Heating Oil Price History by Winter, 1990 to 2026

The EIA’s national average residential price of No. 2 heating oil was $6.19 a gallon for the week of October 19, 2026. It is the highest of the 799 weekly readings in the series, which began in October 1990, ahead of $5.90 for the week of November 7, 2022, and it is 76 percent above the $3.526 of a year earlier. The highest winter average is lower: $4.82 for 2022-23 in the dollars of the day and $5.88 for 2012-13 in September 2026 dollars. A winter has not started yet at the level October 2026 opened at, so the tables below place that start against thirty-six full winters.

The first three weeks of October 2026 averaged $6.13 against $5.26 for 2022, the previous record start, and the 2025-26 winter shows how fast a winter can move: $3.555 on its first reading and $5.535 on its last. The EIA collects this price only from October through March as a delivered cash price, excluding taxes and discounts, so the history is one of six-month heating seasons, deflated with the CPI of the two calendar years each winter straddles, and it says nothing about summer fills, pre-bought contracts or budget plans.

Thirty-six winters in one table

Read down the US column and the pattern is a flat decade, a climb, a plateau and a volatile present. The 1990s sit between 86 cents and $1.31, with the series low of $0.861 in 1998-99. The 2000s climb to $3.28. The 2011-12 to 2013-14 winters are the plateau, four dollars a gallon three years running, and the 2020s are a volatile band between $2.47 and $4.82. The real column removes most of the climb and leaves three peaks: 2007-08, the 2011 to 2014 plateau and 2022-23.

Ranking the winters in real terms

The three winters from 2011-12 to 2013-14 rank first through third at $5.88, $5.82 and $5.76, with 2022-23 fourth at $5.44. The lowest, 1998-99, is 70% below the highest in real terms. The winter just ended, 2025-26, averaged $4.011, which is $4.13 in September 2026 dollars and ranks 13th of 36 on that measure: a middling winter by price that finished at $5.54 a gallon after opening at $3.56.

What a winter of oil cost

A price per gallon is not a bill. The EIA’s winter outlook for 2026-27 expects an oil-heated home to use 402 gallons from November through March, a figure explained in the household use guide. Applying that constant quantity to each winter’s average price isolates the price effect, and Table 3 does so for eight winters. It does not say what any household actually burned in those winters, which varied with weather and house.

The same 402 gallons cost $346 in 1998-99 and $1,622 in 2012-13, a rise of 369% in the dollars of the day and 234% after inflation is removed. The 2025-26 winter, at $1,612, cost about the same in the dollars of the day as 2012-13 ($1,622), but about 30% less in real terms.

How much of the price is crude

A residential price has a crude component and a long chain of other costs: refining into distillate, shipping to a terminal, the dealer’s truck and tank, and margin. A crude-only proxy is simple. WTI per gallon is the barrel price over 42, and what is left is everything else. Table 4 averages that split by decade.

In nominal dollars the non-crude part of the price has risen from $0.55 in the 1990s to $2.10 in the 2020s. In real dollars it has gone from $1.23 to $2.34, a larger real amount, even though its share of the price, 55% in the 2020s, is about where it was in the 1990s (54%) after a dip in the 2000s. The next section splits that remainder, using the heating oil prices guide’s layers. The 2025-26 winter shows the proxy at work: $1.55 of crude in a $4.01 gallon.

The delivery margin, from the wholesale price to the tank

Crude is only one layer. A sharper wholesale marker is the New York Harbor spot price of No. 2 heating oil, which already includes the refiner’s distillate margin. The gap between it and the residential price is what remains for the dealer: trucking, storage, financing, overhead and profit, plus any distance between the harbor and the customer. It is a proxy, since dealers do not buy at the spot price, but it is stable enough to tell a story.

In nominal dollars the gap grew from about 41 cents in 1990-91 to $1.55 in 2025-26, nearly fourfold. In September 2026 dollars the growth is smaller but real: about $1.03 to $1.60, a rise of 56%. The real gap peaked at $1.80 in 2022-23, in the winter after the biggest price run-up, and as a share of the residential price it is now a third to two-fifths of what the household pays. The gap does not shrink when wholesale prices fall, either. The 2008-09 winter, when the national price fell 41 percent, had a gap of $0.99, the highest of its era, which is consistent with retail prices lagging wholesale ones on the way down. The pattern resembles the effect in the rockets and feathers guide.

