# Where do rare earths come from?

Source: Commodity Origins, https://commodityorigins.com/commodities/rare-earths/ — data JSON: https://commodityorigins.com/data/commodities/rare-earths.json — license CC BY 4.0 (upstream data keeps its license; see Sources below).

Rare earths come mainly from China, which produced 270,000 tonnes in 2025, 69% of the world's 390,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). United States (13%), Australia (7.4%) and Myanmar (5.6%) follow; the top five together supply 97%. The biggest exporter of rare-earth metals and compounds (HS 2805) is China (38% of world export value in 2024, CEPII BACI). Rare earths are not rare in the crust; what is rare is a deposit where they are concentrated enough, and in the right proportions, to be worth the enormous chemical effort of separating seventeen nearly identical elements from one another.

*A group of seventeen chemically similar metals, mined together and separated at great cost, used in magnets, catalysts and phosphors.* Also called: rare earth elements, REE, neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, NdPr, rare earth oxides.

## Where do rare earths come from?

| Rank | Country | Production 2025 (tonnes) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | 270,000 | 69% |
| 2 | United States | 51,000 | 13% |
| 3 | Australia | 29,000 | 7.4% |
| 4 | Myanmar | 22,000 | 5.6% |
| 5 | Thailand | 4,800 | 1.2% |
| 6 | India | 2,900 | 0.7% |
| 7 | Madagascar | 2,700 | 0.7% |
| 8 | Russia | 2,600 | 0.7% |
| 9 | Brazil | 2,000 | 0.5% |
| 10 | Nigeria | 1,500 | 0.4% |
| | Rest of world | 550 | 0.4% |
| | World | 390,000 | 100% |

Source: USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, MCS 2026.

In 2025 China mined 270,000 tonnes of rare-earth oxide equivalent, 69% of the world's 390,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). United States followed with 13%, then Australia (7.4%), Myanmar (5.6%) and Thailand (1.2%). The top five account for 97%. Reserves tell a less concentrated story: China holds 52% of the world's 85.3 million tonnes (USGS MCS).

Mining concentration understates the real position, and this is the single most important thing to understand about the sector. Separating the seventeen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium from one another requires hundreds of stages of solvent extraction, because the elements differ so little chemically. That capacity is overwhelmingly Chinese, and so is the magnet-making capacity downstream. A country can mine rare earths without being able to do anything useful with them, which is exactly the position most non-Chinese producers have been in.

The deposits themselves come in a few types: carbonatites such as Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia and Mountain Pass in California, which are rich in the light elements cerium, lanthanum, neodymium and praseodymium; ion-adsorption clays in southern China and Myanmar, which are the main source of the heavy elements dysprosium and terbium that magnets need for heat resistance; and mineral sands containing monazite, a by-product of titanium and zirconium mining.

Production means mined oxide equivalent, not separated oxides and certainly not magnets. World output changed +3% on the previous year, and the trend has been upward as non-Chinese mines opened, but the separation bottleneck has moved much less.

## Who exports and imports rare earths?

Mining is less concentrated than separation: China refines and separates the great majority of world oxide and makes most of the world's sintered magnets, so the mine map understates its position.

### Exporters of alkali and rare-earth metals; scandium and yttrium (HS 2805), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | $422.1 million | 38% |
| 2 | Vietnam | $197.4 million | 18% |
| 3 | Australia | $128.2 million | 11% |
| 4 | France | $98.2 million | 8.8% |
| 5 | Germany | $66.9 million | 6% |
| 6 | United States | $53.8 million | 4.8% |
| 7 | Thailand | $45.1 million | 4% |
| 8 | Japan | $15.8 million | 1.4% |
| 9 | Malaysia | $12.6 million | 1.1% |
| 10 | Netherlands | $12.5 million | 1.1% |
| 11 | Singapore | $8.8 million | 0.8% |
| 12 | Kyrgyzstan | $6.3 million | 0.6% |
| 13 | Mexico | $5 million | 0.4% |
| 14 | Russia | $4.2 million | 0.4% |
| 15 | India | $3.8 million | 0.3% |

