page_title: Coal mining in the United States
section_title: Coal mining employment
hierarchical_section_title: Coal mining in the United States / Coal mining employment
caption_attribution_description: English: Average annual number of employed coal miners in the United States, 1890-2014
context_page_description: Coal mining in the United States is an industry in transition. Production in 2017 was down 33% from the peak production of 1,162.7 million short tons in 2006. Employment of 50,000 coal miners is down from a peak of 883,000 in 1923. Generation of electricity is the largest user of coal, being used to produce 50% of electric power in 2005 and 27% in 2018. The U.S. is a net exporter of coal. U.S. coal exports, for which Europe is the largest customer, peaked in 2012. In 2015, the U.S. exported 7.0 percent of mined coal.
  Coal remains an important factor in the 25 states in which it is mined. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2015 Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Pennsylvania produced about 639 million short tons representing 71% of total U.S. coal production in the United States.
  In 2015, four publicly traded US coal companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, including Patriot Coal Corporation, Walter Energy, and the fourth-largest Alpha Natural Resources. By January 2016, more than 25% of coal production was in bankruptcy in the United States including the top two producers Peabody Energy and Arch Coal.
context_section_description: By the end of 2016, the coal industry employed approximately 50,000 miners.
  US employment in coal mining peaked in 1923, when there were 863,000 coal miners. Since then, mechanization has greatly improved productivity in coal mining, so that employment has declined at the same time coal production increased. The average number of coal mining employees declined to 50,500 in 2016. This was below the previous low of 70,000 in 2003, and the lowest number of US coal miners in at least 125 years.
  Because of the sharp declines in the U.S. coal industry, the Harvard Business Review discussed retraining coal workers for solar photovoltaic employment because of the rapid rise in U.S. solar jobs. A recent study indicated that this was technically possible and would account for only 5% of the industrial revenue from a single year to provide coal workers with job security in the energy industry as whole.
caption: Average annual number of employed coal miners in the United States, 1890–2014
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