The monthly path shows the March 2026 step. The residential price held between $3.55 and $3.73 through the autumn and early winter, rose to $4.08 in February, and then to $5.13 in March as the wholesale price jumped from $2.36 to $3.77 and WTI from $65 to $90. The gap narrowed to $1.36 in March, which is consistent with a retail price that moves with a delay. The week of October 19, 2026 shows $6.19 against a wholesale price of $4.76, a gap of $1.43; on October 12 the gap was $1.57, and on October 5 it was $1.39. The gap has sat between $1.36 and $1.72 in the monthly means since October 2025, and between $1.39 and $1.57 in the three October 2026 weeks.

Inside a winter: the start and the end

A season average hides the direction. Some winters end close to where they began and others end far from it. Table 7 lists the seven largest in-season moves in the series.

The two rising winters of recent years are the 2021-22 winter, up 61 percent from $3.175 to $5.127, and the 2025-26 winter, up 56 percent from $3.555 to $5.535. The biggest fall was 2008-09, down 41 percent from $3.663 to $2.160, which started at nearly the same level as the 2025-26 start and ended in the opposite place. The lesson for anyone reading an opening price as a guide to the winter is in the table’s spread: the opening reading predicted neither the direction nor the size of the winter that followed, in either sign. This page does not forecast, and the EIA’s own winter outlook, covered in the Winter Fuels Outlook guide, is a projection built from assumptions and revised monthly.

October 2026 against every October

The comparison that matters for the current start is the price in the first three weeks of October each year, which is where 2026 has data. Table 8 ranks selected years by real price.

October 2026 is the highest start in both measures, by about a dime in real terms over 2022 ($6.21 against $6.05) and by 87 cents in nominal terms ($6.13 against $5.26). The 2012 and 2011 starts follow in real terms. A year earlier, in October 2025, the same weeks averaged $3.54. The year-over-year rise of 76% to the week of October 19 is larger than any earlier October-to-October jump in the first three weeks of the month, including the 61 percent from $3.27 in 2021 to $5.26 in 2022 and the 48 percent from $1.00 in 1999 to $1.48 in 2000.

The Northeast, state by state

The national average is dominated by New England and the Central Atlantic states, where most oil-heated homes are. The EIA publishes each state’s price, and Table 9 gives the latest week against a year earlier.

New York was the highest at $6.417 and Maine the lowest at $6.026, a spread of $0.391. A year earlier the spread was $0.595. Every row rose, by between 68% in New York and 87% in Pennsylvania, and Maine’s 86% was second. The states that started lowest rose most in percentage terms. In the 2025-26 winter average (Table 1), New York exceeded Maine by 57 cents. The gap between the two has been persistent: New York was higher in every winter in Table 1.

Which state is dear and which is cheap

Across nine Northeast states the dearest and cheapest winter averages follow a stable pattern. New York was the dearest in 30 of the 36 winters, New Jersey in four, Vermont in two. Maine was the cheapest in 24, Pennsylvania in six and Vermont in three. What has changed is the width. The gap between the dearest and cheapest of the nine was 21 cents in 1990-91 and 57 cents in 2025-26, and it has been above 40 cents in every winter since 2012-13.

Last winter’s increase was 9.5% nationally and ranged by state from +0.7% in New Hampshire to +11.9% in Rhode Island and +10.8% in Pennsylvania. New Hampshire’s near-flat winter against an 11 percent rise in neighbouring Massachusetts is an example of why a state energy office’s local survey and the national average can disagree for a whole season. The data do not say why.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Heating Oil and Propane Update and Weekly Heating Oil and Propane Prices (residential No. 2 heating oil, US, regional and state series; weekly, October to March; data through the week of October 19, 2026), and definitions and explanatory notes, from the EIA petroleum bulk data file updated October 22, 2026, checked October 23, 2026. EIA Cushing WTI spot price (RWTC), same file. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U (CUUR0000SA0), annual averages and 2026 monthly values as used in the gasoline price history guide on this site; a direct download of the monthly series was blocked on October 23, 2026, so each winter is deflated with the mean of the annual averages of its two calendar years. The 402-gallon figure is from the EIA Winter Fuels Outlook as used in the household use guide. Maine Department of Energy Resources, weekly fuel price survey of October 19, 2026, as in the kerosene guide. Season means, real values, shares, costs and in-season changes are this page’s arithmetic.