### Importers of alkali and rare-earth metals; scandium and yttrium (HS 2805), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Japan | $279.6 million | 25% |
| 2 | Malaysia | $129.3 million | 12% |
| 3 | United States | $91.7 million | 8.2% |
| 4 | India | $66.8 million | 6% |
| 5 | France | $48.2 million | 4.3% |
| 6 | Vietnam | $43.8 million | 3.9% |
| 7 | China | $42.4 million | 3.8% |
| 8 | Germany | $39.4 million | 3.5% |
| 9 | Singapore | $35.6 million | 3.2% |
| 10 | Other Asia, nes | $34 million | 3% |
| 11 | United Kingdom | $26.1 million | 2.3% |
| 12 | South Korea | $25.6 million | 2.3% |
| 13 | Thailand | $18.6 million | 1.7% |
| 14 | Canada | $18.3 million | 1.6% |
| 15 | Poland | $17.1 million | 1.5% |

### Exporters of compounds of rare-earth metals, other (HS 284690), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Myanmar | $817.8 million | 34% |
| 2 | Malaysia | $386.7 million | 16% |
| 3 | China | $380.8 million | 16% |
| 4 | Laos | $259.6 million | 11% |
| 5 | Japan | $150 million | 6.3% |
| 6 | United States | $89.4 million | 3.8% |
| 7 | France | $34.3 million | 1.4% |
| 8 | India | $33.5 million | 1.4% |
| 9 | Vietnam | $32.2 million | 1.4% |
| 10 | South Korea | $26.3 million | 1.1% |
| 11 | Germany | $25.6 million | 1.1% |
| 12 | Austria | $17.9 million | 0.8% |
| 13 | Netherlands | $15.9 million | 0.7% |
| 14 | Estonia | $14.9 million | 0.6% |
| 15 | Turkey (Türkiye) | $13.1 million | 0.6% |

### Importers of compounds of rare-earth metals, other (HS 284690), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | $1.4 billion | 57% |
| 2 | Japan | $213.2 million | 9% |
| 3 | Vietnam | $188.3 million | 7.9% |
| 4 | United States | $152.3 million | 6.4% |
| 5 | South Korea | $62.1 million | 2.6% |
| 6 | Thailand | $59.4 million | 2.5% |
| 7 | Philippines | $59.2 million | 2.5% |
| 8 | Germany | $51.2 million | 2.2% |
| 9 | Other Asia, nes | $23 million | 1% |
| 10 | North Macedonia | $20 million | 0.8% |
| 11 | Turkey (Türkiye) | $19.8 million | 0.8% |
| 12 | France | $19.6 million | 0.8% |
| 13 | Russia | $18.7 million | 0.8% |
| 14 | Netherlands | $12.2 million | 0.5% |
| 15 | Spain | $11.4 million | 0.5% |

### Exporters of permanent magnets of metal (mostly neodymium-iron-boron) (HS 850511), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | $3.1 billion | 62% |
| 2 | Japan | $429.2 million | 8.6% |
| 3 | Vietnam | $292.8 million | 5.9% |
| 4 | Philippines | $284.3 million | 5.7% |
| 5 | Germany | $230.9 million | 4.6% |
| 6 | United States | $94.1 million | 1.9% |
| 7 | Malaysia | $60.3 million | 1.2% |
| 8 | Thailand | $54.6 million | 1.1% |
| 9 | Switzerland | $52.6 million | 1.1% |
| 10 | Netherlands | $39.2 million | 0.8% |
| 11 | South Korea | $35.3 million | 0.7% |
| 12 | Italy | $33.7 million | 0.7% |
| 13 | France | $26.6 million | 0.5% |
| 14 | United Kingdom | $23.8 million | 0.5% |
| 15 | Other Asia, nes | $23.4 million | 0.5% |

### Importers of permanent magnets of metal (mostly neodymium-iron-boron) (HS 850511), 2024

| Rank | Country | Value (US$) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Germany | $619.2 million | 12% |
| 2 | Japan | $569.1 million | 11% |
| 3 | United States | $491.8 million | 9.9% |
| 4 | Vietnam | $382.4 million | 7.7% |
| 5 | South Korea | $306.9 million | 6.2% |
| 6 | Philippines | $298.2 million | 6% |
| 7 | Mexico | $245.4 million | 4.9% |
| 8 | India | $194.6 million | 3.9% |
| 9 | Thailand | $174.2 million | 3.5% |
| 10 | France | $143.5 million | 2.9% |
| 11 | Poland | $136.7 million | 2.7% |
| 12 | China | $130.2 million | 2.6% |
| 13 | Malaysia | $119.5 million | 2.4% |
| 14 | Hungary | $102.7 million | 2.1% |
| 15 | Italy | $92.7 million | 1.9% |

Source: CEPII BACI international trade database (HS22, V202601).

