588 rigs are turning in the United States and 1,907 worldwide. At a crude price near a four-year high, that is a far smaller number than the textbook predicts.
The rig count is the oldest real-time indicator in oil. Baker Hughes has published it since 1944, weekly for North America and monthly for the rest of the world, and it is one of the very few energy series that arrives without revision, without a model behind it, and without a lag. It counts rigs actively drilling. That is all it counts, and its usefulness comes from that narrowness.
Prepared by The Baratelli Institute · publication date September 10, 2026. Every figure below carries its own measurement date, which is set by whoever measured it and is often older than this page.
Baker Hughes North America Rig Count, week ended September 4, 2026. Shares are computed on this page from the counts shown.
| Baker Hughes United States rig count | Rigs | Share of total | What it counts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total rigs running | 588 | 100.0% | Rotary rigs actively drilling, counted weekly. |
| Drilling for oil | 449 | 76.4% | The number that responds, if anything does, to the crude price. |
| Drilling for natural gas | 130 | 22.1% | Responds to the gas price, which is a separate market. |
| Miscellaneous | 9 | 1.5% | Geothermal and other non-hydrocarbon targets. |
Oil rigs rose by 2, gas rigs fell by 2, and the total was unchanged for a second consecutive week. The highest total since June 2026.
| Week ended | Total | Oil | Gas | Misc. | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week ended September 4, 2026 | 588 | 449 | 130 | 9 | Unchanged for a second week. |
| Week ended July 10, 2026 | 580 | n/d | n/d | n/d | Up 7 on the week. |
This table holds only the weeks the Institute has independently confirmed against a named report. It is deliberately short rather than deliberately long: a rig-count history assembled from secondary summaries acquires errors at exactly the weeks a reader would most want to trust it. Baker Hughes publishes the complete series, and a reader needing the full history should take it from the source. What this page adds is not the series. It is the reading of it below.
Brent reached $126 on April 30, 2026, a four-year high. West Texas Intermediate posted a 35% weekly gain in early March, the largest since the contract began trading in 1983. Brent ended July at $96.80 after rising more than twenty-five dollars inside the month. By any account of how the American oil industry works that was written in the last fifteen years, that is a drilling boom.
The American rig count went from 580 in the week ended July 10, 2026 to 588 in the week ended September 4, 2026. That is 8 rigs across roughly eight weeks, and in the most recent two weeks the total did not move at all. Worldwide, the monthly average was 1,907 in August 2026, up 6.3% year over year. A forty per cent move in price has produced a 1.4 per cent move in the American count.
There are several explanations and they are not mutually exclusive. Shale operators spent the years after 2020 rebuilding balance sheets and returning capital, and boards that were punished for growth are slow to be rewarded for it. Service costs and rig availability constrain how fast a count can rise even when the decision is made. Efficiency means a rig today drills far more footage than a rig a decade ago, so a flat count is not flat activity. And the price is high because of a war, which makes it a price nobody underwrites a ten-year drilling programme against.
The Institute does not need to adjudicate between those explanations to state the consequence, which is the same under all of them: the rig count has stopped functioning as the market's automatic stabiliser. The reflex that shale drilling would cap any price spike rested on a response time of two to three quarters. In a disruption that has run since March, two to three quarters has already elapsed and the count has moved by 8.
The rig count is one of the very few oil figures where the two clocks nearly coincide. A weekly count published on the Friday of the week it measures is about as current as an industrial statistic gets, and it is why this series is worth more than its narrowness suggests.
The trap is on the other side. A rig turning today is a well producing in six to nine months and a well declining thereafter. So the count is a current measurement of a future quantity, and quoting it as though it described present production is the most common error made with it. Present production is on the production ledger. This page describes what is being decided now.
Our reading is that the rig count is currently the most informative series in oil precisely because it is not moving. Every other indicator is telling the reader that supply is short: 1.09 mb/d of effective spare capacity, 8.3 mb/d shut in, stocks down 410 million barrels in five months, refining margins at records. The rig count is the one series that reports on the response, and it reports that the response is not coming from American drilling on any horizon that matters to this disruption.
