Diesel Prices 1994-2025, Adjusted for Inflation

Adjusted for inflation, 2008 was the most expensive year for U.S. diesel since the EIA survey began in 1994. The on-highway average was $3.803 a gallon, about $5.69 in 2025 dollars. The nominal record, 2022 at $4.989, works out to $5.49 and ranks fourth, behind 2012 and 2011.

Diesel’s annual average has topped regular gasoline in every year since 2005, yet the weekly survey still caught diesel below regular in 6 weeks of 2005, 14 weeks in each of 2006 and 2007, 11 in 2009 and 7 in 2015, the last time it happened. Those week counts sit in Table 1 beside the EIA annual average and the same price in 2025 dollars using the BLS consumer price index, so the phrase “diesel has cost more than gasoline since 2004” can be checked year by year. The 2004 switch itself, and the three reasons EIA gives for it, are covered in the September 2004 section of our diesel prices guide. For gasoline over a longer span, see gas prices by year, adjusted for inflation; for crude, the inflation-adjusted oil price history.

Why the series starts in 1994, and which dollars these are

The price used here is EIA’s U.S. No. 2 diesel retail price, series EMD_EPD2D_PTE_NUS_DPG, the number EIA publishes every Monday in its Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update as the on-highway diesel price. EIA collects it on Form EIA-888 from a sample of truck stops and service stations across the contiguous United States. The figure is the cash, self-serve price at the pump including taxes, as of 8:00 a.m. local time on Monday, and EIA weights the outlet prices by sales volume. The first weekly observation is for March 21, 1994. That date is why this table starts where it does: EIA’s annual table shows “NA” for 1994, and its first full-year average is 1995.

EIA’s Real Prices Viewer, part of the Short-Term Energy Outlook, does carry diesel back to 1979. Its source notes are plain about what those early numbers are: from 1979 to 1993 they are EIA estimates based on the refiner end-use diesel price excluding taxes, taken from the Monthly Energy Review. From 1994 on, the viewer uses the weekly survey. A table that blends the two without saying so mixes a modelled price with a measured one, so this page uses only the measured years. For 1994, the row is this page’s average of the 41 weekly prices from March 21 to December 26, labelled as a partial year, and it is kept out of the rankings.

The inflation adjustment, in one line

Each year’s price is restated in 2025 dollars with the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), all items, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted, series CUUR0000SA0. The rule is: real price = nominal price × (2025 CPI ÷ that year’s CPI). The 2025 annual average is 321.943. BLS published no index for October 2025, and the 2025 average is the mean of the other eleven months. For every other year the annual CPI used here is the mean of that year’s twelve monthly values as published by BLS.

Take 2008 as the worked case. The CPI averaged 215.303 that year, so the factor is 321.943 ÷ 215.303 = 1.4953. Multiply the $3.803 average by that and you get $5.687. In words: the diesel a trucker bought in 2008 took the same share of a typical consumer budget as $5.69 would have taken in 2025.

What EIA itself publishes

EIA’s answer to “Does EIA publish inflation-adjusted gasoline and diesel fuel prices?” is yes, and it points to the Real Prices Viewer, where diesel is one of the options in the price-series menu. A second EIA FAQ adds that the agency’s published prices are nominal unless otherwise noted. The viewer resets its base to the current month every time the Outlook is updated, so the October 2026 edition shows real prices in October 2026 dollars and the November edition will show slightly different ones. That is useful for a quick look and awkward for a table that someone wants to quote next year. As a check on the method here, the October 2026 edition of EIA’s spreadsheet ranks the real annual averages 2008, 2012, 2011, 2022, 2013, the same five years in the same order as Table 2 below.

Thirty-two years (one partial) of diesel, nominal and real

Read down the “Diesel, 2025 $” column and the shape of three decades shows up without a chart. Through the late 1990s diesel cost between about $2.06 and $2.53 in today’s money. From 2005 it lifted to a new level and stayed there, peaking in 2008, dropping hard in 2009, then holding above $5.20 in real terms for four straight years from 2011 to 2014. The 2015 crash cut it back to $3.68, about where it had been in 2009, and 2016 was the cheapest year since 2004. Then came 2022.

