How to Read the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report

1. The one report that moves oil every week

Every Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, the US Energy Information Administration publishes the Weekly Petroleum Status Report. It is the fastest official look at the physical side of the US oil market: how much crude sits in tanks, how hard refineries are running, how much fuel the country is actually using, and where spot prices closed the prior week. Futures traders react within seconds, and headlines reduce the whole release to a single word - build or draw. That shorthand is where most readers get misled.

A build means inventories rose during the survey week. A draw means they fell. Neither word, on its own, tells you whether the market is tight or loose. A two-million-barrel draw during peak driving season can be exactly what the calendar predicts, while a small build in a week when everyone expected a draw can tighten the prompt market more than the headline suggests. Reading the report well means reading it in layers: first the stock change, then the flows that caused it, then where stocks sit against their own recent history.

This guide uses PetroEyes archived EIA series - the same weekly data behind our EIA inventory terminal - to show the reading order that professionals use. Every number in the tables below is computed at build time from that data file, with the week-ending date shown, so you can check the math against the source rather than taking a summary on trust. The EIA itself publishes the report free at eia.gov, in the Petroleum Supply Weekly section. Nothing in this guide requires a paid terminal.

2. Know the calendar before you read a single number

The report describes a week that ends on Friday and is published the following Wednesday. That five-day lag creates the first common mistake: treating the release as news about today. It is news about last week, released into a market that has already traded four sessions since the survey closed. When prices jump on the print, they are usually reacting to the gap between the reported number and what analysts expected, not to the physical change alone.

Two calendar traps deserve a permanent note in your notebook. Holiday weeks shift the release - Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year weeks often push publication to Thursday or Friday, and the survey week itself contains fewer working days for imports, exports, and refinery reporting. Storm weeks are the second trap. A Gulf Coast hurricane that shuts refineries and ports in the same week can produce a huge crude build (refineries are not taking barrels) next to a huge product draw (refineries are not making fuel). Read as a pair, that combination says disruption, not weak demand. Read separately, each half tells a false story.

The report is also preliminary. Production is modelled and rounded, trade flows are estimated from customs and shipping data that arrive with a lag, and the following week quietly revises the prior week inside its own tables. A serious reader therefore treats any single week as an estimate with error bars, and gives the four-week average more weight than the latest point for every flow series. The stock levels themselves - actual tank measurements reported by operators - are the hardest data in the release. The flows are the softest. That hierarchy should shape how confidently you argue from each block.

3. The five blocks, in the order to read them

The status report is organised into prices, inventories, production and trade, refining, and demand. Most commentary reads them in that printed order. A better order is stocks first, refining second, demand third, supply and trade fourth, and prices last - because prices are the result, not the cause. Here is what each block actually measures, in plain terms.

Inventories: what is in the tanks

Inventory is reported in thousand barrels, shown in our data as MBbls. Crude oil stocks exclude the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which the report tracks on its own line for exactly that reason: commercial tanks answer to the market, while the SPR answers to the Department of Energy. Gasoline and distillate stocks are finished products plus blending components in the gasoline case, and distillate covers diesel and heating oil together, which is why winter distillate draws often say more about heating demand in the Northeast than about trucking.

Refining: what the system is doing with crude

Gross refinery inputs tell you how much crude and other feedstocks refineries processed each day, in thousand barrels per day. Refinery utilization expresses those runs as a percentage of operable capacity. The two series answer different questions. Inputs can fall because a plant is down for maintenance even while national utilization looks respectable, and utilization can dip in early autumn simply because turnaround season has started on schedule. Our explainer on refinery crack spreads shows why runs respond to margins: when the crack is wide, refiners push utilization toward its practical ceiling, and the status report is where you verify that they actually did.

Demand: product supplied, not pump sales

The demand block is widely misunderstood. The EIA does not survey drivers at filling stations each week. It calculates product supplied - the volume that disappears from primary storage into the distribution system - and uses it as a proxy for consumption. Over a month, product supplied tracks real demand well. In a single week it can swing on pipeline scheduling, terminal transfers, and reporting timing. That is why the guide below insists on the four-week average for gasoline and distillate supplied before calling any demand trend.

Production and trade: the softest numbers

Domestic production in the weekly report is a modelled estimate, published rounded, and later benchmarked by the monthly survey. Treat a 100,000 barrel-per-day weekly wiggle as noise until the monthly data confirms it. Imports and exports are weekly estimates built from preliminary customs data, and export weeks are notoriously lumpy because tanker loadings bunch together. One week of exports tells you about shipping schedules. Four weeks tell you about trade.

