PADD Districts, Explained

1. A rationing map from the 1940s runs US oil data today

Every Wednesday, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) publishes the Weekly Petroleum Status Report, and nearly every table in it is cut five ways. Crude stocks by district. Gasoline stocks by district. Refinery runs by district. The districts are labeled PADD 1 through PADD 5, and most readers skim past the labels to get to the national total. That is a mistake, because the United States is not one oil market. It is five regional markets tied together by a limited set of pipelines, and the district rows are where shortages, gluts, and price spikes show up first.

PADD stands for Petroleum Administration for Defense District. The history is short and explains the geography. During World War II, the Petroleum Administration for War, established by executive order in 1942, used five districts to ration gasoline across the country. The administration was abolished in 1946, but Congress passed the Defense Production Act of 1950, which created the Petroleum Administration for Defense and kept the same five districts under the new name. That agency is also gone. The map survived, because the EIA still collects and publishes petroleum data by district, and the districts happen to match how fuel physically moves: refineries cluster in some districts, people cluster in others, and the pipes between them only run one way at a fixed size.

This page is the reference our other guides assume. Our explainer on how to read the EIA weekly petroleum report uses PADD rows on every page. Our propane prices explainer turns on the gap between Midwest (PADD 2) stocks and Gulf Coast (PADD 3) storage. Our Cushing explainer only makes sense once you know Cushing sits in PADD 2. Here is the map itself: what each district contains, where its refineries and pipelines are, and how to use the district data instead of just the national total.

2. The map: five districts, three subdistricts, two footnotes

The EIA definition is exact. The 50 states and the District of Columbia are divided into five districts, with PADD 1 split into three subdistricts because of its large population. Two further districts cover US territories and are not included in US totals. The full state list, from the EIA glossary:

Three details in that table catch readers out. First, PADD 1 is the only district with subdistricts, and EIA price and stock series often publish at the subdistrict level: New England heating oil, Central Atlantic diesel, and Lower Atlantic gasoline are separate series with separate behavior. Second, some placements surprise people. Oklahoma is Midwest, not Gulf Coast. Arizona is West Coast, not Rocky Mountain. Tennessee and Kentucky are Midwest. Florida, which has no refineries and no crude production to speak of in EIA series, is Lower Atlantic, and it is fed mostly by water and by pipeline branches from the Gulf. Third, PADD 6 (Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) and PADD 7 (Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands) appear in some EIA tables. They are not in US totals, and a territory row is never part of the national stock number.

3. The refinery map does not match the population map

If the districts were balanced, the district rows would be bookkeeping. They are not balanced. Refining capacity sits overwhelmingly in one district, demand sits in others, and the imbalance is the reason inter-district pipelines exist and the reason they matter. The EIA refiner operable capacity series for the week ending September 25, 2026 puts the split like this. The share column is our arithmetic on the EIA figures:

Read the extremes. The Gulf Coast holds about 55 percent of national refining capacity with six states. The East Coast, the most populous district and the only one split into subdistricts, holds about 5 percent. The Rocky Mountain district holds under 4 percent. The practical consequence: PADD 1 cannot supply itself and never has in the modern data. It imports finished fuel from PADD 3 by pipeline and from the rest of the world by ship. PADD 3 makes far more fuel than its own population burns and exports the surplus north, east, and overseas. PADD 5 is large enough to matter and cut off enough to be its own problem, which is section 5. Every regional fuel story in the news is some version of those three sentences.

Storage follows the same tilt. The Gulf Coast holds the largest product inventories in the country as a matter of routine: during the September 2016 pipeline outage covered in section 6, the EIA noted the Gulf Coast typically held the largest gasoline inventory of any district, nearly 79 million barrels at that point, about 35 percent of the national total. A national stock figure is therefore mostly a Gulf Coast figure plus corrections. When a headline says US gasoline stocks built by 5 million barrels, the first question is which district built. A build in PADD 3 with a draw in PADD 1 is a transport story, not a demand story.