One check worth making on any annual table: does it reproduce the source’s own annual figure? For diesel, the mean of EIA’s weekly prices within each year matches EIA’s published annual average to the tenth of a cent (for 2008, 2022 and 2025, exactly). The mean of EIA’s twelve monthly averages does not, and can differ by up to about a cent, because months contain four or five Mondays. So the annual numbers here are weekly averages, which is also why the 1994 partial year is built from weekly data.

The record years, ranked

The real ranking and the nominal ranking disagree in a way that matters for anyone writing “record diesel prices.” In nominal dollars, 2022 is first by a wide margin: $4.989 against $4.214 for 2023, the next highest. In real terms, 2022 is fourth, and the top four years sit within $0.20 of each other. 2008 holds first place despite ranking only seventh in nominal dollars, because consumer prices rose about 36 percent between 2008 and 2022 and a 2008 dollar went further.

The other feature of the list is how much of it falls in one stretch. Five of the top six real years are 2008 and 2011 to 2014. That plateau is the longest run of expensive diesel in the series, longer than the 2022 spike and the 2023 tail combined. Measured by average real price over the five years 2010 to 2014, it is the most expensive half-decade in Table 5 further down, ahead of 2020 to 2025 even though that window includes 2022.

The cheapest years

Every one of the five cheapest years falls between 1995 and 2002, and in 4 of them diesel averaged below regular gasoline. The floor of the series is the week of February 22, 1999, when diesel was $0.953 a gallon. At $2.06 in 2025 dollars, 1998’s annual average was a little over a third of 2008’s. No year since 2002 has come close: the cheapest year after the 2004 switch, 2016, was $3.09, still about 50 percent above 1998 in real terms.

Weekly peaks put the record somewhere else again

Annual averages flatten spikes. A year can contain an extreme week and still post a moderate average, which is what happened in 2008: diesel rose to $4.764 in the week of July 14 and fell to $2.327 by the last week of December. The table below restates three weekly highs with the CPI of their own month.

In nominal terms, the highest weekly price in the EIA series as of the October 27, 2026 release is $6.529, for the week of September 21, 2026, above the $5.810 of June 20, 2022. Adjusted for inflation, the order reverses. The 2022 peak is worth about $6.31 in 2025 dollars and the 2026 week about $6.24, while July 2008 converts to roughly $6.97, still the real high-water mark of the survey. 2026 is otherwise left out of this page, because an incomplete year cannot be ranked against full ones, and the live weekly price belongs on the fuel prices page, not in a history table.

The highest months

Monthly averages sit between the two views. Ranked in 2025 dollars, using each month’s own CPI, the eight most expensive months of 1994 to 2025 are all from the two spikes, and 2008 takes the top four places.

June 2022 at $5.754 was the most expensive month in nominal dollars before 2026, yet it ranks fifth here. The 2008 run was also longer at the top: seven of the ten highest real months fall between March and September 2008, while 2022 contributes three. Someone budgeting through the summer of 2008 paid more, in today’s money, for more months in a row than anyone in 2022.

Within-year range is its own measure of how hard a year was to budget. In 2008 the gap between the weekly high and the weekly low was $2.437, the widest of any year, more than 60 percent of that year’s average price. 2022’s range was $2.197. The calmest full year was 1995, when diesel moved only $0.056 between its high and low weeks; since 2005 the calmest has been 2019, at $0.206.

The premium over gasoline, counted in weeks

The gap column in Table 1 answers a question drivers and fleet managers ask in different ways: how much more does diesel cost? Before 2005 the honest answer was “about the same, sometimes less.” From 1995 to 2004 the annual gap never exceeded 3.6 cents in either direction except in 2003 and 2004, and diesel averaged below regular in seven of those ten years. In 1999, diesel printed below regular in 32 weeks out of 52.

