U.S. Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining — An Investor's Primer (Group Level)
NAICS 2022 code 21222 — Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining (United States)
NAICS = North American Industry Classification System, the federal code that defines an industry. This is a rollup page for the five-digit industry group 21222. That group contains exactly one detailed industry, 212220, so the two are effectively the same thing. This page gives the group's own ground-truth federal figures and then points you to the full 212220 primer. Business figures are U.S. Census; physical production and reserves are U.S. Geological Survey (USGS); both are labeled.
1. Overview
This is the business of digging gold and silver out of the ground in the United States — mining the ore and processing it on site into doré (rough gold-silver bars) or concentrate. It is a small industry by headcount but valuable: roughly 137 firms and 195 establishments employing about 15,700 people [1][2], producing metal worth on the order of $17 billion of gold and $1.4 billion of silver in 2025 [3][4].
The one fact that governs everything here: these companies are price-takers. They sell into deep global markets (London and COMEX, the New York futures exchange) at a gold or silver price they cannot influence. Their production volume barely moves year to year, so almost all the swing in their revenue and profit comes from the metal price, not from how much they dig. An investor in this sector is, above all, taking a view on the price of gold and silver.
Ways in (detailed in the child primer): public-market investors buy producer shares (leveraged bets on the metal price), royalty/streaming companies (smoother, higher-margin exposure), or exchange-traded funds (ETFs) holding miners or physical metal; private investors own operating companies and junior explorers directly or through private equity (PE), or buy mineral and royalty rights.
2. What's inside — the group equals its one child
NAICS is a nested hierarchy: broad sectors (2-digit) narrow down to industry groups (4-digit), NAICS industries (5-digit), and national industries (6-digit). The five-digit group 21222 — Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining contains a single six-digit national industry:
| Child code | Name | Share of the group |
|---|---|---|
| 212220 | Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining | 100% |
Because there is only one child, the group and the child are the same industry — the same firms, the same mines, the same statistics. The 2022 NAICS revision merged the two older codes — 212221 Gold Ore Mining and 212222 Silver Ore Mining — into the single code 212220 [5]. Federal datasets publish the combined industry under either the five-digit code 21222 or the six-digit code 212220; they refer to the same thing.
So this page is deliberately short. Everything substantive — the investable universe, commodity economics, demand drivers, regulation, consolidation, risks, and how to invest — lives in the child primer. See the full leaf primer: 212220 — Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining.
Scope, briefly. Code 21222 covers establishments that develop a gold or silver mine, mine ore valued chiefly for its gold or silver, and beneficiate it (crush, grind, concentrate, leach) up to producing doré or concentrate at the mine gate [5]. It excludes refining and minting (downstream manufacturing, NAICS 331410), jewelry, contract mining-support services (NAICS 213114), and base-metal mines (copper, lead-zinc, NAICS 212230) — even though most U.S. silver, and about 7% of U.S. gold, is recovered as a byproduct at those base-metal mines outside this code [3][4]. This code therefore understates total U.S. gold and silver supply.
3. How big it is
Business figures (U.S. Census — the authoritative source for this industry's business statistics)
These are the group's own ground-truth figures for NAICS 21222.
| Measure | Figure | Source (year) |
|---|---|---|
| Firms | 137 | Economic Census (2022) [1] |
| Establishments | 195 | County Business Patterns (2023) [2] |
| Employees | 15,713 | County Business Patterns (2023) [2] |
| Annual payroll | ~$1.76 billion | County Business Patterns (2023) [2] |
| First-quarter payroll | ~$477 million | County Business Patterns (2023) [2] |
| Industry revenue (receipts) | ~$10.90 billion | Economic Census (2022) [1] |
CBP (County Business Patterns) and the EC (Economic Census) are different programs with different timing, so the firm/revenue year (2022) and the establishment/employment year (2023) do not line up perfectly; treat them as recent snapshots, not a clean time series.
