What Is Henry Hub? The US Gas Price Benchmark

Henry Hub is a natural gas pipeline interconnection in Erath, Louisiana, and the name of the price of gas delivered there. It is the US benchmark: the number behind the NYMEX natural gas futures contract and the one the EIA publishes as the national spot price. On October 20, 2026 it stood at $3.10 per million Btu (MMBtu), after $3.28 the day before. That is a wholesale number at one place, and it is a long way from what a home pays.

Below: where the benchmark is, what the different quoted prices are, how to convert them, and how closely a bill follows them, with Winter Storm Fern in January 2026 as a live test. State-by-state retail prices are in natural gas prices by state; the current reading and chart live on the natural gas price page, which this guide explains.

A place, not just a price

The CME Group, which runs the exchange where the futures contract trades, places Henry Hub in Erath, Louisiana, and describes it as interconnected to pipelines both between states and inside Louisiana. Its education page says the hub is connected to eight pipelines and three intrastate pipelines, and that the Sabine Pipeline is a bidirectional mainline that stretches from Port Arthur, Texas, to the hub, directly connected to four industrial consumers and one producer. The hub also connects to the Jefferson Island, Acadian and Sorrento storage facilities. Other published descriptions count the pipelines differently, nine interstate and three or four intrastate among them, so treat the exact tally as a detail that has changed over time and depends on who counts. The facts that matter for a benchmark are the plural: many pipelines, storage next door, and a pipeline that can move gas in either direction.

Why does that make it the benchmark? The CME’s answer is that the commercial relevance of Henry Hub is the result of its strategic location and logistical infrastructure, and that US local markets often price gas as a differential to Henry Hub, which reflects regional conditions, transportation costs and available capacity. A benchmark is a meeting point where many buyers and sellers can trade the same product, so a price there is observable and hard to push around. Gas produced in the Permian or the Marcellus never passes through Erath, but its price is quoted against it.

Three things people call the Henry Hub price

Headlines say Henry Hub as if it were one number. The EIA’s documentation separates at least two, and a third is worth separating for anyone reading a utility filing.

Which one a story means decides what it says. The next-month contract is the one news stories most often quote. The EIA’s spot series is what a researcher or a regulator typically cites when the question is what gas actually cost at the hub on a given day. Over a year the two track each other closely, as Table 2 shows.

Spot versus front month, year by year

The two series are never far apart because arbitrage links them: a buyer can lock gas for next month at the futures price, or wait and buy at the spot price, so a persistent gap invites trade. The largest percentage gap in the table is 2024, when spot averaged $2.19 against a front-month average of $2.075, about 5.5 percent above; 2009 (5.3 percent below) and 2023 (5.1 percent below) come next, and the largest gap in dollars is 2005, at 32 cents below. These are annual averages: on any single day the difference can be larger, and the shape of the curve beyond the front month is a different topic, covered in the contango and backwardation guide for crude oil.

Table 2 doubles as a history of the benchmark. Annual averages ran at $6 to $9 in the 2005 to 2008 window, fell to $3.94 in 2009 and stayed between $2 and $4.50 for most of the decade after the shale boom, with the 2022 spike to $6.45 the exception. In 2025 the spot average was $3.52, up 61 percent on 2024’s $2.19.

Reading the quote: dollars per MMBtu

The benchmark is quoted per MMBtu, a million Btu, because the product being priced is heat. A bill is in volume (Ccf) or therms, so the first skill is conversion. A therm is 100,000 Btu, so the MMBtu price divided by ten is the price per therm. One cubic foot of US delivered gas carried about 1,036 Btu on average in 2025, so a thousand cubic feet (Mcf) holds 1.036 MMBtu and a hundred (Ccf) holds 1.036 therms. Table 3 applies that to five benchmark prices.

The first practical use of the table is a reality check. At $3.10 per MMBtu the hub price of a Ccf is about 32 cents. If the gas cost line on a bill is much higher than that, the difference is transport and the utility’s own costs, or the utility bought at an earlier, higher price. The units guide covers the conversions and a factor that changes with elevation.

Winter Storm Fern: the benchmark under stress

The biggest test of the link between hub and home in this data was in January 2026. The EIA’s daily Henry Hub spot series, in dollars per MMBtu, shows what happened. Prices were between $2.82 and $3.13 through mid-January, then the series climbed and spiked.

The EIA’s February 10, 2026 release describes the month as one in which natural gas prices rose sharply, averaging $7.72 per MMBtu, with Winter Storm Fern putting significant short-term pressure on natural gas markets, and notes that the drawdown for the week ending January 30 was the largest weekly net withdrawal recorded in the history of EIA’s Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report. The daily path in Table 4 shows the shape: a single trading day at $30.72, about ten times the mid-month level, then a descent that had reached $4.40 by February 2, ten days after the peak, and $3.24 by February 13. A month average of $7.72 hides both the spike and the speed of the reversal.

What did a household see? Table 5 sets the January 2026 monthly national averages beside January 2025 at the three points in the chain: the hub, the city gate where the utility takes delivery and the residential price.

