Henderson Mine Employees: The Real Number and How to Check

Reviewed August 2026 against MSHA, BLS and CO state records.

Table of Contents

What the public record actually says about Henderson’s headcount

Search results for Henderson Mine employment repeat figures like “400 jobs” or “over 1,000 indirect positions” without saying which agency published them or when. None of those numbers appear in a federal or Colorado state dataset in that form. Three official records do carry hard numbers, and each measures something slightly different.

The BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages covers roughly every job covered by unemployment insurance. For Clear Creek County (area FIPS 08019) in the third quarter of 2025, the private “natural resources and mining” supersector reported 552 jobs in July, 550 in August and 544 in September, spread over 8 establishments, paying $17.52 million in wages in those three months. That supersector bundles agriculture and forestry in with mining, but Clear Creek County is a high-alpine county with almost no commercial farming, so the aggregate is dominated by mining. It is an upper bound on the mine’s Clear Creek payroll, not the mine’s headcount itself.

Against a county-wide total of 3,405 jobs in July 2025 across all ownerships and all 406 establishments, that supersector represents 16.2% of every job in the county. By September, with seasonal tourism employment falling to 3,175 while mining held at 544, the share rose to 17.1%. That is the concrete version of the claim that the mine “influences 15% of the county workforce” — and it is checkable.

The trend is flat-to-slightly-up: 528 jobs in July 2023, 535 in July 2024, 552 in July 2025 — a net gain of 24 jobs, or 4.5%, over two years. Anyone writing that Henderson employment is collapsing, or booming, is not reading this series.

Why the mine’s own line is blanked out in federal data

Pull the Clear Creek County QCEW file and look for NAICS 212 (mining, except oil and gas) or 2122 (metal ore mining). The establishment counts are there — 3 and 1 respectively for Q3 2025 — but employment, wages and average weekly wage all read zero, tagged with disclosure code N. That is not missing data. It is BLS confidentiality screening: when one employer accounts for enough of an industry cell that publishing the total would reveal that firm’s payroll, the cell is withheld.

This is the single most useful thing to understand about the query “Henderson Mine employees number”. The reason no clean figure exists in federal statistics is that Henderson is too dominant in its industry within its county for the number to be publishable. The supersector rollup at code 1011 survives the screen precisely because it mixes mining with agriculture and forestry — and that rolled-up 552 is the tightest legally published bound available.

Two consequences follow. First, any single-number claim about Henderson employment sourced to “BLS” is either the supersector figure mislabelled, or invented. Second, the mine-level number does exist — operators file employment and hours with MSHA every quarter — it just lives in a different system, described in the checklist below.

The two-county problem: Clear Creek vs Grand

Henderson is one operation split across the Continental Divide. The underground mine and its portal sit on the Clear Creek County side near Empire; the concentrator that processes the ore sits near Parshall, in Grand County. MSHA’s own record for mine ID 0500790 gives the location as Parshall, Colorado, even though the workings are in Clear Creek. Ore travels between the two on a conveyor system that runs about 15 miles, roughly 10 of them in tunnel beneath the Divide.

QCEW assigns jobs to the county of the worksite. So searching “Henderson Mine employees Clear Creek County” and finding a number under 600 does not mean the operation is small — it means the mill workforce is being counted somewhere else. In Grand County (FIPS 08049) for Q3 2025, the same private natural-resources-and-mining supersector is entirely suppressed across 11 establishments, against a county total of 8,699 jobs in July 2025 at an average weekly wage of $1,059. The Grand County side of the workforce is therefore invisible in published statistics altogether.

What these jobs pay against the rest of the county

The wage gap is where county-level mining employment stops being an abstraction. In Q3 2025 the average weekly wage in Clear Creek County’s private natural-resources-and-mining supersector was $2,457, against $1,400 for all jobs in the county across all ownerships. That is a premium of $1,057 a week, or about 76%. Annualised at 52 weeks, $2,457 a week is roughly $127,800 a year per job.

Note the swing in the mining series: $2,798 a week in Q3 2023, $2,112 in Q3 2024, $2,457 in Q3 2025. Headcount barely moved across those quarters, so the wage line is mostly telling you about overtime, bonus timing and contractor mix rather than pay-scale changes. If you are using these figures to model household income in Empire or Georgetown, use the median-adjacent county average, not the mining average — the mining figure is a mean across a small, high-earning cell and is volatile quarter to quarter.