China was the largest exporter of rare-earth metals and compounds (HS 2805) in 2024 with 38% of world export value, ahead of Vietnam (18%), on world trade of $1.1 billion (CEPII BACI). Japan was the largest importer with 25%.

Trade statistics for rare earths are genuinely difficult to read. The customs headings mix unseparated concentrates, individual separated oxides worth vastly different amounts, metals and alloys, so a value share does not translate into a quantity share. A large share of world trade is also intra-industry: concentrate moves to China for separation and comes back as oxide or metal, and finished magnets move again under an entirely different heading. The map that matters most, magnet production, does not appear in this table at all.

## What do rare earths cost?

### How they are priced

This page does not quote a rare-earth price, and the reason is worth stating plainly. There is no exchange benchmark and no free, citable public price series. Individual separated oxides, neodymium-praseodymium, dysprosium, terbium, lanthanum, cerium and the rest, are assessed by private price reporting agencies whose data is licensed, and the Chinese domestic market and the export market can diverge substantially. Publishing a number here would mean either paying for a license this site does not have or making one up, so it does neither.

What can be said is how prices are actually set. Most material moves under annual or multi-year contracts between separators and magnet makers, referenced to a private index. Chinese production and export quotas, set administratively, have historically been the largest single influence on the level. Because the elements come out of the ground in fixed proportions, producers face a balance problem: demand is concentrated in neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium for magnets, while cerium and lanthanum come out in far greater quantity than anyone wants and are effectively waste with a disposal cost. The economics of a mine therefore depend on its basket composition, not on a single price.

For readers wanting a directional sense of the market, the volumes and shares on this page, the concentration of separation capacity, and the policy timeline below say more about cost and availability than any single quotation would.

## What moves the price of rare earths?

### Permanent magnet demand

Neodymium-iron-boron magnets in electric vehicle motors, wind turbine generators, robotics, drones, and every hard drive and speaker are the demand that matters. Motors are the largest and fastest-growing use, and each direct-drive wind turbine or traction motor contains kilograms of magnet, so magnet demand tracks electrification directly.

### Chinese export and production policy

Quotas on production and export, environmental enforcement against unlicensed mining, and export licensing on specific heavy elements have repeatedly moved the market. Because separation capacity is concentrated, an administrative decision affects world availability in a way no mine closure would.

### The balance problem

The elements are mined together in fixed geological ratios, but demand is wildly uneven. Producing enough neodymium means producing far more cerium and lanthanum than the market wants, so surplus light elements are stockpiled or discarded. A mine's viability depends on whether its ore is rich in the elements people actually pay for.

### Heavy rare earth supply

Dysprosium and terbium, which let magnets hold their strength at motor operating temperatures, come mainly from ion-adsorption clays in southern China and Myanmar. That supply is small, geographically narrow and exposed to conflict and enforcement, and it is the tightest part of the chain.

### Separation capacity outside China

Building a separation plant is a chemical engineering project of hundreds of stages, with difficult effluent and, where monazite is involved, low-level radioactive thorium residues to manage. Permitting is the binding constraint, which is why announced non-Chinese capacity has taken far longer to arrive than announced non-Chinese mines.

### Substitution and thrifting

Motor designers reduce dysprosium content through grain-boundary diffusion, redesign magnets to use less material, or adopt ferrite magnets and externally excited rotors that avoid rare earths entirely. Each price spike accelerates this work, and the demand lost does not fully return when prices fall.

### Recycling

Magnets from end-of-life vehicles, wind turbines and hard drives contain concentrated, already-separated material, and recovering them avoids the separation step entirely. Volumes remain small because collection and disassembly are difficult, but this is the most plausible route to non-Chinese supply of heavy elements.