Concentration is extreme. Census reports that the top 4 firms earned 74.4% of industry revenue, the top 8 earned 87.4%, the top 20 earned 97.3%, and the top 50 earned 99.6% (2022) [1]. (Census suppressed the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI), a standard concentration statistic, so we do not report a value for it.) The establishment count is dominated by small players; revenue and production are dominated by a few giants.
Physical production and reserves (USGS — real units)
USGS measures the metal itself, including byproduct output from mines outside this code, so these figures are broader than the Census business data above. (1 metric ton of gold = 32,151 troy ounces.)
- Gold, 2025 (USGS estimate): U.S. mine production ≈ 160 metric tons (~5.1 million troy oz), worth ~$17 billion, from 40+ lode mines in 12 states plus Alaskan placers (Nevada ≈ 64%, Alaska ≈ 22%). U.S. reserves ≈ 3,000 t (~96 million oz), roughly a 19-year "static reserve life." The U.S. is the world's 5th-largest gold producer [3].
- Silver, 2025 (USGS estimate): U.S. mine production ≈ 1,100 metric tons (~35 million troy oz), worth ~$1.4 billion, from only 4 primary silver mines plus 31 base- and precious-metal mines that yield silver as a coproduct/byproduct. U.S. reserves ≈ 23,000 t; net import reliance was 77% in 2025 — silver is a structurally import-dependent metal [4].
Why the Census and USGS dollar figures differ: Census receipts (~$10.9 B) are 2022 business revenue, when gold averaged ~$1,800/oz; USGS's ~$18 billion of 2025 physical value reflects both far higher prices and byproduct metal recovered outside this code. Both are correct for what they measure.
4. Everything else — see the child primer
Because 21222 is identical to 212220, this rollup does not repeat the detail. The full 212220 primer covers, in depth:
- The investable universe — the public producers (Newmont, Barrick, Kinross, Coeur, Hecla, and others), the royalty/streaming financiers (Franco-Nevada, Wheaton Precious Metals, Royal Gold), and the major private, PE, and foreign owners (Waterton Global, Paulson-backed Donlin, AngloGold Ashanti). The single largest U.S. mine, Nevada Gold Mines, is a Barrick/Newmont joint venture that alone produces roughly half of all U.S. gold.
- How the money works — the price-taker model, the all-in sustaining cost (AISC) cost curve, why operating leverage makes cash flow swing far more than price, grade/recovery, reserves-vs-resources, depletion, royalties/streams, and byproduct accounting.
- Demand drivers — gold as a monetary metal (jewelry, bars, central-bank buying, real interest rates); silver as a hybrid (about half industrial: solar, electronics, electrification).
- Regulation — the General Mining Law of 1872 (no federal production royalty on hardrock mining, a U.S.-specific cost advantage), permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), environmental liability, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), and silver's November 2025 addition to the federal critical-minerals list.
- Consolidation — why depletion forces structural M&A (Newmont-Newcrest, the Nevada Gold Mines JV, recent precious-metals tie-ups).
- Risks — led by commodity-price cyclicality, plus cost inflation, permitting delay, depletion/reserve replacement, policy risk, operational concentration, and silver's byproduct exposure.
- How to invest and outlook — producers (most torque), royalties (smoother, higher-quality cash flow), physical metal (unlevered exposure), and the private-market routes, with the standing caveat that today's record margins are a cyclical peak.
Full detail: 212220 — Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 Economic Census, Summary Statistics (Table EC2200BASIC), NAICS 212220 — firms, revenue, concentration ratios (CR4/CR8/CR20/CR50). https://data.census.gov/table/ECNBASIC2022.EC2200BASIC
- U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 County Business Patterns, NAICS 21222 profile — establishments, employment, annual and Q1 payroll. https://data.census.gov/profile/21222_-_Gold_Ore_and_Silver_Ore_Mining?codeset=naics~21222
- U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Gold (2025 data). https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-gold.pdf
- U.S. Geological Survey, Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 — Silver (2025 data). https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2026/mcs2026-silver.pdf
- U.S. Census Bureau, 2022 NAICS Definitions: 212220 Gold Ore and Silver Ore Mining, and "NAICS Changes" (2024). https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=21222&year=2022; https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/11/naics-changes.html