Gasoline vs. diesel prices
Area
Data source: U.S. Energy Information Administration — Weekly Retail Gasoline and Diesel Prices · Inflation adjustment: FRED CPIAUCSL
Weekly estimates of retail gasoline and diesel prices, observed on Mondays, side by side for the same area, so the gap between the two fuels is readable directly. The shaded band is the diesel premium — the amount by which diesel exceeds gasoline, or falls below it. Use the price toggle to switch between inflation-adjusted prices and nominal prices, the dollars of the day.
Each weekly figure is a snapshot, not an average over the week. EIA surveys retail outlets for the cash pump price — self-serve, including taxes — as of 8:00 a.m. local time on Monday, and publishes the estimate the following morning. The figure is a volume-weighted average across outlets at that moment, weighted by their annual sales volumes: about 1,000 outlets for gasoline (Form EIA-878) and 590 for diesel (Form EIA-888). Both fuels are surveyed the same way and on the same morning, so the gap between them is a like-for-like comparison. Gasoline is regular grade, all formulations; diesel is No 2 diesel, all types.
Coverage starts at different dates by area: US gasoline from August 1990 and the PADD regions from May 1992, against US and PADD diesel from March 1994; California gasoline begins in May 2000 and California diesel in July 1995. The two lines therefore start at different points, and the shaded gap only begins where both exist.
There are two methodology breaks in the series, on different dates for the two fuels. EIA rebuilt its sample and estimation method for gasoline on 14 May 2018 and for diesel on 13 June 2022, and says estimates either side of those dates are not directly comparable. Each break can shift the gap between the two fuels slightly for methodological rather than market reasons, but the discontinuities are small — prices moved 2.8 cents across the gasoline break and 1.5 cents across the diesel one, around the median weekly move for each — so the effect on the gap is well inside ordinary variation.
The diesel product also changed: the “all types” series carried low-sulfur diesel through the switch to ultra-low-sulfur diesel, and from mid-2010 is fully represented by ULSD.
EIA publishes diesel for far fewer areas than gasoline: for the US and the PADD regions, but among individual states for California alone, and for no cities. This chart offers the United States, the five PADD regions and California. EIA also publishes both fuels for the three PADD 1 sub-regions — New England, Central Atlantic and Lower Atlantic — which this chart leaves out because the gasoline chart does too; that is our choice of granularity, not a gap in the data.
To adjust for inflation, nominal prices are deflated using the monthly seasonally adjusted CPI-U (all items, all urban consumers — FRED series CPIAUCSL), rebased to 2024 dollars. BLS publishes a month's index about two weeks after the month ends, so the most recent weeks are deflated with the latest published month and revised once the index catches up; nominal prices are unaffected. Prices are shared with the gasoline and diesel prices chart, which is built from the same file.