4. The five districts, one at a time

Each district has a supply personality. Learn the five and most weekly data reads itself:

• PADD 1, East Coast: the customer. Seventeen states plus DC, the largest fuel demand on the map, and about 928 thousand barrels per day of refining capacity to serve it. The district runs on deliveries: gasoline and distillate arrive from the Gulf Coast by pipeline, and New England and New York Harbor also take waterborne imports. The three subdistricts behave differently. 1A (New England) is a heating oil market with thin local supply. 1B (Central Atlantic) holds New York Harbor, the delivery point for RBOB gasoline and ULSD futures, and the district's remaining refineries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. 1C (Lower Atlantic) is the long tail of the Colonial Pipeline system and the first place a pipeline problem becomes a gas station problem, as section 6 shows.
• PADD 2, Midwest: the crossroads. Fifteen states, about 4.28 million barrels per day of refining, large crude production in North Dakota and Oklahoma, Canadian crude arriving by pipeline from the north, and product pipelines running in from the Gulf and out toward the East. Cushing, Oklahoma, the WTI delivery point, sits in this district, so the most watched crude stock number in the world is a PADD 2 number. Chicago and Group Three (the Oklahoma and Kansas market) are its pricing points. The district is also the propane heating and crop drying market, which is why Midwest propane stocks get their own stress test in our propane explainer.
• PADD 3, Gulf Coast: the factory. Six states, about 9.89 million barrels per day of refining, the Texas and Louisiana crude fields, most of the country's crude and product export terminals, and the largest storage position in nearly every EIA product table. This is the district that sets the marginal price for the eastern United States. It is also the hurricane district: a storm that closes Gulf refineries and ports removes supply from PADD 3 and, within days, from every district the Gulf feeds. Refinery economics here are covered in our crack spreads explainer.
• PADD 4, Rocky Mountain: the small landlocked market. Five states, about 653 thousand barrels per day of refining, the smallest capacity on the map. Local refineries in Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana run regional crude, including Canadian barrels moving south, and the district trades in a thin market where one refinery outage is a large percentage of supply. Prices here can sit away from both coasts for weeks because resupply has to come over distance, by pipeline from neighboring districts or by rail and truck.
• PADD 5, West Coast: the island. Seven states including Alaska and Hawaii, about 2.28 million barrels per day of refining, and no pipeline connection that brings finished fuel in from the rest of the country at scale. The EIA describes the region as isolated by geography and by a lack of petroleum infrastructure connections to the rest of the United States. California then narrows the market further by requiring a gasoline specification different from the rest of the country. The result is a district that supplies itself, pays the highest retail prices in the country in most weeks, and reacts fastest when a local refinery goes down. Section 7 works through a documented case.

5. How fuel moves between districts, and why the pipes set the prices

Districts trade with each other constantly, but through fixed plumbing. The EIA's regional analysis makes the pattern plain: the bulk of petroleum product pipeline movements take place among PADDs 1, 2, and 3, and more than half of total US inter-PADD product pipeline movements have run from PADD 3 to PADD 1, from the refining coast to the population coast. PADDs 4 and 5 show very small pipeline volumes entering and leaving by comparison, with nothing leaving PADD 5 by pipeline in the year the EIA profiled. In plain terms, the eastern half of the country is one connected system with the Gulf as its supply base, and the western districts are close to self contained.

The single most important pipe in that system is the Colonial Pipeline. Its Line 1 can move about 1.4 million barrels per day of gasoline from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast, and the EIA states directly that motor gasoline shipments between the Gulf Coast and East Coast are the largest inter-PADD movement of petroleum products in the United States. A second line carries distillate, heating oil, and jet fuel north on the same route. When Colonial runs normally, PADD 1C drivers barely know PADD 3 exists. When it stops, they find out within days, because the Southeast has limited refining of its own and inland markets away from ports have few alternative supply routes.

Water fills the gaps the pipes leave. New York Harbor and New England take imported gasoline and blending components from Europe and elsewhere, Gulf Coast terminals load exports, and coastwise tankers and barges move product between US ports. Water is slower and more expensive than pipe, and for the West Coast it is the only outside option: once in-region inventories are drawn down, the next resupply is imports from refineries in Asia or Europe, in the EIA's own description of the region. That is the mechanical reason West Coast price spikes last longer. The replacement cargo is weeks away, not days.

