How to Read OPEC's Monthly Oil Market Report

OPEC's Monthly Oil Market Report is read for two numbers: the group's crude production according to secondary sources, and the "demand for DoC crude" it has to supply. Subtract one from the other and you have OPEC's own view of whether the market is drawing or building stocks. In August 2026 that gap was a draw of about 5.8 million barrels a day for the second quarter.

The report, published by the OPEC Secretariat in Vienna and known by its initials MOMR, runs close to a hundred pages a month. Most of it is market commentary that can be skimmed. A handful of tables carry the information that moves prices and frames producer policy. This guide walks through those tables using the August 2026 edition (dated 12 August 2026), the most recent full report that could be read for this article, and places OPEC's figures next to the EIA and IEA using the International Energy Forum's monthly comparison through October 2026.

Release rhythm and the report's place in the month

The MOMR comes out monthly, usually in the middle of the month. In August 2026 it arrived one day after the EIA's Short-Term Energy Outlook, which was released on August 11. The August 2026 edition is dated 12 August and states on its final page that the next report would be issued on 10 September 2026. That closing line is the easiest way to find the next date, since OPEC's website can be hard to reach from automated tools and the calendar shifts around meetings and holidays.

The order of releases matters for interpretation. When OPEC publishes after the EIA, it has seen a few more days of price and inventory data than the STEO did, and a revision in OPEC's figures may partly reflect that later information rather than a difference of view. Our guide to reading the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook covers the U.S. agency's side, including how to check forecast completion dates.

The chapters, in the order worth reading them

The August 2026 contents page lists the oil market highlights, a feature article (that month, recent global refining trends and the winter outlook), and then eleven chapters: crude oil price movements, commodity markets, world economy, world oil demand, world oil supply, product markets and refinery operations, tanker market, crude and refined products trade, commercial stock movements, and the balance of supply and demand, followed by an appendix of data tables. Printed order is not reading order. A practical sequence:

Table 11-2 deserves special attention because almost nobody reads it. It reprints the world balance but shows only the changes from the previous month's table, with dashes where nothing moved. In August 2026 it shows world demand for the second quarter of 2026 cut by 0.6 million barrels a day and the annual 2026 figure cut by 0.2 million, while non-DoC supply from the Americas was raised by 0.1 to 0.2 million in most quarters. That is the whole month's news in one grid.

Two production tables that disagree on purpose

The supply chapter prints crude production twice. Table 5-7 is "DoC crude oil production based on secondary sources" and covers every country in the Declaration of Cooperation, the OPEC members plus the non-OPEC partners such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Mexico and Oman. Table 5-8 is "OPEC crude oil production based on direct communication": what each OPEC member government reported for itself. Only OPEC members appear in the second table.

The secondary-source table is the one that counts. Headline totals in the highlights, the production rows in the balance tables, and most news coverage of whether a country is above or below its target use it. The direct-communication table is a record of what governments claim. The gap between the two is information in its own right: it shows which governments see their output differently from outside estimators, and by how much.

Worked example: July 2026, side by side

The table below takes July 2026 values from both tables in the August 2026 report, in thousand barrels a day, for the members that reported directly.

Source: OPEC, Monthly Oil Market Report, August 2026, Tables 5-7 and 5-8 (thousand b/d), checked October 22, 2026. Gap column is PetroEyes arithmetic. Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran and the UAE had no July direct-communication figure in that table. Membership note: the EIA's UAE country analysis (July 2026) states that the UAE left OPEC on May 1, 2026, and the October 2026 STEO no longer lists it among OPEC members, so check which country list a given MOMR table uses before comparing totals across months.

Four lessons sit in this small table. First, the gaps are not random noise around zero; for six of seven reporters the government's number is equal to or higher than the outside estimate. Second, the size varies a lot: Iraq's gap of 280 thousand barrels a day is larger than the entire output of some smaller members. Third, a country can report less than outsiders see, as Nigeria did. Fourth, the gaps for the same country move from month to month, so a reader cannot simply apply a fixed correction.

Saudi Arabia's row needs its footnote. The report gives two direct figures for July 2026: "supply to the market" of 7,420 thousand barrels a day, which is the number placed in the table, and production of 8,202 thousand. The two diverge by 782 thousand barrels a day that month (they were 7,010 and 6,561 in May, and 6,637 and 7,122 in June). The report does not explain the difference in that table, so this guide does not either. What a reader should take from it is that a Saudi "production" number quoted in the news needs the definition attached.

