Productivity in mining industries for National Miners Day

December 6 is National Miners Day, celebrating the workers who extract minerals from subterranean America that underlie countless products of the surface world. Labor productivity—output per hour of work—nearly doubled in the mining sector from 2007 to 2020. All the gains came after 2012.

Labor productivity growth in the oil and gas extraction industry took off after 2012, increasing every year. This industry’s productivity boom lifted the whole mining sector. The rise in productivity came from increasing output most years (but not in 2016 or 2020) and from declining hours worked, particularly from 2014 to 2017. The period of rapid productivity growth overlaps with the expanded use of innovative technologies to extract petroleum and natural gas from areas that were previously difficult to access.

These data are from the Labor Productivity and Costs program. Data are preliminary and may be revised. To learn more, see "Productivity and Costs by Industry: Manufacturing and Mining Industries — 2020." To learn more about labor productivity, see Productivity 101. We also have more charts on industry productivity.