A rise of $3.72 per Mcf at the hub became a rise of $1.88 at the city gate and $1.52 in the average residential price. Roughly 40 cents of each dollar of the hub increase showed up in the residential average within the month, and the rest was either absorbed, averaged with cheaper gas the utilities had bought or stored earlier, or deferred into later adjustments. Which of these happened cannot be read from the EIA figures; the right place to look is the utility’s gas cost filing. The mechanics of how regulators let gas costs be passed through with a lag are in the purchased gas adjustment guide.

February shows the lag more clearly than January does. By February the hub monthly average had fallen to $3.62, down 53 percent from January. The city gate average was $6.55, only 3 percent below its January level, and the residential average rose again, from $13.96 to $14.95 per Mcf, up 7 percent. Gas that utilities bought or drew from storage during the cold weeks may still have been priced into deliveries a month after the hub price had come back down; the EIA figures show the pattern but not the cause. The city gate price did not fall below $5 until March ($4.80) and April ($4.34), the same months that appear in the monthly table of the state price guide.

The long gap between hub and home

The January test is one month. Over years the pattern is the same: the residential price follows Henry Hub with a delay and a fraction of the swing. In 2023 the hub average fell 61 percent, from $6.45 to $2.53 per MMBtu, while the residential price rose 4 percent, from $14.75 to $15.40 per Mcf. The full 2000 to 2025 comparison, with the residential-minus-city-gate gap each year, is Table 7 on the state price page, so it is not repeated here. The reason is the one in Table 5: a bill carries local delivery, a customer charge and sometimes a recovery of earlier costs as well as gas.

How much seasonality is in the benchmark?

Gas is a heating fuel, so a winter premium seems obvious. The monthly spot data for the last ten years say the average premium is small. Table 6 averages each calendar month across 2016 to 2025 and lists the lowest and highest single-year value for that month.

The ten-year mean runs from $2.75 in March to $3.44 in September, a spread of $0.69, and the three months with the highest means are September, December and November. January’s mean is $3.23, below every month from September to December. The lowest value for every one of the twelve months comes from 2019, 2020 or 2024, and 2022 supplies the highest value for eleven of the twelve (February's high is 2021). In other words, the year matters far more than the month: whatever set the level in a given year, the calendar added little on top of it. The seasonal pattern shows up more clearly in the storage report and in retail bills than in the benchmark itself.

That is a finding about averages. A cold spell can still produce a winter spike, as Table 4 shows, and a spike can be gone before a monthly average registers it. Daily and weekly data suit the question of what happened in a given cold snap; the monthly mean suits the question of what a typical month looks like when budgeting or reading a rate filing.

The extremes in the monthly record

The January 2026 average of $7.72 does not appear in the table. It ranks twenty-first among the 357 months, with twenty higher, all between December 2000 and September 2022, and it was the highest monthly average since September 2022 ($7.88). Measured against the record of $13.42 in October 2005, it was 58 percent of that figure. The single day at $30.72 is a different kind of number: a one-day spike in a market that also saw the largest weekly storage withdrawal in the history of EIA's report, and it should not be confused with the price the market carried for the month.

What Henry Hub is not

It is not the price paid in every region. Gas in New England, California or the Rockies trades at its own local hubs, usually quoted as a premium or discount to Henry Hub, and that gap, called basis, can be large when a local pipeline is full. The EIA’s annual state prices in the Natural Gas Annual show the end result: a residential price in Hawaii more than three times the national average and one in Idaho half of it, at the same Henry Hub.

It is not a price anyone can simply pay. Gas bought at the hub is for delivery at the hub; getting it to a home takes pipeline capacity and a local utility. Nor is it a forecast. A futures price for a later month is a market quote that moves with weather and storage, and reading it as a prediction is a common error. For the inventory data that often moves it, see the storage report guide.

Before comparing any Henry Hub number with a bill

Name the series first, because spot, front-month futures and an index are different numbers. Read the unit, since a utility rate in Ccf or therms needs the conversion in Table 3. Find the date, including whether it is a trade date or a flow date and whether the figure is a day, week, month or year average. Monthly retail figures such as those in Table 5 were still subject to revision at the time of writing. Only then compare, and compare like with like: a winter bill against a winter bill.

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration, Henry Hub Natural Gas Spot Price (series RNGWHHD; annual, monthly, weekly and daily), release date October 21, 2026, checked October 23, 2026. EIA, Natural Gas Futures Contract 1 (RNGC1, annual), same release. EIA, Natural Gas Futures Prices definitions, sources and notes, checked October 23, 2026 (spot source Refinitiv, an LSEG business; Contract 1 expiry; NYMEX 2:30 p.m. closing price). EIA, U.S. Natural Gas Citygate Price (N3050US3) and Price of Natural Gas Delivered to Residential Consumers (N3010US3), monthly and annual, checked October 23, 2026. EIA, press release of February 10, 2026 (January average $7.72 per MMBtu; Winter Storm Fern; largest weekly net withdrawal), checked October 23, 2026. EIA, Heat Content of Natural Gas Delivered to Consumers (1,036 Btu per cubic foot, 2025), checked October 23, 2026. CME Group, Understanding Henry Hub, checked October 23, 2026 (location, pipelines, storage, local differentials). CME Group’s contract specification pages could not be fetched on October 23, 2026, so this page does not state the futures contract size or settlement terms beyond the EIA’s definitions. Differences, multiples, per-unit conversions and the 2013 spot average are this page’s arithmetic.