This plumbing is also why the WTI and Brent benchmarks behave differently, a link worth making explicit. WTI prices at Cushing, in landlocked PADD 2, so its price carries Midwest pipeline capacity in it. Brent prices on the water, where cargoes can go anywhere. Our WTI-Brent spread explainer and our WTI price page cover the spread itself. The PADD map is the physical reason a spread exists at all.

6. Stress case: September 2016, when the biggest pipe stopped

The cleanest documented demonstration of the PADD system under stress is the Colonial Pipeline outage of September 2016, reconstructed by the EIA at the time. A leak shut Line 1, the 1.4 million barrel per day gasoline line from the Gulf Coast to the East Coast. What happened next followed the district map step by step:

• PADD 1C drew down. The Lower Atlantic states, the segment of the East Coast most dependent on Colonial deliveries, drew down gasoline inventories and scrambled for replacement supply, including barrels moved on Line 2, which normally carries distillate only.
• PADD 3 backed up. Gulf Coast refineries could not move gasoline east, so they stored it or exported it. Gulf Coast gasoline inventories rose 4.8 million barrels in a single week, which the EIA recorded as larger than the previous record weekly builds of 4.7 million barrels in early October 2008 and 4.6 million barrels in early November 2012.
• The national number hid both halves. Added together, a shortage region drawing stocks and a supply region building them netted into a national figure that understated both. Anyone reading only the US total missed the outage entirely.
• Retail prices moved where the pipe ended. The average retail price of regular gasoline in PADD 1C rose 8 cents to $2.17 a gallon in the week to September 19, while supply shortfalls showed up at local terminals in inland Southeast markets with no port access.
• The fix was a bypass, and time. Colonial restored operations on September 21 through a roughly 500 foot above ground bypass around the damaged section. Because pipeline shipments move at about five miles per hour, the EIA warned some markets would still face shortfalls for days after the restart.

Keep that sequence as a template. Hurricane landfall on the Gulf Coast, a refinery fire on the West Coast, and a pipeline outage in the Southeast are different events with the same signature: one district moves first, the connected districts follow through the pipes, the isolated districts do not follow at all, and the national average smooths the whole thing into a number that describes nowhere in particular.

7. Why your gasoline price depends on your district

Retail prices are published by the EIA by district and subdistrict, and the gaps are not small change. For the week of October 12, 2026, the EIA Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update put regular gasoline at $6.10 a gallon in California and $3.85 a gallon on the Gulf Coast, with the Midwest at $4.14, the Rocky Mountain district at $4.43, and the Lower Atlantic at $3.92. Diesel showed the same shape: $8.09 in California against $5.64 in the Lower Atlantic, the lowest district average that week. One country, one week, and a $2.25 a gallon spread between the highest and lowest gasoline regions.

The spread has layered causes, and the district map explains most of them:

• Distance from PADD 3 refining. The Gulf Coast is usually the cheapest district because fuel there travels the shortest distance from the largest refinery cluster. Every district away from the Gulf pays transport, by pipe, ship, rail, or truck, and the charge shows up at the pump. Our gasoline price breakdown separates that transport slice from the crude, refining, and tax slices.
• Local specifications. California requires a different gasoline specification than the rest of the country, which narrows the set of refineries anywhere that can supply it. A specification is a wall inside the market: fuel that meets the federal standard cannot be sold into California, so a California shortage cannot be filled from a neighboring state's surplus.
• Isolation and thin spare capacity. The West Coast case from spring 2019 is documented by the EIA in detail. Unplanned refinery outages in California cut in-region production, West Coast gasoline inventories fell to 26.4 million barrels by the week ending May 10, 2019, about 8 percent below the five year average, and the four week average of West Coast gasoline imports reached 120,000 barrels per day in early May, the highest since the EIA began tracking the series in May 2008. Wholesale prices rose to cover the cost of the waterborne resupply. No pipeline from another district could shorten that story.
• Taxes and fees. State fuel taxes differ widely and sit on top of the regional wholesale price. Taxes explain part of the California premium and part of the difference between neighboring states in the same district, but they do not explain week to week moves. When a district price jumps in a single week, look at supply first.