## How are rare earths produced?

Mining is conventional: open pit at Bayan Obo and Mountain Pass, in-situ or heap leaching of ion-adsorption clays, or recovery of monazite from mineral sand dredging. The ore is concentrated by flotation or gravity to a mixed rare-earth concentrate, typically cracked with acid or alkali to break down the mineral structure and put the elements into solution.

Then comes the step that defines the industry. Because the lanthanides differ by a single electron in an inner shell, their chemistry is almost identical, and separating them requires solvent extraction in cascades of hundreds of mixer-settler stages, each achieving a tiny enrichment, repeated until the individual oxides reach the required purity. The capital is moderate but the process knowledge, the effluent handling and the permitting are not, and this is where the world's dependence actually sits.

Separated oxides are then reduced to metal, usually by molten salt electrolysis or metallothermic reduction, and alloyed with iron and boron. The alloy is jet-milled to powder, aligned in a magnetic field, pressed, sintered, machined and coated to make a finished magnet. Heavy elements may be added at the grain boundary rather than throughout, which achieves the same heat resistance with far less dysprosium.

Monazite-bearing ores carry thorium, which is mildly radioactive, so residues require licensed disposal. This is a real and often decisive obstacle to permitting separation plants outside China, and it explains part of why the industry consolidated where it did.

## What are rare earths used for?

Permanent magnets are the dominant use by value: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium go into the magnets that drive electric vehicle traction motors, direct-drive wind turbine generators, industrial robots, actuators, hard drives, headphones and countless small motors. This is the use that makes rare earths strategic.

Beyond magnets, cerium is used as a glass polishing compound and in catalytic converters, lanthanum in petroleum fluid cracking catalysts and in nickel-metal-hydride batteries, europium and terbium as phosphors in lighting and displays, yttrium in high-temperature ceramics and superalloys, gadolinium in medical imaging contrast agents and neutron shielding, and samarium in high-temperature magnets for aerospace and defense. Erbium is essential to the optical amplifiers that make long-haul fiber networks work.

The defense applications, in precision guidance, radar, sonar and aircraft actuators, are small in volume and disproportionate in strategic weight, and they are the reason governments treat rare earth supply as a security question rather than a commercial one.

## Supply chain and chokepoints

The chain runs mine, concentrate, separation, metal, alloy, magnet, and China holds a commanding position at every stage after the first. That is the whole story of rare earth supply risk: opening a mine elsewhere does not reduce dependence if the concentrate must still be shipped for separation, and building a separation plant does not help if there is no magnet maker to buy the oxide.

The tightest single point is heavy rare earth supply from ion-adsorption clays. Those deposits are geographically small, environmentally damaging when mined informally, and partly located in areas affected by conflict in northern Myanmar, from which material crosses into China for processing. A disruption there affects the elements with the fewest substitutes.

Thorium disposal is the quiet constraint on diversification. Any separation project handling monazite must find a licensed route for low-level radioactive residue, and in most jurisdictions that is a multi-year permitting exercise with strong local opposition. It is the reason several announced non-Chinese projects have slipped repeatedly.

The market's own economics are a risk too. Because prices are volatile and administratively influenced, and because a new entrant must sell a full basket including elements nobody wants, financing a mine-to-magnet chain outside China has usually required a government to underwrite part of it. Where that support has been available, projects have advanced; where it has not, they have stalled regardless of the geology.

## Key companies

- China Northern Rare Earth Group: miner and separator, China, listed (600111)
- MP Materials: miner, separator and magnet maker, United States, listed (MP)
- Lynas Rare Earths: miner and separator, Australia, listed (LYC)
- Iluka Resources: mineral sands producer and refiner, Australia, listed (ILU)
- Neo Performance Materials: separator and magnet maker, Canada, listed (NEO)
- Solvay: separator, Belgium, listed (SOLB)

