How the EIA gas price survey works

The weekly U.S. average gasoline price comes from the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s retail gasoline survey, Form EIA-878. It is not a census of stations. The EIA draws a sample of 1,000 retail outlets from a frame of about 130,000 stations. Stations are first grouped into strata by physical address, then split again by outlet type, so that big-box retailers are sampled separately from other stations. [1]

Every Monday, each sampled station reports its self-serve cash price as of 8:00 a.m. local time, by telephone, email, text, fax, or the internet. The price is the one posted at the pump, so it includes federal, state, and local taxes. [1] Missing reports are imputed so that a station that does not answer one week does not drop out of the average.

The average is weighted by volume, not a simple mean of stations. Each outlet’s weight is its sampling weight multiplied by its annual gasoline sales, and those weights are applied to the reported or imputed prices every week. [1] A high-volume highway station therefore moves the average more than a small rural one. Because the figure comes from a sample, the EIA also publishes standard errors: a published average is an estimate with a known margin, not an exact count.

The series has a long run. The EIA’s weekly U.S. price for regular gasoline dates back to August 1990, and on-highway diesel to March 1994. [3] This site holds the weekly data from January 3, 2000 onward, which is where the EIA’s state and city series also begin.

Until April 2025 the EIA published the survey on Monday afternoon, the same day it collected the prices. Starting the week of April 7, 2025, publication moved to Tuesday at about 10:00 a.m. Eastern, and to Wednesday morning when Monday is a federal holiday. The EIA gave the reason as respondents having trouble reporting early on Monday, which had been delaying collection. The prices themselves did not change: they are always Monday’s. [2]

That is why every weekly figure on this site is dated to a Monday even though it appears a day or two later. The most recent week in our database is September 21, 2026. Our ingest runs on Tuesday afternoon, with a daily catch-up that covers holiday weeks; the about page describes the schedule.

The survey is designed to support estimates at several levels: the nation, the Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts (PADDs), and selected states and cities. [1] The five PADDs date from World War II fuel allocation and are still how the EIA reports regional fuel markets. The East Coast district, PADD 1, is split into New England (1A), the Central Atlantic (1B), and the Lower Atlantic (1C), and the West Coast district is also published without California, whose prices would otherwise dominate it. The state level covers nine states: California, Colorado, Florida, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Texas, and Washington. The city level covers ten metro areas. [3]

The table below is what this site holds for regular gasoline at each level, straight from the database.

Each station reports three grades of gasoline: regular, midgrade, and premium. The EIA also splits prices by formulation. Reformulated gasoline is the cleaner-burning blend required in areas with ozone problems; conventional gasoline is everything else. The EIA publishes each separately and an “all formulations” figure that blends the two by volume. [1] The headline figure on this site, and in most news coverage, is regular, all formulations.

For the week of September 21, 2026, the U.S. average for regular was $4.48, midgrade $5.06, and premium $5.46. Regular reformulated gasoline averaged $4.78 against $4.34 for conventional, a gap of 44.1¢. Part of that gap reflects the fuel and part reflects geography, since reformulated gasoline is sold mostly in large coastal metro areas where prices are higher for other reasons as well. Diesel, surveyed separately, averaged $6.53.

The weekly survey starts in the 1990s and covers nine states. For all 51 jurisdictions and the years back to 1970, this site uses a second EIA product, the State Energy Data System (SEDS). SEDS is an annual accounting of energy use and prices by state. Its price data now run through 2024; the release covering 2024 was published on June 26, 2026, and the next is scheduled for June 2027. [4] That lag of roughly a year and a half is why SEDS supports history and cross-state comparison on this site but not the current price.

SEDS motor gasoline prices are retail prices that include federal and state motor fuel taxes. They exclude state general sales taxes and local fuel and sales taxes, because those are applied too unevenly to add consistently. They cover all grades and formulations together. [5] The sources behind them have changed over time. For 1983 through 2010, SEDS starts from refiner and reseller sales prices collected on EIA survey forms and adds state and federal taxes. Since 2011, after one of those surveys was suspended, SEDS estimates the nine weekly-survey states by applying the annual growth rate from the EIA-878 weekly survey, and every other state by applying its PADD region’s growth rate to the previous year’s price. For 1982 and earlier, SEDS relies on trade-press survey prices and Consumer Price Index city data. [5]