One more point about blanks. In Table 5-8 the OPEC total is shown as not available because several member cells are blank. Any "direct communication total" quoted elsewhere is therefore someone's partial sum, not an OPEC figure.

The demand for DoC crude: what the report is built to produce

The balance chapter computes one number for each quarter and year. Start with world oil demand. Subtract liquids production from countries outside the Declaration of Cooperation (the report names the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Argentina and Qatar as the main growth drivers, and the total includes refinery processing gains). Subtract the DoC countries' own natural gas liquids and non-conventional liquids. What is left is the crude the DoC group would have to pump to keep inventories flat. OPEC calls it the demand for DoC crude. Market coverage often calls the same residual the "call on OPEC+ crude".

The August 2026 report prints the pieces in Tables 10-1 and 10-2, in million barrels a day:

Source: OPEC, Monthly Oil Market Report, August 2026, Tables 10-1 and 10-2, checked October 22, 2026. The appendix version of the same balance (Table 11-1) shows -5.9 for 2Q26 because of independent rounding.

A negative balance means DoC production fell short of the demand for its crude, so the world drew on inventories (or the statistics are missing barrels; the appendix labels the line "stock change and miscellaneous" for that reason). Note the structure of the table: forecast quarters have a demand-for-DoC figure but no production or balance. OPEC does not forecast its own members' output. The reader supplies the production assumption and does the subtraction.

Worked example: what July's output implies for the third quarter

The report gives July 2026 DoC crude production of 37.66 million barrels a day from secondary sources (Table 5-7 total: 37,655 thousand), up 1.42 million from June. The demand for DoC crude in the third quarter of 2026 is 42.4 million.

• Gap if July's rate held for the quarter: 37.66 - 42.4 = -4.7 million b/d (rounded).
• Over the 92 days of July, August and September: 4.7 x 92 = about 432 million barrels of implied stock draw.
• For scale, the same report puts OECD commercial stocks at 2,729 million barrels in June 2026. The implied quarterly draw equals about 16 percent of that total.
• Production needed to close the gap within the quarter: 42.4 million b/d, about 4.7 million above July. Even if August and September each added another 1.42 million, the quarterly average would be about 39.1 million, still about 3.3 million short.

This is an illustration of the method, built only from numbers in the August 2026 report, not a forecast. Its value is in showing what the report implies without saying: in OPEC's own framework, the market in mid-2026 was drawing stocks at a rate that only a large return of DoC barrels could stop. The October 2026 EIA outlook reached a similar conclusion through different numbers, with global inventories falling by an average of 1.9 million barrels a day in the third quarter.

The gap between OPEC's implied draw and the EIA's estimate is itself instructive. Because OPEC's demand figure is higher, the same production produces a bigger shortfall in OPEC's tables. A reader who wants to know whether the market is tight should not take either draw estimate at face value but check it against observed inventories, which is what the stocks chapter and the weekly U.S. data are for.

OPEC's demand view against the EIA and IEA

The International Energy Forum, which sits between producer and consumer governments, publishes a monthly comparison of the three reports. Across 2026 the comparison shows OPEC consistently expecting demand growth while the two consumer-country agencies expected a decline, with all three revising in the same direction.

Source: International Energy Forum, Comparative Analysis of Monthly Reports on the Oil Market, June, August, September and October 2026, checked October 22, 2026.

A detail worth catching: OPEC's 2026 demand level was 105.7 million barrels a day in both its August report and in the October comparison, yet its growth figure fell from 0.6 to 0.2 million. If the level holds while growth falls, the base year must have moved up. Taking the rounded figures at face value, 105.7 minus 0.2 implies a 2025 level of about 105.5 million, against 105.2 million in the August tables. Part of OPEC's "downgrade" to 2026 growth is therefore an upgrade to 2025 history, not a cut to 2026 consumption. Rounding limits how far this can be pushed, but the direction is clear, and it is the kind of thing that only shows up when levels and growth rates are read together.

The supply side diverges too. In the October comparison, OPEC expected non-DoC liquids plus DoC natural gas liquids of 63.6 million barrels a day in 2026 and 64.3 million in 2027, while the EIA had 66.6 and 70.8 and the IEA 66.2 and 69.6. Higher demand and lower outside supply both raise the call on the group, which is why the IEF reported OPEC's call on DoC crude at 45.2 million barrels a day in its late-2027 discussion, against 35.7 million from the IEA and 33.3 million from the EIA. The difference of roughly 9.5 to 12 million barrels a day between OPEC and the other two is not a rounding question; it is two different pictures of how much room the group has to raise output without building stocks.

