A FuelFigures story · California statewide · week of Sep 21, 2026 · EIA

Why is gas so expensive in California?

This week a gallon of regular averages $6.00 in California and $4.48 in the country as a whole. That $1.52 premium is not one thing. It is a stack of five, and four of them have price tags.

Diesel is worse: $8.25, an all-time statewide record set this week, $1.72 over the national average.

How much of this is Sacramento? The receipts are below ↓

California has always paid more, but not like this. The gap over the U.S. average ran about 22¢ in the early 2000s. It stepped up after February 2015 and averaged 74¢ through 2019. This year it averages $1.46, and the all-time widest was $2.43 in October 2022. Same crude, same planet. The difference is everything after the oil.

Taxes: roughly 50¢ of the premium. California’s excise is 63.4¢ a gallon as of July 2026 (it indexes up every July under SB 1), plus the 18.4¢ federal excise everyone pays, a 2¢ underground-storage fee, and sales tax that adds about 15¢ at today’s prices. Call it a dollar of tax in each California gallon. The typical state collects about half that, so tax explains close to 50¢ of the gap and not much more. Sources: CDTFA, Tax Foundation.

Climate programs: about 37¢, and this one is an estimate. Cap-and-trade adds roughly 23¢ and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard about 14¢ as of early 2026; the LCFS figure is projected to climb after the 2025 amendments. These are pass-through estimates from program analysts, not line items on a receipt, and honest people publish different numbers. We label them the way we label every research estimate on this site.

The fuel island. California requires its own CARB gasoline blend, which almost no refinery outside the state brews, and no fuel pipeline crosses the Rockies to help. When something breaks here, relief arrives by tanker from the Gulf Coast or Asia, weeks out. Islands pay island prices.

The mystery surcharge. After the named pieces, tens of cents remain that nobody can assign. UC Berkeley’s Severin Borenstein has tracked this unexplained residual since the 2015 Torrance explosion; you can see the exact moment in the chart, where the premium doubled and stayed. State investigations have found no proof of gouging and also no innocent explanation. On this site, an unexplained number stays labeled unexplained.

The premium is widening this year for a reason you can point at. Phillips 66 ran the last barrel through its Los Angeles refinery in October 2025. Valero closed Benicia in April 2026. Together that was about 17% of the state’s refining capacity, per EIA. Then, days ago, a fire hit Chevron’s El Segundo refinery, the state’s largest, which supplies about a fifth of Southern California’s motor fuel. First-day forecasts ran as high as a dollar a gallon; after damage assessments, analysts expect more like 5 to 15¢ near-term. On an island, every outage prices like a siege.

Posts this week put Los Angeles regular at $6.23 against a record of $6.44. Those are metro-area figures from AAA’s daily survey, which runs above the statewide average and moves faster. EIA’s statewide weekly number is $6.00, against a statewide record of $6.27 set in June 2022. Both readings are real; they measure different things. We chart the statewide series because it is public domain and comparable to 25 years of history.

The posts tag Governor Newsom by name, so here is his actual ledger. Started on his watch: the 2024 LCFS amendments, whose pass-through lands from 2025 on. Inherited: the excise and its annual indexing are 2017 law signed by Jerry Brown, the mystery surcharge dates to 2015, the special blend to the 1990s, and the federal excise to 1993. A governor owns a real slice of this premium. No governor owns the crude market, which still sets most of the sign in every state.

And one thing this premium is not: evidence about national politics. Crude explains 97% of the national pump price, and no presidency has moved the leftover by more than about 7¢. California’s gap is state-made: taxes and programs its voters and legislators chose, plus geography nobody chose. It grew under officeholders of both parties, and it will outlast the current ones too.