Prices: the scoreboard

The price block records weekly spot prices for WTI and Brent crude, New York Harbor gasoline, heating oil, and Henry Hub natural gas. These are the same benchmarks we track on the markets page and, for gas in depth, on the natural gas price page. In the status report, prices are best used as a check on your physical reading. If stocks drew, runs were high, and product supplied was firm, a falling spot price is telling you the market expected even more tightness - or that the driver sits outside the United States entirely.

4. The latest week, laid out in full

The table below is the original working asset for this guide. It is computed directly from PetroEyes archived EIA data for the week ending September 25, 2026, the most recent week in the file. Columns show the latest level, the prior week, the week-on-week change in level and percent, the four-week average, and the 52-week range, so that any single print can be judged against its own context without opening a second document.

Read the current print the way the table invites you to. Crude stocks stand at 427,320 thousand barrels for the week ending September 25, 2026, a week-on-week move of +922 thousand barrels. That change is small against a 52-week range that runs from 404,508 to 465,729 thousand barrels, so the crude level itself is not shouting. Gasoline and distillate both drew on the week while refinery utilization eased from the prior week, a combination that points first to refinery runs, not collapsing demand - and the demand block confirms it, with total product supplied up on the week. That three-block cross-check, done in under a minute, is the entire craft in miniature: never let one block file the report alone.

5. Days of supply: the worked example that turns levels into tightness

A stock level means little until you divide it by the rate at which the system burns through it. Days of supply does that division. It answers a practical question: if nothing new arrived, how many days would current tanks cover current use? The arithmetic uses only numbers from the table above, all from the week ending September 25, 2026.

Crude days of supply = crude stocks / gross refinery inputs = 427,320 / 16,670 = 25.6 days

Gasoline days of supply = gasoline stocks / gasoline supplied = 204,362 / 8,689 = 23.5 days

Distillate days of supply = distillate stocks / distillate supplied = 105,180 / 3,948 = 26.6 days

These are hypothetical cover calculations, labelled as such: refineries do not actually run tanks to zero, imports keep arriving, and product supplied is a weekly proxy rather than metered consumption. The value of the calculation is comparative, not literal. When gasoline cover falls toward the low end of its recent range heading into driving season, the market has less cushion for an unplanned outage, and the crack spread usually prices that cushion before the status report prints it. When cover rises through autumn as demand fades and refineries return from maintenance, the same arithmetic explains why a headline draw can still leave the market comfortable. Pair days of supply with the 52-week range columns in the table and you have a defensible tightness statement built entirely from public data.

One warning belongs with this tool. Days of supply uses national totals, and the United States is five PADD districts with limited pipelines between them. A comfortable national gasoline number can coexist with a tight East Coast if the surplus sits on the Gulf Coast. The EIA report breaks stocks and runs down by district precisely for this reason. Read the national number for the trend, then check the district where the price benchmark you care about is set.

6. Cushing: the small tank farm with an outsized vote

Inside the crude stock total sits one line that futures traders watch more closely than the national figure: crude stored at Cushing, Oklahoma. Cushing is the delivery point for the NYMEX WTI futures contract, so barrels there are the barrels that can be delivered against the benchmark. When Cushing drains toward operational lows, the prompt WTI contract can strengthen sharply against both later months and Brent, because shorts need deliverable supply. When Cushing refills, that pressure fades even if total US stocks are falling elsewhere.

In the latest week, Cushing held 24,301 thousand barrels, against a 52-week range of 18,599 to 31,489 thousand barrels in our archived series. Placing the print inside that range tells you more than the week-on-week change alone. Our deep dive on the WTI vs Brent spread works through the full mechanism, including how pipeline flows between the Permian, the Gulf Coast, and Cushing move the spread. The weekly habit is simple: read total crude for the balance story, then read Cushing for the benchmark story, and do not confuse the two.

The SPR deserves the same separation discipline. A release from the reserve raises measured supply without any change in commercial production, and a refill does the opposite. Because the status report keeps the SPR on its own line - 283,767 thousand barrels in the latest week - you can strip it out in one glance. Commentary that folds SPR moves into commercial builds or draws is mixing a policy decision into a market signal, and the report format gives you no excuse to join it.

7. Expectations, seasonality, and the four-week rule

Markets trade the surprise, not the level. A widely followed ritual on Tuesday evening, when the American Petroleum Institute publishes its private estimate, and again on Wednesday morning, when analyst surveys circulate, sets the expected build or draw before the EIA prints. The investable information on Wednesday is the distance between the EIA number and that expectation, plus whether the internals agree. A bullish headline with bearish internals - say, a crude draw produced entirely by a one-week export surge while refinery runs fell and gasoline built - tends to fade, because the flows say the draw will not repeat.

