Four instruments,
aimed at four different links

For a decade, Western support went into the ground. Grants and loans chased deposits, on the theory that the shortage was geological. Nobody is short of rock.

Support is now concentrated on processing, separation and metallisation, because those are the steps a Western buyer cannot currently route around. Magnet manufacturing has become an explicit industrial goal rather than a hoped-for consequence, with new capacity planned in Oklahoma and South Carolina. Benchmark Mineral Intelligence describes US support as now extending across the full mine-to-magnet chain, with the sharpest emphasis on the midstream and downstream.

The chart below counts the instruments in this tracker by the chain link each one targets. It is the shape of the data, not an argument being asserted over it.

Grants build plants. They do not make plants bankable. Every non-Chinese project runs into the same wall: sign a ten-year debt facility against a price that one government can move whenever it wants.

Price floors attack that directly. The US arrangement with MP Materials set a floor of $110 per kilogram for NdPr oxide with profit sharing. Lynas signed an offtake and price floor commitment reported at $96 million, and a separate Japanese commitment running to 2038. These are not subsidies in the ordinary sense. They are a public balance sheet absorbing a price risk no private lender would take, and they are why several projects became financeable in a year when nothing about the geology changed.

The price has traded on both sides of that line. When the assessment sits above the floor the support costs nothing while still doing its job, because the bankability came from the commitment rather than from cash changing hands. When it sits below, the floor is doing exactly what it was written for.

The framing has shifted from domestic self-sufficiency to an allied network with the US at the centre. Australia signed a critical minerals framework with the US. Brazil, France, Canada and Japan appear in the same structures. Support has widened to unconventional feedstocks and recycling, which broadens what counts as domestic supply without needing a new mine.

China's export controls are the largest single variable here, and each revision reaches further down the chain. Licensing arrived on seven heavy rare earths with their oxides, metals and magnets in April 2025 and remains in effect. A broader escalation followed that October, including extraterritorial licensing provisions, before some measures were partially suspended in November. A later prohibition extended to equipment and process technology rather than only material, which matters more than it sounds: it targets the ability to build a separation train at all, not just the ability to buy its output.

These move on a timescale of months. Treat every date here as of its compilation and check the primary notice before relying on it.