For current delivered prices by region, our gas prices page tracks the retail end of this system, and the natural gas price page covers the other half of household energy costs, where regional differences run through pipelines and storage regions of a different map.

8. How to read PADD data in the Wednesday report

The district rows in the Weekly Petroleum Status Report reward a fixed routine. This is the checklist we apply on top of the national reading in our weekly report guide, in the order that catches problems earliest:

Two habits make the routine reliable. First, compare a district with itself over time, not with other districts in the same week. PADD 4 stocks are always small because PADD 4 is small; the useful question is whether they are small for PADD 4 in that month. Second, give a district move two weeks before treating it as a trend, unless a named physical event, an outage, a storm, a pipeline closure, explains it. Weekly survey data gets revised, and single week district swings reverse often. The exception proves the rule: in September 2016 the event came first and the data followed it.

9. Limits and common mistakes

• Treating the US total as the market. The national figure averages a surplus district and a shortage district into a number that describes neither. September 2016 is the documented case. Read districts first, total second.
• Assuming fuel flows freely between districts. Pipelines have fixed capacity and fixed direction, several run full in peak season, and the West Coast has no inbound product pipeline at scale. A surplus in PADD 3 does not automatically relieve PADD 5.
• Mixing up the subdistricts. PADD 1C is the Lower Atlantic: Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and West Virginia. New York is 1B, not 1C, and New England heating oil data is 1A. Stories that cite the wrong subdistrict usually misread which market is tight.
• Placing Cushing on the Gulf Coast. Cushing is in Oklahoma, PADD 2. Commentary that treats Cushing stocks as Gulf Coast supply misstates both the futures delivery mechanics and the district balance.
• Reading a district stock level without its range. Districts differ in size by an order of magnitude. Ten million barrels is a crisis buffer in PADD 4 and a rounding entry in PADD 3. The five year range for that district and week is the yardstick.
• Forgetting PADDs 6 and 7 in territory data. Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands sit in PADDs 6 and 7 and are excluded from US totals. Adding them into a national figure double counts nothing but misstates the total.

10. Frequently asked questions

What does PADD stand for?

Petroleum Administration for Defense District. The name comes from the Petroleum Administration for Defense, created under the Defense Production Act of 1950, which kept the five districts the Petroleum Administration for War had used to ration gasoline during World War II. The agencies are long gone. The US Energy Information Administration still uses the five districts to collect and publish petroleum data.

How many PADD districts are there?

Five cover the 50 states and the District of Columbia: PADD 1 East Coast, PADD 2 Midwest, PADD 3 Gulf Coast, PADD 4 Rocky Mountain, and PADD 5 West Coast. PADD 1 is split into three subdistricts, 1A New England, 1B Central Atlantic, and 1C Lower Atlantic, because of its large population. Two more districts exist on paper for US territories: PADD 6 covers Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, and PADD 7 covers Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. EIA does not include PADDs 6 and 7 in US totals.

Which PADD is Texas in?

Texas is in PADD 3, the Gulf Coast, along with Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Mexico. PADD 3 holds about 55 percent of US refinery operable capacity, 9.89 million barrels per day out of a national 18.03 million in the EIA capacity series for late September 2026, which is why Gulf Coast events move national fuel prices.

Why are gasoline prices so different between PADDs?

Because the districts are partly separate markets. Refineries are concentrated on the Gulf Coast, pipelines between districts are limited and often run full, and some regions add their own costs on top: California requires a gasoline specification no other state uses, and state taxes differ. The West Coast has no pipeline supply from the rest of the country at all, so a local refinery outage there cannot be covered quickly from another district. In the EIA retail averages for the week of October 12, 2026, regular gasoline was $6.10 a gallon in California and $3.85 on the Gulf Coast.

What PADD is Cushing, Oklahoma in?

