By Shale Markets · Thursday, October 1, 2026 · 4 min read

Permian Rig Count Has Fallen to 270 as DUC Backlog Thins and Output Concentrates in Fewer Counties

Original illustration created for Shale Markets.

Diamondback Holds 570,000–580,000 B/D by Draining DUCs

Diamondback Energy told shareholders in a May 2026 letter that it plans to hold production at 570,000–580,000 barrels per day by running five completion crews through year-end while keeping its rig count flat, Investing.com reported on May 7, 2026. The company is doing this by working down its drilled-but-uncompleted well, AKA DUC (pronounced Duck), inventory rather than adding rigs.

The backlog that's funding the gap

DUCs are wells already drilled and awaiting only a completion crew, which lets an operator add barrels without the four-to-six month lead time a new well requires. Diamondback's plan is the clearest documented example of that math: a completion crew finishing an already-drilled well adds production faster than a rig spudding a new one, and it does so without moving the rig count at all.

Enverus Intelligence Research flagged the mechanics of that drawdown as early as February 2025. The Midland Basin's excess DUC supply fell from two months to one month during 2024, the firm reported, with DUCs depleting faster than rigs over that stretch. "Operators entered 2025 with lower DUC numbers than the year before," Mark Chapman, principal analyst at Enverus, said in the report, a dynamic he tied to capital efficiency going forward.

What the rig count actually shows

Baker Hughes's broader release put the U.S. total rig count at 599, up 50 from the year-ago count of 549, with oil-directed rigs at 455 and gas rigs at 135. Those two categories sum to 590, nine short of the reported total; Baker Hughes's release does not break out the remainder, and nothing in the available data explains the gap.

Efficiency, not just fewer rigs, is holding output flat

Energy Sector Market News reported on April 13, 2026 — citing its own analysis as the sole source for these figures — that Permian crude production was holding near 6.6 million barrels per day despite fewer new wells, with feet drilled per month per rig in the Midland Basin up 25% year over year. The EIA's 2024 data tells a parallel story for the prior cycle: the basin's 308-rig average still produced 6.3 million barrels per day, on the strength of improved well productivity, with the agency citing breakeven prices of $62 per barrel in the Midland Basin and $64 per barrel in the Delaware Basin as the threshold that kept oil-directed drilling economic even as rig counts fell. The same Energy Sector Market News report carried the EIA's forecast for the year ahead: output essentially flat through 2026, with a potential slight decline in 2027.

Novi Labs, in a September 4, 2026 report, put the Permian's share of total U.S. oil production at roughly 45%, attributing part of the sustained output to stacked-pay development — targeting multiple zones from a single surface location — which lowers the rig count needed to hold a given production level. That 45% figure comes from a single source and is not corroborated elsewhere in the available material.

Where the barrels concentrate

Production growth has concentrated in a narrow set of counties. The EIA reported on September 2, 2025, that ten counties — led by Lea and Eddy in New Mexico and Martin and Midland in Texas, with Andrews, Glasscock, Howard, Loving, Reagan and Ward rounding out the list — accounted for 93% of all U.S. oil production growth between 2020 and 2024, averaging 4.8 million barrels per day and 37% of total U.S. production in 2024.

Texas Railroad Commission data for December 2024 shows the hierarchy within that group: Martin County led the state with 19,047,071 barrels that month, followed by Midland County at 18,286,234 barrels. That data is now roughly eighteen months old; no more recent RRC monthly figures appear in the available material, so it is not possible to say whether this ordering still holds in 2026.

What's still missing

None of the available rig-count series breaks activity out by county, so it is not possible to say whether drilling inside Martin, Midland, Loving and Reeves specifically has turned negative even as the basin-wide count has stabilized. That gap matters because a flat basin-wide rig number can mask activity shifting away from the highest-producing counties toward lower-productivity acreage. The more immediate question is how long the DUC backlog can keep substituting for rigs once it falls below the one-month working supply Enverus flagged for the Midland Basin in early 2025 — at that point, Diamondback's completion-crew strategy and others like it run out of inventory to draw on, and the basin's output trajectory will depend on rigs that, at the moment, are not running anywhere near the pace they were two years ago.

Links Verified at Time of Publish.