U.S. average · week of Nov 2, 2026 · EIA & BLS
Is gas actually expensive?
Depends how you measure. This page takes the number on the sign and corrects it twice: once for inflation, once for your time. The answer flips both times.
A data project by Preston Zeller
Scroll to re-read the price ↓
Week over week
Nov 2 vs Oct 26, 2026Regular gasoline fell 11.6¢ to $4.15 a gallon, a sixth straight weekly drop, and a 15-gallon fill-up now takes 115 minutes of work, 3 minutes less than last week. Diesel came down too, by 6.0¢, to $6.29. Because it fell slower, the diesel premium over regular rose for a fourth week to $2.14, a record for a weekly series that starts in 1994.
Written by Claude from the week's EIA figures; the pipeline checks every number in it against the data before it can publish.
This is what the sign said: every month since January 1980, in the dollars of its day. It looks like a 46-year climb.
Correct every month for inflation and the climb disappears. The record isn't now. It's June 2008.
Measured in the average worker's time, today sits just above the 46-year median. Diesel, the fuel actually setting records, gets its own story below.Minutes = pump price ÷ the average hourly wage, now $32.62 (BLS production & nonsupervisory workers, about 80% of the private workforce, before taxes).
Shaded bands mark oil-price eras; the grey segment in each is that era’s average. The dashed line is the 46-year median. Both re-fit as the lens changes. Hover for any month.
The verdict
High, sure. 116 months were higher.
Every month since 1980, sorted cheapest to priciest in today’s dollars. This month sits at the 79th percentile. Anyone calling it the worst ever, or calling it cheap, picked one lens and hid the others.
How prices move
Up like a rocket, down like a feather.
Nobody remembers an average. You remember the week the sign jumped 35 cents, then the months it refused to come back down. That memory has a shape in the data. When crude rises, about 63% of the move reaches the pump within a week. When crude falls, 29% does. Both moves arrive in full eventually; the fall just takes a month to do what the rise does in days. Economists call it “rockets and feathers,” after a 1991 study of British petrol stations, and it has never gone away.
Share of a crude move (WTI, as cents per gallon) showing up in EIA’s weekly retail price, 1990–2026. Since 2021 the rocket is quicker still: 78% of a rise lands in week one, against 35% of a fall. Estimated by distributed-lag regression on weekly changes; the recipe is on the methodology page.
Every spike gave half back. This one hasn’t.
Take each big run-up since 2005: the low it climbed from, the peak, then the weeks until half the climb was gone. Katrina needed 9. Even 2008 needed only 14, with a financial collapse pushing. The slow one was 2011, at 29 weeks. The 2026 spike peaked at $4.50 in May. 25 weeks later, the pump has given back 35 cents.
Life above $4
$4 gas was a seven-week emergency in 2008. In 2022 it ran 23 weeks. This year is at 27 and counting. One honest footnote before anyone frames that: milestones in nominal dollars flatter the past. Deflate every week to today’s money and all of 2010 through 2013 sat above $4, four straight years nobody calls a crisis anymore.
September isn’t a plot twist.
Pump prices keep a calendar. Refineries switch to summer-blend gasoline in spring and the price climbs into Memorial Day; after Labor Day the cheaper winter blend returns, driving thins, and the price slides. From this week of the year to New Year’s, the U.S. average fell in 26 of the past 35 years, a median drop of 4.1%. So far this year is tracking the calendar.
Each week’s price as a share of its own year’s average. The grey band holds the middle half of the 35 years; the amber line is 2026. Hover for any week.
Act II · the fuel nobody price-watches
While you watched gas, diesel broke every record.
Gasoline is merely high, 79nd percentile. Diesel, at $6.29, beats 99% of every month since 1994. Its gap over regular has never been this wide. And diesel is the freight fuel; every grocery truck runs on the green nozzle.
Shaded: diesel’s premium over regular. This week it’s $2.14; the old record was $1.61 in Nov 2022. Hover for any month, or flip to today’s dollars above.
