How to read these gas prices
This page tracks the average retail price of gasoline and diesel at the pump across the United States — for the country as a whole, for each region, and for a set of individual states and cities. The numbers are prices per gallon, updated weekly, and the section below explains exactly where they come from and why they differ so much from one place to another.
Where the data comes from
Every price here is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail survey, the Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update. The EIA collects prices each Monday from thousands of stations and publishes an average per gallon the same day. It is the authoritative source — the “national average gas price” quoted in the news traces back to this survey — and because pump prices move slowly next to wholesale fuel, a weekly average is the standard way retail gas is measured.
Grades and diesel
Gasoline is sold in three octane grades — regular, midgrade and premium — and the “all grades” column is the average across them. All three are surveyed for the nation, every region, and each state and city shown here. Diesel is a different fuel, used mostly by trucks, and its price follows its own supply and demand, so it is shown separately. EIA surveys retail diesel far less finely than gasoline — only nationally, by PADD region, and for California — so there is no diesel figure for other states or for individual cities.
Why regions differ
The country is split into five PADD regions — Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts — that are the standard geography for fuel data: PADD 1 the East Coast, PADD 2 the Midwest, PADD 3 the Gulf Coast, PADD 4 the Rocky Mountains, and PADD 5 the West Coast. Prices vary between them because of three things: taxes, which differ by state; the gasoline formulation a state requires, with cleaner-burning blends costing more to make; and logistics — how far fuel has to travel from a refinery, and how connected a region is by pipeline. California sits high on all three, which is why it runs well above the national average; the Gulf Coast, home to much of the country’s refining, tends to sit below it.
Pump price versus wholesale
The price on the sign is not what the fuel itself costs. Wholesale gasoline — the RBOB futures price — is roughly the cost of the gasoline before it reaches the station, and the gap up to the pump price, often more than a dollar a gallon, is federal and state taxes, the cost of getting fuel to the station, and the retailer’s margin. Retail prices follow wholesale with a lag and a well-known asymmetry: they tend to rise quickly when wholesale rises and drift down slowly when it falls.