A reader who wants a single number to watch weekly should watch this one, and should watch the oil line rather than the total, because the gas line answers to a different market. 449 of 588 rigs are drilling for oil, which is 76.4% of the total.
| Worldwide series | Figure | Measured | Source | What it carries |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Worldwide monthly average | 1,907 rigs | August 2026 | Baker Hughes Worldwide Rig Count, released September 4, 2026 | Up 28 from 1,879 in July 2026 and up 113 from 1,793 in August 2025 — a 6.3% year-over-year increase. The international component alone was 1,102 rigs, up 6 on the month and up 26 on the year. |
The worldwide count is monthly rather than weekly and excludes several significant producing regions, most consequentially Russia and onshore China. It is a directional series for the rest of the world, not a global census, and the year-over-year change is the part of it worth reading.
Prices, the supply and demand balance, refining, the two-clock rule and the plain-English glossary that serves all 13 ledgers.
Back to the hub →LedgerWhere every cent of a $4.48 gallon goes — crude, refining, distribution and tax — with each of the four components on its own clock and three of the four defined differently from how a reader assumes.
Open the ledger →LedgerSeventy-six years of crude prices deflated to constant July 2026 dollars. The 2008 records are still records in real terms and today's are not close.
Open the ledger →LedgerOne central bank, one date, one fixing time. A dollar barrel converted into 29 currencies without mixing thirty sources and thirty clocks.
Open the ledger →LedgerWhat the shape of the curve does to inventory and why it drives storage behaviour rather than describing it — then the full strip: 63 listed WTI months from the exchange's own Daily Bulletin, $96.05 front against $72.60 a year out, $23.45 of backwardation, open interest printed beside every settlement.
Open the ledger →LedgerTwo entirely different questions that share one word. The price a well needs and the price a treasury needs, kept rigorously apart — with the gaps in each named.
Open the ledger →LedgerAll 41 countries the OPEC bulletin itemises, ranked, with share of world total and reserve life computed two ways. Venezuela first at 303.701 billion barrels; the United States ninth with a reserve life of 8.4 years.
Open the ledger →LedgerEvery OPEC+ member's output for July 2026 against its implied target and its sustainable capacity. Effective spare capacity is 1.09 mb/d, or 1.07% of a 101.5 mb/d market.
Open the ledger →LedgerThe seven countries that hold the voluntary cuts — not eight, and not the full membership — their August and September 2026 decisions, and why quota discipline is currently the wrong lens.
Open the ledger →LedgerCapacity measured on two clocks five months apart, crack spreads computed from same-week legs in both units the market quotes, and the one undated figure on this reference, labelled as such.
Open the ledger →LedgerDiesel at $5.967 a gallon, a nominal record and not a real one. Why distillate is tighter than gasoline, and why distillate fuel oil is not diesel.
Open the ledger →LedgerCommercial crude one per cent above its five-year average in the same week the Strategic Petroleum Reserve reads 39.3% of capacity and its lowest since November 1982. The two facts are causally linked.
Open the ledger →LedgerEight passages, six years of flows each, and bypass capacity that covers under a quarter of Hormuz. Plus what the industry itself expected in April, measured, and how wrong it was.
Open the ledger →Provenance. Reserve figures are transcribed from the OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin; production, spare-capacity, stock and refining figures from the International Energy Agency Oil Market Report; United States production, refinery capacity and inventory figures from the Energy Information Administration; rig counts from the Baker Hughes North America and Worldwide rig counts; benchmark prices from published daily quotes. Each row names its source and the date the figure was measured. Where a figure was not published, or where a published series does not itemise a country, the cell reads n/d rather than carrying a fabricated estimate. Derived quantities — reserve life, shares of world total, capacity utilisation, spare capacity as a share of supply — are computed from the figures shown and are not separately sourced; they inherit the measurement dates of their inputs, and where the two inputs run on different clocks the page says so. The Baratelli Institute is a publisher operating under the Lowe v. SEC publisher exception. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security or commodity. Figures change; verify against the primary source before relying on any of them.