U.S. Gas Price Tracker

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.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve and commercial crude

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is an emergency stockpile of crude oil owned by the U.S. government and stored in underground salt caverns along the Gulf Coast. It was created after the 1973 oil embargo so the country could keep fuel moving through a serious supply disruption. It holds crude oil, not finished gasoline, and it is measured in millions of barrels.

It affects what you pay indirectly, through crude oil rather than at the pump. Releasing barrels from the reserve adds supply to the crude market and pushes prices down; buying barrels back to refill it does the opposite. The effect is real but modest next to global crude demand, and it reaches the pump only after refining and distribution, with a lag of weeks — which is why the reserve chart and the price tables above rarely move in lockstep.

The second line on the chart is commercial crude: every barrel held in the United States outside the reserve, in refinery tanks, storage terminals and pipelines. These are the barrels the market actually draws on week to week, and they are the number oil traders watch — a weekly build or draw in commercial stocks moves crude prices in a way a slow change in the reserve does not. Both are crude oil only; neither counts finished gasoline.

Comparing the two is the point of showing them together. The reserve held more crude than the entire commercial system for most of its history, and the gap has closed and reversed. Reserve barrels are also not interchangeable with commercial ones: a release has to be sold, moved and refined before it reaches a pump, so the reserve line moves in slow policy-driven steps while the commercial line moves with ordinary supply and demand.

The third line is Cushing, Oklahoma — the tank farm where West Texas Intermediate futures are physically delivered, and the most closely watched single storage site in the country. It is a part of the commercial number, not a fourth stockpile: its barrels are already counted there, so the lines on the chart should never be added together. It is also far smaller, running between roughly 12 and 69 million barrels against hundreds of millions for the national figures, which is why the chart puts it on its own scale down the right-hand side. Read it against the right axis only.

Cushing gets that attention because it is the delivery point for the WTI contract. When it fills toward the top of its working capacity, sellers can struggle to find somewhere to physically put oil, and when it drains toward the bottom the opposite squeeze appears — both show up in the WTI price well before they show up at a pump. Working capacity is the volume the tanks can actually hold in normal operation, which is less than their total shell volume: some space is unusable tank bottoms and some is headroom needed to move oil in and out.

That is what the percentage and the lower chart above measure — current stocks against the working capacity of the Cushing tank farm. Read it with one caveat, which is why the figure carries its own date. The capacity number came from a federal report that the EIA has discontinued: the final edition covered March 2024, so 78.4 million barrels is the last officially published capacity for Cushing and there will not be another. Stocks are still current every week, but if the tank farm is expanded or tanks are retired, the denominator will not reflect it. Capacity moved within about two percent between 2018 and 2024, so the figure is a reasonable guide rather than an exact one.

All three levels are reported once a week. The EIA publishes them in the Weekly Petroleum Status Report each Wednesday morning, covering the week that ended the previous Friday. The two national series charted here run back to 1982; the Cushing series begins in 2004, so its line starts partway across the longer windows. The “share of all-time peak” figure compares the current reserve level with its highest recorded fill rather than with any stated capacity, because the authorized capacity has been revised over the years while the historical record has not.