Gas Prices by State, Country, and Year. Live U.S. state averages, 17-year historical chart, and a 65-country international comparison.

It mostly comes down to taxes, fuel rules, and how close a state is to a refinery. State and federal taxes range from about 9 cents a gallon in Alaska to over 70 cents in California. California also requires its own low-emission CARB blend that other states don't use. Gulf Coast states tend to have lower prices since refineries are right there.

AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report surveys more than 60,000 retail stations every day across all 50 states and DC. This page pulls fresh data each time you load it. The timestamp under the headline shows when.

About half the retail price comes from crude oil, a quarter from taxes, 15 percent from refining, and 10 percent from distribution and marketing. Daily swings come from oil market moves, weather (especially hurricanes that affect Gulf refineries), seasonal demand, and geopolitical events.

Crude oil makes up about half of what you pay at the pump, so it's the single biggest factor. When oil prices move, gas prices typically follow within one to two weeks since refineries usually work through their existing inventory before passing changes along. A common rule of thumb: every $10 change in the price of a barrel of crude oil shifts gas prices by about 25 cents per gallon. The other costs in your gas, like taxes, refining, and distribution, are relatively stable, so oil is the main driver of the swings you see.

A few things stack up. California has some of the highest state fuel taxes in the country (over 70 cents a gallon). It requires its own CARB clean fuel blend, so out-of-state gas can't easily fill in when supply gets tight. The state's refineries also don't have a lot of spare capacity, so any disruption pushes prices up fast.

UNL 88, also known as E15, is gasoline mixed with 15 percent ethanol, a bit more than the standard E10 most pumps sell. E85 has up to 85 percent ethanol and only works in a flex-fuel vehicle. E85 usually costs 15 to 25 percent less per gallon than regular gas, but you'll get about 25 percent fewer miles per gallon since ethanol packs less energy.

It's almost entirely a tax difference. The U.S. federal gas tax is 18.4 cents per gallon, and combined federal plus state taxes total about 56 cents per gallon, roughly 13 percent of the pump price. In most European countries, fuel duty plus VAT account for more than half of the retail price. Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands each add roughly two to three U.S. dollars per gallon in taxes alone. Underlying crude oil costs the same wholesale; the gap is fiscal policy, not geology.

Hong Kong is the world's most expensive at around $13.50 per gallon, thanks to the highest fuel duty per liter on Earth and no domestic refining. Among full countries, the Netherlands is typically the priciest in the EU at about $10.28. At the other end, Venezuela has the cheapest gasoline (effectively free at the pump for citizens), followed by Libya around $0.09 and Iran around $0.13. The cheap ones are all oil producers with deep state subsidies, not low underlying production costs. Norway is a useful illustration: it's a major oil producer but sits at $8.20 because of high road-use and CO2 taxes designed to encourage EVs, which now make up over 90% of new car sales there.

Three primary sources, each cited in the country detail card. For the 27 European Union member states, prices come from the European Commission's Weekly Oil Bulletin, published every Thursday. For the United Kingdom, prices come from the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero's weekly road fuel prices. For everywhere else, prices come from GlobalPetrolPrices.com, which aggregates official government and industry data weekly. All international prices are converted to U.S. dollars at prevailing exchange rates and shown for Octane-95 gasoline so they're directly comparable.