The weekly count makes the switch measurable. In 2004, diesel was below regular in 34 of 52 weeks, so its calendar-year average still came in 4.2 cents under gasoline even though the EIA dates the lasting reversal to that September. 2005 dropped to 6 weeks below. A few years after that still had stretches below regular, all of them between April and September: the six weeks from August 22 to September 26, 2005, 14 weeks each in 2006 and 2007, 11 in 2009 and 7 in July and August 2015. After that the count goes to zero. From 2016 through 2025, the weekly diesel price never once fell below the weekly regular price.

The premium has also grown in size, not just in reliability. In real terms the average gap went from roughly zero in the late 1990s to about 31 cents in 2005 to 2009, 49 cents in 2010 to 2014, and 62 cents in 2020 to 2025. The single widest year was 2022, when diesel averaged $1.038 more than regular in nominal terms, a 26.3 percent premium. In 2025 the gap was 56.3 cents, or 18.2 percent.

The premium has a season

EIA’s FAQ on the diesel premium describes the older pattern: diesel used to sell below gasoline except in cold winters, when heating oil demand pushed it higher. The monthly data show that pattern clearly, and show that it survives inside the modern premium rather than disappearing.

In 1995 to 2003, diesel averaged above regular from October to March and below it from April to September, with the deepest discount in June, about 8 cents. In 2016 to 2025, diesel never averaged below regular in any month, but the shape is the same: the premium is narrowest in June, about 38 cents in 2025 dollars, and widest in December, about 71 cents. The summer narrowing is gasoline’s season, the winter widening is distillate’s, and a reader comparing one month of one year with another should expect roughly a 33 cent swing in the gap from the calendar alone.

How much of the gap is tax

Taxes explain only a small, fixed slice. According to EIA, as of January 2026 the federal tax was 24.40 cents a gallon on diesel and 18.40 cents on gasoline, and the average of state taxes was 35.50 cents on diesel and 33.27 cents on gasoline. Together that is about 8.2 cents of extra tax on a gallon of diesel. Against the 2025 gap of 56.3 cents, taxes account for about 15 percent, using January 2026 rates as an approximation for 2025. The rest is the refining and distribution side of the price, which the crack spread guide breaks down, and the global pull on distillate that EIA cites. A fixed cents-per-gallon tax also shrinks in real terms every year it goes unchanged, so the tax share of the premium is smaller now than it would have been with the same rates in the 1990s.

Years the price jumped or collapsed

The year-to-year change in the real price shows which years were shocks, as opposed to merely expensive. Both lists use full years only.

The 2022 jump stands alone: a real increase of about 41 percent, more than ten points larger than any other year in the survey. The big falls cluster after the big rises. 2009 gave back the 2008 surge and more, and 2015 ended the 2011 to 2014 plateau in one step. 2023 eased by about a fifth but remained the eighth most expensive year in real terms. Two of the largest increases, 2000 and 2005, came off cheap bases, which is why a 28 percent rise in either year added well under a dollar a gallon.

What the table means for a fuel budget

Price per gallon becomes concrete when multiplied by volume. As an illustration with stated inputs, take a buyer who uses 10,000 gallons of on-highway diesel a year, and price that volume at each year’s national average in 2025 dollars. The volume is hypothetical; the prices are the annual averages from Table 1.

The same volume that cost about $20,619 at 1998 prices cost about $56,866 at 2008 prices, both in 2025 dollars. 2025 itself sits in the middle at $36,600, a little below 2019, 2021 and 2024, and well below the 2011 to 2014 range. A carrier who remembers 2022 as the worst year for fuel is right in nominal dollars and in the speed of the increase, but in purchasing power 2008, 2011 and 2012 took a slightly larger bite. Freight fuel surcharges, which move with the EIA weekly price, are covered in the diesel prices guide.

Over the whole span, nominal diesel rose from $1.109 in 1995 to $3.660 in 2025, a factor of 3.30. Consumer prices rose by a factor of 2.11 over the same thirty years. So in real terms diesel cost about 56 percent more in 2025 than in 1995. Regular gasoline rose less over the same period, from $1.111 to $3.097, a factor of 2.79, which is the widening premium of the previous section expressed another way.