What actually moves the headcount: pounds, price and cost

Henderson’s workforce is not set by county policy. It is set by how many pounds of molybdenum the Climax and Henderson pair need to produce, and whether those pounds clear their cash cost. Freeport-McMoRan reports both in every quarterly release, and it reports Climax and Henderson together as the “Molybdenum Mines” segment — so the numbers below cover two Colorado operations, not Henderson alone.

In its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results, published 22 January 2026, Freeport reported segment production of 11 million pounds in Q4 2025 against 9 million pounds in Q4 2024, consolidated company molybdenum production of 92 million pounds for 2025, and guidance of 90 million pounds of consolidated molybdenum sales for 2026. In the second-quarter 2026 release of 23 July 2026, segment production was 8 million pounds against 9 million pounds in Q2 2025.

Output alone does not tell you whether jobs are safe. The margin does. Freeport’s reported average realisation for molybdenum was $28.75 per pound in Q2 2026 against $21.10 per pound in Q2 2025, while average unit net cash costs for the Molybdenum Mines rose from $14.20 to $19.20 per pound over the same comparison — the company attributed the cost increase to lower volumes and higher costs for supplies, energy and labour.

Cash margin per pound widened from $6.90 to $9.55 even as volumes fell — which is why a quarter of lower output did not read as a distress signal. The rule of thumb worth carrying forward: watch the gap between the two lines, not either line alone. A quarter where realised price falls toward unit cash cost is the quarter to start re-checking headcount filings.

Workforce share and payroll calculator

Enter whatever headcount you want to test against the published county baselines below.

The five-step verification checklist

This is the part of the page worth bookmarking, because it keeps working after every figure above has been superseded.

1. Start at the mine record. MSHA’s page for Henderson Operations confirms the identifiers you need: mine ID 0500790, underground, molybdenum ore, controller Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc, district M6. Everything else keys off that ID.
2. Pull the quarterly employment filing. Enter 0500790 into the MSHA Mine Data Retrieval System, which returns operator-reported employment and hours by quarter. MSHA warns that the system is down for maintenance from 22:00 ET Friday to 10:00 ET Saturday.
3. Or take the whole dataset. MSHA publishes open government data files, including MinesProdQuarterly, which carries quarterly employment by mine ID back to 2000 and is rebuilt Friday afternoons. Metal and non-metal operators are not required to report production, so use it for employment and hours, not tonnes.
4. Cross-check against the county. Swap the year and quarter in the QCEW open-data path for area 08019 (Clear Creek) and 08049 (Grand), then read own_code 5, industry 1011. If the mine number you were given exceeds the county supersector total, the number is wrong or it is counting both counties.
5. Check the permit is still live. Colorado’s Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety files inspection reports under permit M-1977-342; the 17 September 2025 inspection document is public in the DRMS portal. A permit moving into temporary cessation is the earliest formal warning that headcount is about to change.

Which roles the site hires, and who else is on the property

Freeport-McMoRan posts Henderson vacancies through its own careers system rather than through the county. Because Henderson is a block-cave underground operation feeding a remote concentrator, the recurring role families are narrower than a generic mining job board suggests: underground production and development crews, mobile and fixed plant maintenance, electrical and instrumentation trades, mill operations and process control at the Parshall side, water treatment operators, mine engineering and geotechnical staff, environmental and safety compliance, and haulage.

The 8 establishments QCEW counts in the Clear Creek supersector are a reminder that the mine is not the only employer in that cell, and that contractors with their own UI accounts appear separately. When Freeport describes development work in the mine, that labour frequently sits with contractors and will not show up in the operator’s own MSHA employment line. If you are estimating total people on site, treat the operator figure as a floor.

Monitoring a mine site from orbit: what Farmonaut adds

Employment filings tell you how many people are on a payroll. They do not tell you what is happening on the ground — how a tailings facility is changing shape, whether a reclamation planting is establishing, or whether disturbance is expanding beyond a permit boundary. That is the gap satellite monitoring fills, and it is the part of this story that applies to any operation, not just Henderson.

