Which Country Owns The Most Number Of Oil Rigs?

Oil rigs are structures used to extract crude oil and natural gas from beneath the Earth's surface, and there are many spread all over the globe. While most people think of offshore oil platforms as the only types of oil rigs, thanks to one of the largest oil spills on record in the Gulf of Mexico, there are plenty in use on the land as well. Essentially, anywhere people have detected enough oil to bother extracting, someone has come along with an oil rig to dig it out of the ground.

Oil rigs extract their precious natural resource from deep within the Earth and send it out for refinement, the process that turns crude oil into gasoline, kerosene, and many other oil derivatives. While it's well known that oil-rich nations in the Middle East extract a ton of oil, they're not the only nations involved. The United States, Russian Federation, Venezuela, and many other nations all use oil rigs to get their oil, and these expensive systems are arguably some of the most important machines on the planet.

That's due to humanity's current dependence on oil, which isn't looking to change in the near future. Of the many nations that employ oil rigs, the United States far outpaces every country that follows. That's not to say there aren't a ton of them in operation globally that aren't owned by the U.S., but the vast majority of them are. Here's how many the U.S. has in operation and how the nation compares to other oil-producing countries around the world.

As of May 2025, The American Oil & Gas Reporter revealed that the United States had a total of 584 active rigs. These are broken down into 479 oil rigs, 101 used to harvest natural gas, and four designated for miscellaneous extraction. That gives the U.S. an oil rig ratio of 82/17/1. These rigs are spread all over U.S. territory, which is fairly large when you factor in all of the states and territories that comprise the nation.

The U.S. is followed next by Canada, which, as of March 2025, had 195 operational oil rigs of different types. You can already see that the U.S. has well over twice the capacity of oil rigs that Canada boasts. These two nations are followed next by Iran's 117 rigs, which is then followed by the United Arab Emirates' 62. Iraq comes in next with 59, and the remaining countries that have oil rigs only possess a handful of active ones as of March 2025 when compared to the U.S. and some of the others on top.

Not all of the oil rigs used by these nations are offshore, as the numbers include both shore-based and offshore rigs, though these figures aren't further broken out. Regardless, there's plenty of oil extraction and refinement going on around the world, and the U.S. is the clear winner in terms of sheer numbers. Should the world find a way to eliminate fossil fuels from the auto industry, there may be a time when oil rigs are a relic of the past. Until that day, it seems the U.S. will continue extracting crude oil via its hundreds of oil rigs.