The flip, isolated
Same two lines, reduced to their difference. Diesel spent two decades trading places with gasoline; as late as Aug 2015 it was briefly the cheap fuel. It has not dipped below zero since, and the premium keeps setting records.
Monthly averages, that month’s dollars. Below the $0 line, diesel was the cheaper fuel. This week’s gap is $2.14.
The diesel ripple
When diesel jumps, groceries follow six months later.
A diesel spike shows up in trucking bills within weeks; fuel surcharges reset that fast. Reaching the grocery shelf takes about half a year. Three data series tell the story, and you can drag the slider to find the delay yourself.
The dashed green ghost is diesel, slid 6 months into the future, over the grocery line. Best alignment across 30 years: 6 months (r = 0.61). A peer-reviewed California milk study found the same window; effects peak four to seven months out, about 20% in total.
On the record · Sep 2026
This year’s diesel shock hit trucking in full. Grocery inflation still reads 2.2%. If the 30-year pattern holds, the food effect lands around early 2027.
Where the shock sits now: trucking costs track diesel with no lag this episode (r = 0.88, both up double digits). The pipe’s middle link, trucking into processed foods, is still weak (r ≈ 0.15; processed-food prices are up just 0.1%), and farm-gate prices are falling 2.4% a year, pulling against the fuel push. That opposition is new; in 2008 and 2022, farm and fuel rose together. Farmers already spent $1.4B more on diesel this planting season (+63%, JEC minority staff, Jul 2026). A dated, checkable claim. We’ll grade it here either way.
Anatomy of a gallon
Half the pump price isn’t oil.
The brown layer is crude at that month’s barrel price (a barrel is 42 gallons). The amber layer is everything else: refining, trucking it to the station, taxes, the station’s cut. In 1980 crude was 71% of the price. Today it’s 53%. That amber layer is also a floor. April 2020 proved it, when oil traded near zero and gas still cost $1.84.
Crude cost is WTI ÷ 42. The non-crude wedge grew from 36¢ in 1980 to $2.04 today. Hover for any month’s split.
Crude in, pump out
Every month since 1980 as one dot. The band is tight because crude drives the pump (correlation 0.96). But watch the colors climb: at the same barrel price, each decade pays more at the pump than the last. That gap above the dashed line is the markup, widening.
The cost of a mile
Your engine beat the pump.
Nobody buys a gallon to own a gallon; you buy miles. In 1980 the average car on the road got 14.9 miles from it, today 23.4. Price the mile in work time and the story flips: 100 miles took 69 minutes of the average wage in January 1980, 34 minutes now. The dashed line shows today’s prices paid through a 1980 engine. That gap is the quiet win.
Minutes of work (average hourly earnings) to cover 100 miles at that month’s regular price and that year’s on-road fleet MPG. Efficiency saves you 20 minutes per 100 miles today. Worst month ever: Apr 1980 at 76m. Fleet MPG is annual (FHWA/BTS; 1981–89 computed from ORNL’s data book; classification changed in 2007; 2025–26 carry the 2024 figure). Hover for any month.
Act III · the bigger scoreboard
Gas never beat your paycheck. Health insurance did.
It feels like everything outran your paycheck since 1980. Gasoline didn’t: it grew 0.78× as fast as wages. Groceries and electricity fell behind too. What won are the bills and the big purchases. Health insurance ran 2.73× (since 1987, the first year with data), insurance of every kind beat you, and so did the car and the house (a new house took 4.5 years of pay in 1980; it takes 5.8 now). Press play to watch the race year by year, or flip to dollars to see what each thing costs.
Left of the line, it fell behind your paycheck; right of it, it beat your paycheck. 1.00× means it grew exactly as fast as average hourly pay (BLS, production and nonsupervisory workers). Most rows track the price people actually pay. Rows marked “CPI index” have no price series going back that far, so they use the government’s price index instead.