Stocks, and why the report counts them in days

The commercial stock chapter reports OECD inventories in million barrels and in days of forward cover, meaning stocks divided by expected demand. The August 2026 report puts OECD commercial stocks at 2,729 million barrels in June 2026, down 26.4 million from May, 66.5 million below the latest five-year average, and equal to 58.7 days of forward cover, 1.9 days below the five-year average. Crude was 1,296 million barrels and products 1,433 million.

Days of cover is OPEC's preferred lens, and it has a property worth knowing. When demand is forecast to rise, the same barrel count yields fewer days, which makes the market look tighter. When demand is forecast lower, as the EIA and IEA forecast for 2026, the same stocks would look more comfortable in days. A reader comparing OPEC's days of cover with another agency's should check which demand series sits in the denominator.

The U.S. part of those stocks can be followed weekly. Our guide to the EIA weekly petroleum status report explains the Wednesday figures, and the U.S. crude inventory history puts current levels in a longer frame.

Prices in the report, briefly

The first chapter reviews prices, including the OPEC Reference Basket, a price for a basket of member-country crudes. For July 2026 the August report gives the basket at $82.99 a barrel, down $6.76 from June, ICE Brent front-month at $83.97 and NYMEX WTI front-month at $79.22, a Brent premium of $4.75. These are month averages of futures settlements, and they arrive weeks after the market has moved on. Read the chapter for its description of curve structure and positioning, not for prices. The relationship between the two benchmarks is covered in our WTI versus Brent spread explainer.

Misreadings that cost readers the most

• Quoting direct-communication output as OPEC production. News and policy discussion use the secondary-source table. A government figure that is 280 thousand barrels a day higher tells you about the gap, not about the market.
• Comparing OPEC's demand level with another agency's growth. Levels and growth rates must come from the same report. OPEC's 2026 level is 3.3 million barrels a day above the EIA's, so mixing them invents a balance that neither agency holds.
• Reading the demand for DoC crude as a production target. It is an accounting residual. The group's production targets are set at ministerial meetings, and our OPEC+ explainer covers how quotas, baselines and compliance work.
• Forgetting that the producer group writes the report. The MOMR is careful and data-rich, but it is published by an organization with an interest in how demand is perceived. That is a reason to compare it, not a reason to dismiss it.
• Ignoring the "miscellaneous" in the balance. The appendix calls the balance line "stock change and miscellaneous". Part of any implied draw may be missing barrels in the statistics rather than barrels leaving tanks.
• Treating Table 5-7 history as final. Secondary-source estimates for recent months are revised as better data arrives, and the report notes that totals reflect "available secondary sources to date".

A checklist for MOMR day

1. Read the highlights and note every revision word: "revised down", "unchanged", "upward revision".
2. Open Table 11-2 and list every non-dash cell. That is the month's news.
3. Take the latest month of DoC crude from Table 5-7 and subtract it from the current quarter's demand for DoC crude in Table 10-1.
4. Compare Table 5-7 with Table 5-8 for the large producers and record the gaps.
5. Check OECD stocks in barrels and in days of cover, and note the demand series behind the days.
6. Within a few days, line OPEC's demand growth and level up against the EIA and IEA using the IEF comparison.
7. Note the next release date from the report's final page.

For the production politics behind the numbers, the OPEC supply topic hub gathers the related pages, including our model of how Arab producers' export quotas translate into market supply.

Reader questions on the MOMR

To see the same market through a consumer-country agency's numbers, continue with how to read the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook, where the October 2026 edition raised its Brent forecast by $5 for 2026 and $10 for 2027 and explains why in its balance tables.

Sources, all checked October 22, 2026: OPEC Secretariat, Monthly Oil Market Report, August 2026, dated 12 August 2026 (oil market highlights; Tables 5-7, 5-8, 10-1, 10-2, 11-1 and 11-2; commercial stock movements; crude oil price movements). The report is published at opec.org; because that site returned an automated-access challenge, the text was read from a public copy of the same PDF. International Energy Forum, Comparative Analysis of Monthly Reports on the Oil Market: June 2026, August 2026, September 2026, October 2026. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Short-Term Energy Outlook, October 2026, global oil markets (third-quarter 2026 inventory draw). Gaps, implied balances and the base-year inference are PetroEyes arithmetic on the published figures.