PADD 2, the Midwest. Oklahoma is one of the 15 Midwest states in the EIA definition. That placement matters because Cushing is the delivery point for the WTI futures contract: the crude stock number traders watch most closely sits in the Midwest district, not on the Gulf Coast where most refining happens.

Where do I find PADD level data?

Inside the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report, published Wednesdays, which breaks crude and product stocks, refinery activity, and imports down by district, and in the EIA retail price releases, which publish gasoline and diesel averages by PADD and by subdistrict. Read the district rows, not just the US total: a national stock build can be a Gulf Coast build sitting next to an East Coast draw, and the two halves mean opposite things for prices.

11. Related reading

• How to Read the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report - the Wednesday release whose tables are organized by the districts on this page, with a worked reading of the latest report.
• Cushing, Oklahoma, Explained - the PADD 2 tank farm that anchors the WTI contract, and why its stock level moves futures prices.
• WTI vs Brent Spread, Explained - how a landlocked PADD 2 benchmark prices against a waterborne one.
• Refinery Crack Spreads, Explained - the margin arithmetic of the PADD 3 refining system that supplies the eastern districts.
• Propane Prices, Explained - a worked example of district analysis, where PADD 2 stocks and PADD 3 storage tell opposite stories.
• Gasoline Price Breakdown, Explained - the crude, refining, transport, and tax slices inside a retail gallon, and why the transport slice grows with distance from PADD 3.
• Natural Gas (Henry Hub) Price Today - the gas side of US energy pricing, organized around a Louisiana hub and its own regional pipeline map.
• Gas Prices - current retail averages, the delivered end of the district system described here.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) - Glossary and table definitions for Petroleum Administration for Defense District (full state lists for PADDs 1A, 1B, 1C, 2, 3, 4, and 5; PADD 6 as Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands; PADD 7 as Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands; PADDs 6 and 7 not included in US totals); Today in Energy, February 7, 2012 (Petroleum Administration for War established by executive order in 1942 and abolished in 1946, Defense Production Act of 1950 creating the Petroleum Administration for Defense on the same five districts used for wartime gasoline rationing, PADD 1 divided because of its large population, more than half of US inter-PADD product pipeline movements running from PADD 3 to PADD 1, and very small pipeline volumes for PADDs 4 and 5 with nothing leaving PADD 5); EIA Refiner Operable Capacity series, release of September 30, 2026 (US 18,027 thousand barrels per day, PADD 1 928, PADD 2 4,283, PADD 3 9,888, PADD 4 653, PADD 5 2,275, for the week ending September 25, 2026; district shares are PetroEyes arithmetic on those figures); Today in Energy, September 2016, on the Colonial Pipeline disruption (Line 1 capacity of 1.4 million barrels per day of gasoline, Gulf Coast to East Coast gasoline shipments as the largest inter-PADD movement of petroleum products in the United States, Gulf Coast gasoline inventories of nearly 79 million barrels or about 35 percent of the national total as of September 9, a record 4.8 million barrel weekly build the following week against prior records of 4.7 million in October 2008 and 4.6 million in November 2012, PADD 1C retail gasoline up 8 cents to $2.17 a gallon for the week to September 19, restoration on September 21 through a roughly 500 foot bypass, and pipeline transit at about five miles per hour); Today in Energy, May 2019, on California and West Coast gasoline (the region isolated by geography and a lack of petroleum infrastructure connections, California's different gasoline specification, resupply by imports from Asia or Europe after in-region stocks are drawn, West Coast gasoline inventories of 26.4 million barrels for the week ending May 10, 2019, about 8 percent below the five year average, and a four week average of West Coast gasoline imports of 120,000 barrels per day, the highest since EIA began tracking the series in May 2008); EIA Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update for the week of October 12, 2026, as reported October 14, 2026 (regular gasoline: California $6.10, Gulf Coast $3.85, Midwest $4.14, Rocky Mountain $4.43, Lower Atlantic $3.92 per gallon; diesel: California $8.09, Lower Atlantic $5.64 per gallon). All other figures are as published by the sources named, for the periods stated.