## Timeline

- 1965: Mountain Pass supplies the color television era. Demand for europium phosphors made the California carbonatite the world's dominant source for two decades, the last period in which rare earth supply was not Chinese. (https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/mineral-commodity-summaries)
- 1983: The neodymium-iron-boron magnet is invented. A magnet far stronger than anything before it created the demand that now defines the industry and made neodymium and praseodymium the elements that matter commercially. (https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/)
- 1998: Mountain Pass suspends separation after effluent problems. Wastewater pipeline failures and the permitting difficulties that followed ended American separation capacity and completed the transfer of the industry to China. (https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/mineral-commodity-summaries)
- 2010-09: Export restrictions expose the concentration risk. A sharp reduction in Chinese export quotas sent prices for several oxides up by multiples within months and prompted every major economy to start a critical minerals policy. (https://www.iea.org/topics/critical-minerals)
- 2014-03: The World Trade Organization rules against export quotas. A dispute settlement finding required China to remove its rare earth export quota system, though production quotas and environmental enforcement continued to shape supply. (https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds431_e.htm)
- 2015-06: Molycorp's bankruptcy shows the cost of restarting. The collapse of the company that had reopened Mountain Pass demonstrated that mining rare earths without separation and magnet capacity is not a viable business. (https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/mineral-commodity-summaries)
- 2019-05: Rare earths enter trade policy as leverage. Public discussion of restricting supply during a trade dispute made explicit what the 2010 episode had implied, and accelerated stockpiling and diversification programmes. (https://www.iea.org/topics/critical-minerals)
- 2020-12: Myanmar becomes central to heavy rare earth supply. Ion-adsorption clay mining in Kachin State grew into a major source of dysprosium and terbium feeding Chinese separators, adding conflict exposure to the tightest part of the chain. (https://www.iea.org/topics/critical-minerals)
- 2023-12: China restricts export of separation and magnet technology. Adding rare earth processing and magnet-making technology to an export control list targeted the capability gap rather than the material, making diversification harder. (https://www.mofcom.gov.cn/)
- 2025-04: Export licensing extends to specific heavy elements. Licence requirements on named heavy rare earths and magnets containing them disrupted automotive supply chains and prompted emergency qualification of alternative sources. (https://www.iea.org/topics/critical-minerals)

## Frequently asked questions

### which country produces the most rare earths

China mined 270,000 tonnes of rare-earth oxide equivalent in 2025, 69% of the world's 390,000 tonnes (USGS MCS). United States was second with 13%. Mining concentration understates the position, because separation and magnet-making are far more concentrated still.

### are rare earths actually rare

No. Cerium is more abundant in the crust than copper. What is rare is a deposit where they are concentrated enough and in the right proportions to justify separating seventeen chemically near-identical elements from one another, which takes hundreds of solvent extraction stages.

### why is there no rare earth price on this page

Because no free, citable public series exists. Individual separated oxides are assessed by private price reporting agencies under license, and Chinese domestic and export prices can diverge. This site does not publish figures it cannot source, so it explains how prices are set instead.

### what are rare earths used for

Mainly permanent magnets for electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, robotics and electronics. Other uses include glass polishing, petroleum cracking catalysts, display and lighting phosphors, medical imaging contrast agents, optical fiber amplifiers and high-temperature ceramics.

### why does China dominate rare earths

Not through geology but through processing. Separation requires hundreds of solvent extraction stages, difficult effluent handling and, for monazite ores, licensed disposal of radioactive thorium residue. That capacity and the magnet-making that follows it are concentrated in China, so mining elsewhere does not by itself reduce dependence.

### what is the rare earth balance problem

The elements come out of the ground in fixed geological ratios but demand is uneven. Producing enough neodymium for magnets means producing far more cerium and lanthanum than anyone wants, which then has to be stockpiled or discarded. A deposit's viability depends on its basket composition.

### how much rare earth is left

China holds 52% of world reserves of 85.3 million tonnes (USGS MCS). Reserves are far less concentrated than production, which is the clearest evidence that the constraint is processing capability rather than geology.

## Sources

- USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries, MCS 2026, fetched 6 September 2026. License: Public domain (US Government work). https://www.usgs.gov/centers/national-minerals-information-center/mineral-commodity-summaries
- CEPII BACI international trade database (HS22, V202601), BACI HS22 V202601, fetched 6 September 2026. License: Etalab Open Licence 2.0. https://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/en/bdd_modele/bdd_modele_item.asp?id=37

Text last reviewed 2026-09-05. Cite as: Commodity Origins, "Where do rare earths come from?", https://commodityorigins.com/commodities/rare-earths/.