Fuel Price History

The three fuel histories in this hub share one lesson: nominal records and real records are different lists. For gasoline, the annual real peak is 2012, not 2022, even though the weekly record in the dollars of the day was set in June 2022. For crude oil, 2008 is the real annual peak for WTI and for the US first purchase price, and 2011 for Brent, while the nominal highs of 2022 and the daily peak of $138.21 in April 2026 sit below them once inflation is removed. For heating oil, the winters of 2011-12 to 2013-14 rank first through third in September 2026 dollars at $5.88, $5.82 and $5.76 a gallon, with 2022-23 fourth.

The exception is the very latest data. The EIA's national heating oil price for October 19, 2026 is $6.19, the highest of 799 weekly readings since October 1990 in the dollars of the day, though still below the real prices of October and November 2022. An opening reading of that kind is not a winter average, and the history of the series shows that the first reading of a winter has not been a reliable guide to its end.

Every table here uses the BLS consumer price index for all urban consumers, all items, not seasonally adjusted, with September 2026 as the base month, so that gasoline, crude oil and heating oil can be compared in the same dollars. Annual prices are deflated with the year's average index and winter averages with the mean of the two calendar years a winter straddles. The guides state where a direct download of the monthly CPI was blocked and annual averages were used instead.

The series themselves differ. The gasoline history uses the EIA regular all-formulations retail series and a wage lens that converts a gallon into minutes of average hourly earnings. The crude history combines three EIA series, the first purchase price from 1978, WTI from 1986 and Brent from 1987, because no single series covers the whole period. The heating oil history is a heating-season series collected by state energy offices from October to March, which is why it cannot say what oil cost in a summer fill.

The oil guide counts trading days above $100: 133 for Brent in 2008, 224 in 2011, 224 in 2012, 243 in 2013, 169 in 2014, 115 in 2022 and 86 of the 203 trading days of 2026 through October 20, and it converts the threshold itself, since a $100 barrel in 2008 was worth $156 in September 2026 dollars. The heating oil guide splits the residential price into the New York Harbor wholesale price and a delivery gap that has grown from about 41 cents a gallon in 1990-91 to $1.55 in 2025-26, and shows which Northeast state was dearest and cheapest in each winter.

Each of these is a measurement that a price chart hides, and each is built from named EIA and BLS series so that it can be reproduced. None of the guides forecasts a price, and none is a recommendation about any contract, fuel purchase or security.