Fuel prices · Updated every week · Figures to 24 Aug 2026
Why is Fuel 30% dearer than a year ago?
A gallon of regular averages $4.08 this week, 30% higher than a year ago. Whatever year your sense of a "normal" price was set in, it's on this chart - along with what your region pays and what your own fill-up costs now.
Everyone carries a number in their head for what a fill-up should cost. It gets set around the time you start driving, and it never quite updates - so $4.08 feels alarming to one driver and normal to the one at the next pump, and neither is wrong. This chart settles it: every week of the price back to 1990, including the year your number was set.
So, what are we looking at, exactly?
Every Monday, the US Energy Information Administration - the government's energy statistics agency - asks filling stations across the country what they're charging for a gallon of regular, and averages the answers into one national number. That's the line above: the same question, asked the same way, every week for 36 years. It exists so you can tell a normal week from an unusual one without leaning on memory. For a sense of normal: half of all the weeks on this chart sit between $1.25 and $3.09. The record is $5.01, set in the week of 13 Jun 2022 at the peak of the 2022 energy shock, and this week's reading is $4.08.
A weekly national average is a blunt tool on purpose. It smooths away the price war on your local corner (the station by the highway charging fifteen cents over the one in town), and it can't keep up with a fast week. What you get in exchange is the thing no live price app can give you: the same measurement, taken the same way, every week since 1990. The apps are how you find cheap fuel on a Tuesday; this page is how you know whether the whole country's Tuesday is expensive.
What moves the price of a gallon?
Four ingredients, moving on four different clocks. Crude oil is the big one - the reason the pump tracks a global market even in a country pumping millions of barrels of its own. Then refining, which runs to a calendar: twice a year, refineries switch between summer and winter blends (summer fuel is made to evaporate less in the heat, and costs more to make), and they schedule their maintenance around the changeover, so supply tightens at times you could mark in a diary. Distribution is mostly geography - fuel is heavy, and every mile between refinery and forecourt ends up on the receipt. And then taxes, federal plus state, sitting on top of all of it.
Why your state pays a different price
Start with taxes, because they're the steady part: state gasoline taxes differ by multiples, not percentages. Then the blends. California requires a cleaner-burning formulation that only a handful of in-state refineries make, which in effect gives the state its own private fuel market - so when one of those refineries goes down, California prices jump in a way the Gulf Coast barely feels. Distance does the rest. The regions below are PADDs (Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts - the five-district map American fuel logistics has run on since the Second World War, and nobody has found a reason to redraw it). The Gulf Coast refines far more than it burns, which is why it tends to hold the cheap end; this week the spread runs from $3.64 (PADD 3 · Gulf Coast) to $5.15 (PADD 5 · West Coast).
See all the numbers
| Rank | Region | Value ($/gal) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PADD 5 · West Coast | 5.1 | 20.5% |
| 2 | PADD 4 · Rocky Mountain | 4.4 | 17.4% |
| 3 | U.S. average | 4.1 | 16.3% |
| 4 | PADD 2 · Midwest | 3.9 | 15.7% |
| 5 | PADD 1 · East Coast | 3.9 | 15.6% |
| 6 | PADD 3 · Gulf Coast | 3.6 | 14.5% |
Where the weekly numbers stop
EIA's Monday survey prices the nation, the five regions, and nine individual states - the shaded ones on the map below, which happen to include the biggest fuel markets in the country. That's it. Weekly state numbers for the other forty-one, wherever you meet them on the open web, are one of two things: monthly data dressed up as weekly, or crowd-sourced feeds with licensing strings attached. We'd rather show you nine real states than fifty dressed-up ones, so this page names a state only when the source prices it.
See all the numbers
| Rank | State | Value ($/gal) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | California | 5.5 | 14.1% |
| 2 | Washington | 5.2 | 13.5% |
| 3 | Colorado | 4.4 | 11.4% |
| 4 | New York | 4.1 | 10.6% |
| 5 | Minnesota | 4.1 | 10.6% |
| 6 | Massachusetts | 4.0 | 10.4% |
| 7 | Ohio | 4.0 | 10.3% |
| 8 | Florida | 3.8 | 9.8% |
| 9 | Texas | 3.6 | 9.3% |
What would your tank cost?
Pick a vehicle - or set your own tank - and slide the year. The comparison it makes is the one memory is worst at: the same tank, a different decade. (The fair version needs inflation stripped out too, and that toggle is coming, built on the consumer-price index. A 1998 fill-up quoted in 1998 dollars flatters the past, and always will.)
Fill-up calculator · US weekly average prices
15 gal × 4.085 $/gal → $61.27
What this chart can't tell you
The survey prices the nation, five regions and nine states, so your own forecourt can sit well above or below every line on this page. The right-hand edge of the chart stays provisional until the next release lands, each Monday afternoon US time - read this on a Monday evening and the number may already be a week old. And every price here is nominal; across three decades, that flatters the past considerably.
Further reading
All of our numbers come from live, free government data - here, the US Energy Information Administration's weekly retail gasoline survey (regular grade, all formulations), which prices the country's forecourts every Monday. This page updates when the new week lands.
If you want to dig deeper, EIA's gasoline and diesel update carries the full history and the regional detail free. And if a chart here is useful to you, take it - the copy button hands you a version with the source and a link back built in.