Helmerich & Payne, Inc.

Helmerich & Payne is a Tulsa-based contract drilling company, successor to a business organized in 1920 and incorporated in Delaware in 1940. It trades on the New York Stock Exchange as HP and reported roughly 6,200 U.S. employees and 9,500 international employees in its fiscal 2025 annual report, about 15,700 in total across more than thirty countries.

The company is vertically integrated in a way few drilling contractors are: it manufactures its own rigs, including the FlexRig and T-Series fleets, and develops its own automation software such as FlexFusion, AutoSlide and Autodriller Pro. It also runs real-time operations centers that monitor active wells remotely. Beyond oil and gas, H&P drills geothermal wells, which puts it directly into the enhanced geothermal power construction market now scaling in the western United States. Fervo Energy added a third H&P rig for its Cape Station Phase II development in 2026. The company reports drilling roughly 600 million feet in U.S. land over the last decade and cutting emissions intensity 33 percent since 2018.

The biggest recent change at H&P is structural. In 2025 the company joined forces with KCA Deutag, a drilling, engineering and technology group with more than 135 years of history that was itself formed from the 2001 merger of KCA Drilling and Deutag AG. H&P frames the combination as expanding global reach and technical capability rather than as a simple bolt-on acquisition.

The starting point was considerably smaller. In 1920 Walt Helmerich II, an aviator from Chicago, met Bill Payne, a microbiologist from Shawnee, Oklahoma, on a Star 29 cable rig in South Bend, Texas. More than 35,000 wells later, H&P works across the Americas, the Middle East and the Pacific: the United States and Canada, the Gulf of America, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela in South America, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, and Australia. In the United States it holds over 25 percent of the land drilling market and about a third of the super-spec rig market.

Not all of the work is unconventional shale. H&P also runs offshore platform drilling, with more than 50 years in that segment and over 40 rigs across six countries, handling new drills, workovers and plug-and-abandonment programs on operator-owned platforms. Other drilling types the company lists include managed pressure drilling, extended-reach drilling, workover services, and wells for carbon capture and CO2 injection. Across the three largest U.S. unconventional basins it reports an average 88 percent improvement in drilling performance since 2014.

The technology portfolio reaches past the rig-mounted automation H&P is best known for. Its universal rig technologies are built to run on any rig rather than only an H&P one, and include the Bit Guidance System for automated directional drilling decisions, Survey Management for real-time survey correction, and advanced well engineering based on physics-based modeling. On the rig floor, FlexRobotics is the company’s first full-scale robotic system for automating tubular handling, and StallAssist mitigated more than 25,000 stalls during 2024. Safety is organized under a program called Actively C.A.R.E., backed by an SSHE reporting system aimed at catching serious injury and fatality precursors before they occur.