity takes years of permitting and construction; building new processing capacity, the harder and more decisive piece, takes longer still. Analysts broadly agree that meaningful diversification away from China is a multi-year undertaking rather than something that shows up in next year's USGS report — a fair, hedged way to frame it rather than predicting exactly when or how far that shift will go.

For now, the practical takeaway is straightforward: the rate of ₹12.41 per gram, ₹12,407.36 per kilogram, shown on this page as of September 17, 2026, sits downstream of a market where one country supplies most of the mined material and an even larger share of the processing that turns it into something usable. That's unlikely to change quickly, whatever progress the countries further down this table's list manage to make.