Updated 9/27/2026. This issue now reflects BLM records as of 9/20/2026 and live-tracker data through 9/27/2026. Every figure below replaces the one first published from the 9/6/2026 records.
BHP spent May staking Alaska.
The company located 2,713 unpatented mining claims across the Kenai Peninsula and Matanuska-Susitna boroughs, 56,043 acres of new ground. That was 40.1% of every federal mining claim located in the United States that month, and it came from a single company working two adjoining boroughs. Nothing else in May came close. The second-largest staker, Intrepid Potash-Wendover, filed 614 claims in Utah.
You are reading about it here for the first time because of how the federal record works. A locator has 90 days to record a new claim with BLM (43 CFR 3833.11), and BLM processes those filings after they arrive. A May claim can surface in the public record in June, or in August, or later. The Staking Report keys every figure to the date the ground was actually staked, and waits until a month's filings have substantially arrived before calling it settled. May 2026 is now that month. When it was first counted, it showed 3,958 claims. It shows 6,758 today.
The fee deadline: 29,734 claims with no payment on file
Every unpatented federal mining claim owes an annual maintenance fee on or before September 1 (43 CFR 3834.11), unless the claimant qualifies for and files a small-miner waiver by the same date (43 CFR 3835). Going into this year's deadline, 578,453 active claims owed it.
BLM's records as of 9/20/2026 showed 542,320 of them (93.8%) recorded as paid or waived, and 36,133 with no payment on file.
That second number is the one worth watching, and BLM's published data cannot watch it for you: the bulk files come out in batches, and payments post late as a matter of routine. So ClaimWatch's live tracker has been checking each of those 36,133 claims against BLM's own case records, claim by claim, ever since. Through 9/27/2026 it has watched BLM record payment on 6,399 of them. That leaves 29,734 claims with no payment of record nearly four weeks after the deadline.
A claim with no payment of record is not a forfeited claim. Payments are made and posted late, which is exactly why the live re-check exists, and a claim that neither pays nor files a waiver is only voided when BLM processes it (43 CFR 3830.91), usually in a single administrative batch months later. Last year's batch voided 37,262 claims on 2/9/2026. When BLM processes this year's, this report will carry the count.
The national number is the summary. The watch itself runs by state, by county and by holder, and it tracks each claim on every successive data load, so the question a land manager actually has, which claims near mine are on this list and which have since paid, is answerable today rather than in February. That breakdown is ClaimWatch's Maintenance Fee Lapse Watch.
May 2026: who staked, and where
Nationally, 6,758 new claims were located in May 2026, the third-highest of the nine settled months on the books. The settled curve has been anything but smooth: a peak of 12,493 claims in September 2025, a slide through the winter to 3,809 in February 2026, a rebound to 5,551 in March, a step back to 5,111 in April, and then May's jump to the highest count since October 2025. Month to month, federal staking is lumpy. A handful of large block plays move the national number far more than any broad trend does.
Who staked
BHP was not the only major on the leaderboard. Rio Tinto filed 359 claims in Utah, 5.3% of the national total, nearly all of them in Millard County. The two multinationals took the top of the rankings with targets that share little geology: Alaska base metals for one, Utah ground for the other.
The second-largest block in the country was potash, not metal: Intrepid Potash-Wendover filed 614 placer claims in Utah's Tooele County, 9.1% of all new claims, and Blue Wash Exploration added 352 more in the same county.
Below them sits a cluster of mid-tier and private operators working copper and silver across the Southwest, the Great Basin and northern Idaho. Silver Opportunity Partners filed 291 claims in Idaho's Mineral and Shoshone counties, and Celatus Copper USA filed 290 spanning three counties in Arizona and New Mexico (Cochise, Hidalgo and Luna). Cardero Copper staked 176 claims in Yavapai County, Arizona. At 4.3%, 4.3% and 2.6% of the month's total, these three point to sustained junior interest in copper-silver districts.
Where
Alaska took the two top counties outright: Matanuska-Susitna with 1,381 claims and Kenai Peninsula with 1,322, each from a single staker, both BHP.
The most contested county was Arizona's Yavapai, where 294 claims came from 11 separate operators, competitive prospecting rather than a block play. Idaho's Shoshone County (320 claims) and Nevada's Humboldt County (222) were the other crowded ones, with 8 stakers each. The rest of the county leaderboard is block plays: Tooele's 1,010 claims came from 4 stakers, Millard's 358 from 2, and New Mexico's Luna County's 213 from 3.
What BHP is standing next to
Public records describe BHP as the world's largest mining company by market capitalization and a leading producer of copper, iron ore and metallurgical coal. Its May staking on the Kenai Peninsula places new ground within range of several known mineral occurrences in the USGS record. The Chill Group prospect, carrying copper, lead and silver, sits 17.1 kilometers from the staked area. Just beyond it lies the Chill prospect at 17.3 kilometers, cataloged for tin, lead, copper, gold, silver and zinc. Farther out, three unnamed occurrences along the upper Crystal Creek and Styx River drainages record lead-zinc mineralization at 19.5, 19.6 and 21 kilometers. The commodity mix across these deposits, copper and silver in particular, matches the metals BHP's own public materials name as strategic priorities.
Ground opening up
Closures in May were modest. Nationally, 80 claims were closed, for a net gain of 6,678 claims and an active federal claim inventory of 589,665. The largest single closure block was 24 claims in Valley County, Idaho, a small relinquishment by Historic Mines LLC.