Some rows carry a second number, because the two ways of counting disagree. A new vehicle takes 1.40× the work it did in 1980; the same car, with quality held fixed, takes 0.42×. Buyers moved to bigger, better-equipped trucks and SUVs, and that is what they pay for. Health insurance is the full cost of employer coverage per person, the employer’s share and the worker’s together (CMS, from 1987, its first year). The mortgage payment trails wages only because rates fell, from 12.9% in January 1980 to 6.9% in Sep 2026. The house itself beat your pay.
Every figure is one somebody published. A year without one shows a dash; nothing is filled in, stretched or carried forward. Hover a row for the raw multiples.
Groceries, in your time
The same lens works on the whole cart.
Minutes of the average worker’s time to buy each staple. Hover any chart for a month.
Half the work of 1980, when a dozen took eight minutes. The 2025 spike was avian flu stacked on top of freight costs.
Jan 1980: 8.0 min · worst Mar 2025: 12.0 min
Thirty years of drifting cheaper. The 2004 and 2022 bumps both trace back to feed and freight.
Jul 1995: 12.7 min · worst Jun 2004: 13.7 min · series starts 1995
Bread barely moved in four decades. That quiet flat line is what most staples look like.
Jan 1980: 4.6 min · worst Jul 2011: 4.7 min
The outlier. A pound costs more work now than in 1984, and it set its record this spring.
Jan 1984: 9.2 min · worst Apr 2026: 12.8 min · series starts 1984
Who actually bears it
The average driver is a fiction.
Every chart above uses the average wage. Split households into income fifths and the picture sharpens: in 2024 the poorest fifth took in $16,658 and spent $1,262 of it on gasoline, 7.6% of income. The richest fifth: 1.5%. Counting all energy, the bottom fifth’s bill reaches 17% of income.
Share of spending is the fairer read: the bottom fifth spends about twice its measured income (savings, retirees, students, underreporting), so the income share overstates it. Even by spending, the burden humps in the middle fifths and the top fifth always pays the smallest share.
2012, near record pump prices, is the worst year on record for every fifth. 2000, the cheap-gas era, is nearly flat across them. Dots mark the years BLS published; before 2004 the survey built its fifths from complete income reporters only.
Act III · the fraying yardstick
The ruler itself has holes in it.
Every number on this page comes from federal statistics, and lately the government has struggled to collect them. Where data is missing we show the hole and quote the agency. No interpolating, ever.
Not published due to the 2025 lapse in appropriations.
October 2025 CPS was never collected and never will be; Q4 2025 quarterly figures rest on two months.
No collection Oct-Nov 2025; Interview Survey collected 33-66% fewer expenditures Jul-Oct 2025. Flag all 2025 CE shares.
Rent/OER carried forward from April 2025; the April 2026 one-month rent change is atypical.
Collection suspended entirely in Lincoln NE and Provo UT (Apr 2025) and Buffalo NY (Jun 2025); ~15% of sample suspended in other areas. All-items effect <0.01pp; item-level and metro indexes more volatile.
Surveys suspended after June 2022 IT failure; historical monthly by state 1983-2022 archived only.
Not published (item-level casualty of the 2025 collection disruption); missing in addition to the economy-wide 2025-10 hole.
Single unpublished month in the BLS average-price series; render as a gap.
Your year
What did gas cost the year you were born?
Slide to any year back to 1980. Same gallon, three readings, and a card you can send to whoever still brags about 89¢ gas.
- At the pump
- $1.07
- Today's dollars
- $2.44
- Minutes of work
- 5.7 min
This week’s gallon: $4.15, about 8.0 minutes of work.
The full page for 1994Keep going
Three honest rankings, three different podiums. Then the blame test: did any of them actually move the pump?
A calculator: your pay, your car’s MPG, your weekly miles, priced against 1981 and 2008 you.
The premium over the U.S. average, itemized: taxes, climate programs, a fuel island, and a mystery nobody can assign.