Crude oil
Above normalDiesel price vs crude oil
$3.910/gal for the week of Nov 2, 2026: the US pump price minus WTI crude, converted to dollars per gallon. Not the crack spread; refining, distribution, taxes and margin combined, all netted against crude.
Data through Nov 3, 2026 · source last checked Nov 5, 2026 · page revised Nov 5, 2026
Cite
- US retail diesel (pump)
- WTI crude ($/gal equivalent, divided by 42)
- Brent crude ($/gal equivalent, divided by 42)
About this data
- Source
- Derived from EIA retail diesel and EIA daily crude oil spot
- Series
- US retail diesel minus WTI crude, converted to $/gal
- Basis
- Retail pump (taxed) minus crude; not the wholesale crack spread
- Geography
- United States
- Unit
- $/gal
- Calculation
- Weekly, crude matched to the nearest business day
- Last observation
- Nov 3, 2026
- Update frequency
- Weekly
Now $3.910/gal, 71% above the 5-yr median. The gap widened by $0.064/gal this week.
The pump-minus-crude gap widened $0.064/gal to $3.910/gal for the week of Nov 2. The gap sits 71% above the five-year median.
| Period | Current | Prior | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week over week | $3.910/gal | $3.846/gal | +1.7% |
| vs 4 weeks ago | $3.910/gal | $3.910/gal | -0.0% |
| Year over year | $3.910/gal | $2.282/gal | +71.3% |
| vs 5-yr median | $3.910/gal | $2.282/gal | +71.3% |
| Period | Current | Prior | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week over week | $99.64/bbl | $103.37/bbl | -3.6% |
| vs 4 weeks ago | $99.64/bbl | $96.13/bbl | +3.7% |
| Year over year | $99.64/bbl | $61.79/bbl | +61.3% |
| vs 5-yr median | $99.64/bbl | $80.82/bbl | +23.3% |
| Period | Current | Prior | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Week over week | $107.03/bbl | $123.10/bbl | -13.1% |
| vs 4 weeks ago | $107.03/bbl | $125.51/bbl | -14.7% |
| Year over year | $107.03/bbl | $65.79/bbl | +62.7% |
| vs 5-yr median | $107.03/bbl | $81.10/bbl | +32.0% |
- Non-crude share of the pump price
The pump price minus WTI converted to dollars per gallon, over time. Not the crack spread (that compares wholesale product to wholesale crude); this compares the retail pump price to crude.
Previous weeks
Week of Oct 27, 2026
The pump-to-crude gap widened to $3.846/gal for the week of Oct 26, 2026, up $0.189/gal from the prior week. The spread sits 72% above the five-year median.
Week of Oct 20, 2026
The pump-to-crude gap narrowed to $3.657/gal, down $0.261/gal on the week, and sits 64% above the five-year median. Year over year, the gap is up 63.9% from $2.231/gal.
About Diesel price vs crude oil
This gap is not the crack spread. A crack spread compares a wholesale refined product to wholesale crude. This is the RETAIL pump price minus crude, so it carries refining, distribution, station costs and federal and state fuel taxes all in one number, not just a refiner's margin.
Crude moves fastest. The pump follows with a lag of days to weeks as the new crude cost works through refining and distribution, so a crude spike this week shows up at the pump gradually, not instantly, and the gap often widens briefly right after a sharp crude move before it settles back.
A widening gap over a longer stretch, weeks rather than days, points at something other than crude: tighter refining capacity, a distribution bottleneck, or a tax change, since the crude cost is already netted out of this number. A narrowing gap points the other way, the pump catching up to a crude move that already happened, or refining and distribution costs easing.
WTI, converted to dollars per gallon by dividing by 42 (the gallons in a barrel), is the crude benchmark the gap uses. How do crude oil futures move diesel prices? covers the crack spread and the rack that sit between crude and the pump.
WTI and Brent
WTI, short for West Texas Intermediate, is the benchmark price for crude oil delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for the main US crude oil futures contract. Brent is the waterborne benchmark: crude priced off the North Sea and used as the reference for oil that moves by tanker, which is most of the crude traded internationally. Neither is a diesel price. Refiners buy crude like this, run it into diesel alongside gasoline, jet fuel and other products, and sell the diesel into the wholesale and retail market the rest of this site tracks.
The Brent-WTI gap matters for where a diesel buyer sits. Coastal markets that import crude and refined product by tanker, the East Coast and California especially, price closer to Brent's waterborne economics. The pipeline-connected interior, the Midwest and the Gulf Coast, prices closer to WTI. A wide Brent-over-WTI gap tends to show up as a bigger coastal premium on the regional diesel prices this site tracks, and a narrow one tends to bring the coasts and the interior closer together. On Nov 3, 2026, Brent sat $7.39 a barrel over WTI.
Common questions
How much of the price of diesel is crude oil?
For the week of Nov 2, 2026, WTI crude came to $2.382 a gallon (the barrel price divided by 42), 37.9% of the $6.292 US pump price. Across the 276 survey weeks this page carries since Jul 26, 2021, the median share is 44.8%. EIA's own breakdown puts crude at 44.9% of the retail on-highway diesel price on average over 2016 to 2025 and 43.6% in 2025; the rest is refining, distribution and marketing, and taxes.
Why don't diesel and crude oil prices move together?
Crude is one input, and the pump follows it with a lag of days to weeks while refining, distribution and station costs move on their own. From the week of Oct 5, 2026 to the week of Nov 2, 2026, WTI moved up 9.4 cents a gallon and the US pump price moved up 9.3 cents. The gap chart above shows the difference week by week.
Does diesel follow WTI or Brent?
Both matter. WTI prices crude at Cushing, Oklahoma, and the pipeline-connected interior tends to price off it; coastal markets that import by tanker price closer to Brent. On Nov 3, 2026, Brent sat $7.39 a barrel over WTI. Refiners then sell diesel off its own wholesale market, covered on the diesel spot price page.