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November 4, 2026 - U.S. coal mines and the contractors working at them employed 55,547 people in the second quarter of 2026, down 4,210 from a year earlier, according to a Skillings analysis of federal mine safety filings. That left the coal workforce 48 people above its pandemic low.
The 7% drop left employment within 48 workers of the second quarter of 2021, when the industry reported 55,499. Those two quarters are the lowest in the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s quarterly records, which begin in 2000. Coal employment has fallen from a year earlier for nine straight quarters and is down 9,347, or 14%, from a recent peak of 64,894 in mid-2023.
The figures cover the first full year after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on April 8, 2025, meant to revive coal mining. They show the decline that began after mid-2023 continuing through that year. They cannot show what effect the order has had.
.png) Fewer workers, nearly the same coal
Coal output fell far less than employment. Mines reported 125.4 million tons of production in the quarter, down 2.3%, while hours worked at coal mines, including by contractors, fell 5.9%.
Among mine operators’ own staff, most of the losses came at mines that kept running. Operators’ employees fell by 2,715. Of that, 1,944 came from mines that operated in both quarters, and 1,149 from 113 mostly small operations that reported no work in the latest quarter, partly offset by 378 workers at mines that started or restarted.
Contractors, whose filings cannot be traced to individual mines, accounted for the rest of the decline.
That does not mean individual mines became more efficient. More of the work moved to mines that produce the most coal per hour, which lifted the average. At mines that produced coal in both quarters, output per hour worked by mine operators’ own employees rose to 6.33 tons from 6.23. That measure leaves out contractors, whose hours cannot be assigned to individual mines, so it runs higher than an industrywide figure that includes them.
Skillings tested how much of that came from the shift alone by applying each mine’s year-earlier output rate to its latest hours, which would have produced an average of 6.52 tons per hour. The change in where coal was produced lifted the industry average. But after accounting for that shift, output per hour declined on balance at mines operating in both periods.
.png) The largest cuts at operating mines included Alliance Resource Partners’ River View mine in Kentucky, where reported employment fell to 315 from 664, and Wolverine Fuels’ Skyline No. 3 mine in Utah, down to 96 from 427.
Over the same period, Alliance’s Henderson County mine, also in Kentucky, added 283 workers to reach 465, offsetting most of River View’s loss. Coronado’s Buchanan mine in Virginia reported 747 workers, up from 563.
Weak markets for both kinds of coal
West Virginia accounted for almost half of the drop in mine operators’ own employees. Coal operators there reported 12,309 workers, 1,328 fewer than a year earlier.
Producers of metallurgical coal, the type used to make steel, described a weak market in their second-quarter results in August. Core Natural Resources said seaborne metallurgical markets “remain muted in the face of two years of contraction in global hot metal output.” Alpha Metallurgical Resources CEO Andy Eidson cited “soft met market conditions persisting” as the company cut its 2026 metallurgical coal shipment forecast to 13.2 million to 14 million tons; Alpha also cited storm damage at the Dominion Terminal Associates export terminal. Core also said demand for thermal coal, burned in power plants, “was pressured by moderate temperatures, low natural gas prices, and inflated customer stockpiles.” The MSHA filings do not record why individual mines cut jobs.
Metal mines and contractors added workers
The total U.S. mining workforce held at about 306,000, up 274 from a year earlier, as metal mines, quarries and the contractors working at them hired. Metal mine employment rose 2.9% to 43,406. Gold mines added 732 workers to reach 14,593, and copper mines employed 15,282, up 1%.
Two small workforces have more than doubled since 2022. Workers reported under MSHA’s rare earth mining classification, all at MP Materials’ Mountain Pass mine and mill in California, numbered 737, up from 347 four years earlier. Operations classified as uranium mines, led by Energy Fuels’ White Mesa mill in Utah, reported 221 workers, up from 73. Those counts cover only operations MSHA classifies under those commodities, not every job in either industry.
The numbers
.png) How we count
The Skillings Mine Jobs and Safety Tracker uses the quarterly employment reports every U.S. mine operator and mining contractor files with MSHA, from the agency’s open government data published Oct. 30: the mine and contractor quarterly employment and production files, and the mines register for each mine’s commodity and location. Employment is the average number of workers in the quarter, including office staff at mine sites. Mine operators report employment, hours and coal production for each mine. Contractors report company-wide figures split only between coal and other mines, so contractor jobs cannot be traced to individual mines or states.
Skillings corrected a filing only where, for a single quarter, a mine’s reported headcount and hours contradicted each other, such as a Minnesota sand pit that reported 2,347 employees and six hours of work. The corrections removed 5,366 workers from the second-quarter 2026 national total, all at seven sand, gravel and perlite operations, and 3,078 from the year-earlier total. None changed a coal figure cited in this story. The national totals exclude five workers at one new mine MSHA has not yet assigned to a sector.
Download the quarterly employment tallies since 2000 (CSV) and the list of every correction (CSV). MSHA has not yet published third-quarter employment. The tracker will update when it does.
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