Seasonality is the second filter. Gasoline stocks normally build through winter, peak before spring refinery maintenance, draw hard through summer driving season, and rebuild in autumn. Distillate builds through summer and draws in winter. A gasoline draw in July is the calendar working. A gasoline draw in January is information. Before reacting to any stock change, ask what the calendar usually delivers in that week, then judge the print against the seasonal expectation rather than against zero. The 52-week range in our table is a rough seasonal scaffold, and the EIA report itself prints five-year averages for exactly this comparison.

Finally, apply the four-week rule to every flow: production, imports, exports, refinery inputs, and product supplied. Weekly flows carry survey noise, weather noise, and shipping bunching. The four-week average, shown in the table for each series, strips most of that out while still responding within a month when a real trend starts. If the latest week and the four-week average point in opposite directions, believe the average until a second week confirms the turn. More bad Wednesday trades come from ignoring that sentence than from any other single habit.

8. Your Wednesday checklist

Print this sequence and run it in order. It takes about ten minutes once the report is familiar, and it is deliberately ordered so that the hardest data speaks first.

1. Stocks versus expectation. Note the crude, gasoline, and distillate changes against the surveyed expectation, not against zero. Record the surprise, in barrels, for each.
2. Cushing split. Check whether the crude move happened at Cushing or elsewhere. A national draw with a Cushing build is a different benchmark signal than the reverse.
3. Runs and utilization. Did refinery inputs confirm the product moves? A gasoline draw alongside falling runs is a supply event. A draw alongside rising runs is a demand event.
4. Demand on the average. Compare gasoline and distillate supplied on the four-week average. Ignore the single-week swing unless the average turns with it.
5. Days of supply. Run the three divisions from section 5 and place each result against its recent range. Tightness is a level, not a change.
6. Trade lump check. If imports or exports explain the crude move, check the four-week average before believing it. Tanker timing fakes more weekly crude stories than any other line.
7. Price confirmation. Compare the physical reading with the spot prices in the report and the live benchmarks on our markets page. When price and physics disagree, write down which one you trust and why. That note is your audit trail next Wednesday.

9. Limits to keep taped to the monitor

• Weekly production is an estimate. The monthly Petroleum Supply Monthly, published with a longer lag, is the benchmark. Weekly production moves of a few hundred thousand barrels per day routinely shrink or vanish on revision.
• Product supplied is a proxy. It is disappearance from primary storage, not metered end-use. It is excellent over months and noisy over weeks.
• National totals hide districts. PADD-level tightness drives regional prices, including what drivers pay. Our gas prices page and the rockets and feathers deep dive connect those regional physical signals to the pump.
• One week is not a balance. The annual balance emerges from hundreds of weekly prints. The report rewards readers who keep a running table - which is why our inventory terminal archives each week instead of overwriting it.
• Rig counts answer a different question. The weekly Baker Hughes count, tracked on our rig counts page, leads production by months, not days. Do not use it to explain this week stock change.

10. Frequently asked questions

When is the EIA weekly report released?

Normally Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. Eastern, covering the week ended the prior Friday. Federal holiday weeks shift the day. The companion natural gas storage report follows on Thursday, and we walk through its benchmark on the natural gas price page.

What is the difference between a build and a draw?

A build is a week-on-week increase in a stock level; a draw is a decrease. The terms describe direction only. Whether either matters depends on the seasonal expectation, the four-week trend, and which flows caused it, as section 7 lays out.

Why did oil fall on a draw, or rise on a build?

Because the market had priced a different number. A small draw after a surveyed expectation of a large draw is, in trading terms, a relative build. Regional splits, especially Cushing, and the forward curve reaction can also overpower the headline within the same hour.

Which single number matters most?

There is not one, and distrust anyone who names one without conditions. If forced to rank, crude stocks against expectation set the headline, refinery runs explain it, and days of supply judge it. The checklist in section 8 is built on that ranking.

Is product supplied the same as demand?

It is the EIA weekly proxy for demand: volume leaving primary storage. It is not a direct measurement of fuel burned. Use the four-week average for trend claims, and expect the monthly report to refine the picture.

Where can I see the numbers each week without a paid service?

The EIA publishes the full report free on its website, and PetroEyes archives the core weekly series in the EIA inventory terminal, with benchmark prices on the markets page and published outlooks collected on the forecasts page.

11. Related reading

• EIA Crude Oil Inventory and Weekly Petroleum Status Report - the archived weekly data behind this guide.
• WTI vs Brent Spread, Explained - why the Cushing line in this report moves the benchmark spread.
• Refinery Crack Spreads, Explained - the margin that decides how hard refineries run each week.
• Natural Gas (Henry Hub) Price Today - the Thursday storage companion to the Wednesday petroleum report.
• Rig Counts - the slower supply signal that leads weekly production by months.