Where the series has seams

Long series carry small breaks that are invisible in a table. Five are worth knowing before a number from this page is quoted elsewhere.

• The diesel sample changed in June 2022. EIA introduced a new sample and new estimation methods for on-highway diesel on June 13, 2022, and says the estimates from that week are not directly comparable with the June 6 release. The 2022 weekly peak, June 20, was measured one week after the change. The 2008 peak came from the earlier sample.
• The gasoline sample changed in May 2018. EIA moved its retail gasoline survey to a new sampling frame and estimation method on May 14, 2018. The gap column therefore compares diesel and gasoline estimates whose methods changed in different years.
• “Diesel” is not one fuel across the whole period. EIA notes that most U.S. diesel contained high quantities of sulfur before 2006, when the EPA issued requirements that phased in ultra-low sulfur diesel, 15 parts per million or less, which is what is now sold for on-highway use. The heating oil versus diesel guide covers the specs. A 1995 gallon and a 2025 gallon met different specifications, and part of the real increase is the cost of a cleaner product.
• The 2025 CPI average has eleven months. With no October 2025 index from BLS, the base year averages the other eleven. Every real figure here inherits that, by the same proportion, so rankings are unaffected.
• CPI measures a consumer basket, not a trucking budget. Deflating by CPI-U answers “what was this worth in general purchasing power?” It does not answer “how did diesel compare with freight rates or wages in trucking?” Those need a different deflator.

Restating any year in another year’s dollars

The arithmetic is portable. To move a price from year A into year B dollars, multiply by CPI in year B and divide by CPI in year A. Using Table 1, 1999’s $1.121 in 2012 dollars is $1.121 × 229.594 ÷ 166.575 = $1.545. To move any 2025-dollar figure on this page into September 2026 dollars, multiply by 1.0466: 2008’s $5.69 becomes $5.95. A general-purpose inflation calculator on CalculatorVillage does the same conversion for any amount.

Two rules keep the result honest. Use annual average CPI with annual average prices, and monthly CPI with monthly or weekly prices, as Table 4 does; mixing them shifts a result by up to a few percent in a high-inflation year such as 2022, when the CPI rose about 5.6 percent from January to December. And always name the base. “$5.69” means nothing without “in 2025 dollars” attached, and the same 2008 price is about $5.95 in September 2026 dollars and about $5.88 in EIA’s October 2026 dollars, because each uses a different CPI month. All three describe the same gallon.

The broader context for this table, how crude, refining margins and seasonal demand set the price of a gallon, is in the price history section of the deep-dive library, alongside the heating oil price history by winter, the residential cousin of the same distillate barrel.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. No 2 Diesel Retail Prices (annual, monthly and weekly views) and U.S. Regular All Formulations Retail Gasoline Prices (annual, monthly and weekly views), release of October 27, 2026, checked October 30, 2026. EIA, Methodology for weekly on-highway diesel fuel price estimates and methodology for weekly retail gasoline price estimates, checked October 30, 2026 (Form EIA-888, Monday 8:00 a.m. cash self-serve price, contiguous U.S., June 13, 2022 and May 14, 2018 sample changes). EIA FAQs, Does EIA publish inflation-adjusted gasoline and diesel fuel prices?, Are the prices EIA publishes adjusted for inflation?, Why are diesel fuel prices higher than gasoline prices? and How much tax do we pay on a gallon of gasoline and on a gallon of diesel fuel? (taxes as of January 2026), checked October 30, 2026. EIA, Short-Term Energy Outlook, Real Prices Viewer and its October 2026 spreadsheet (source notes for 1979 to 1993 diesel estimates; real annual diesel ranking), checked October 30, 2026. EIA, Diesel fuel explained, checked October 30, 2026 (sulfur requirements from 2006, ULSD at 15 ppm). U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U, all items, U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted (CUUR0000SA0), monthly values 1993 to September 2026, checked October 30, 2026. Annual CPI means, real prices, gaps, weekly counts, ranks and period averages are this page’s arithmetic.