Lithium Reserves by Country 2025

What this chart shows: the lithium each country could economically extract at the time of assessment (its reserves), in metric tons of lithium content, as reported by the U.S. Geological Survey in February 2026.

How the data is collected: reserves come from company and government reports. In this edition the USGS revised reserves for Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, the United States and Zimbabwe. Reserves are not the same as resources: resources include lithium that is known but not currently economic to mine, and the USGS puts measured and indicated lithium resources at about 150 million tons worldwide, four times the reserve total.

Background: resources are spread differently from reserves. The USGS lists Argentina (28 million tons), Bolivia (23 million tons) and Chile (13 million tons) as the countries with the largest resources. Bolivia has no reserve figure in this edition, so it does not appear in the chart despite ranking second for resources. For Australia, the USGS notes that reserves compliant with the Joint Ore Reserves Committee (JORC) code were 5.1 million tons, lower than the 8.4 million tons shown here.

Limits: reserve figures change as prices, technology and exploration change, and different countries report them under different standards. A further 2.4 million tons are held by other countries the USGS groups together (Austria, Congo (Kinshasa), Czechia, Finland, Germany, Ghana, Mexico, Namibia, Serbia and Spain); they are not shown as separate bars.