• 🛰️ Non-invasive prospect screening: satellite-based mineral detection screens alteration and structural signatures across a licence area before any ground crew is mobilised.
• 🗺️ Prospectivity mapping: 3D mineral prospectivity outputs rank target zones against structure and surface geochemistry so drilling budgets are spent where the evidence is.
• 📉 Change detection over time: repeat-pass imagery gives a dated series of a site’s footprint — the same discipline as a quarterly employment filing, applied to land instead of payroll.
• 🌱 Reclamation verification: vegetation indices over a reclaimed bench give an independent record of whether planting is establishing, useful when a DRMS inspection is a year away.
• 📋 Audit-ready reporting: dated, repeatable imagery is defensible in a compliance file in a way that a site photograph is not.
• Jump to the calculator

The same method applied elsewhere: Mississippi County, Arkansas

The verification pattern above — find the agency with statutory responsibility, find the document with a date on it, then read the county list — resolves county-level questions far outside Colorado. Take flooding in Mississippi County, Arkansas. The authoritative record is a USDA Farm Service Agency notice dated 22 August 2025, which designates 39 Arkansas counties as natural disaster areas following severe storms, tornadoes and flooding between 2 April and 22 April 2025. Mississippi County appears on the contiguous-county list rather than the primary list, which still makes producers there eligible for FSA emergency loans; the application deadline given in that notice is 21 January 2026. Anyone citing flood impact for that county should quote the designation type and the date, exactly as with a mine headcount — and should re-check, because FSA designations are issued on a rolling basis and later incident periods carry their own county lists and deadlines.

FAQ

How many employees does the Henderson Mine have?

No agency publishes a single current figure for the site. The published bound is BLS QCEW private natural-resources-and-mining employment for Clear Creek County: 552 jobs in July 2025, 550 in August, 544 in September, across 8 establishments. The mine-specific count is operator-reported to MSHA each quarter under mine ID 0500790 and can be pulled from the Mine Data Retrieval System.

Why do published articles say “over 400 jobs”?

That figure circulates without an agency attribution. Where a number cannot be traced to QCEW, MSHA, a DRMS filing or a Freeport disclosure, treat it as unsourced. The verification checklist above gives four traceable routes.

Is the mill workforce counted in Clear Creek County?

No. The concentrator is near Parshall in Grand County, and QCEW assigns jobs by worksite. Grand County’s equivalent supersector cell was fully suppressed for Q3 2025, so that portion of the workforce does not appear in published statistics at all.

What would signal that Henderson employment is about to change?

Three things, in order of lead time: a permit status change filed with Colorado DRMS under M-1977-342; Freeport’s quarterly molybdenum guidance and segment cash cost, where realised price converging on unit net cash cost is the pressure signal; and then the QCEW county cell, which lags by roughly two quarters.

How much does a mining job in Clear Creek County pay?

The private natural-resources-and-mining supersector averaged $2,457 a week in Q3 2025 — about $127,800 annualised — against $1,400 a week for all jobs in the county. That is a mean across a small cell and swings between quarters: it was $2,798 in Q3 2023 and $2,112 in Q3 2024.

Where do I get a site-specific analysis?

Request a scoped quote at farmonaut.com/mining/mining-query-form, or contact the team at farmonaut.com/contact-us.

Conclusion

The honest answer to “how many people work at the Henderson mine” is that the federal statistical system deliberately does not print it, because one employer dominates the industry cell in its county. What you can have instead is better than a rounded rumour: a published upper bound of 552 jobs for Clear Creek County’s private natural-resources-and-mining supersector in July 2025, an $17.5 million quarterly wage bill behind it, a mine-level filing under MSHA ID 0500790 refreshed every quarter, a permit file at Colorado DRMS under M-1977-342, and quarterly segment economics from Freeport showing an $8–11 million pound production range and a cash margin that widened from $6.90 to $9.55 per pound between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026.

Carry the method, not the numbers. Identify the agency, note the vintage, check the county boundary, and cross-read the operator’s disclosures against the statistical series. It works for a molybdenum mine under the Continental Divide and it works for a flood designation in the Arkansas Delta.

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