Frequently Asked Questions

How can I find historical gasoline prices for each state?

EIA publishes retail (pump) prices, including taxes, for selected cities and states back to 2000; weekly and average monthly and annual prices, by grade and formulation are available.

Average monthly (and annual) prices for all states, from retail outlets excluding taxes back to 1983 by grade and formulation (and other sales types) are also available. (Note: data collection for the price series was suspended in May 2011; the most recent data available are for February 2011.)

Prices for all States, including taxes, can be calculated from EIA's retail outlet price data (above) and historical tax data available as follows:

For 2011, 2010, and 2009.

Taxes for prior years are available from the Federal Highway Administration's website: Federal taxes and State taxes: 1996-2009 and 1997 to 2010.

For federal and state taxes for years prior to 1992; see the Rates and Revenues section of the Motor Fuels sections of FHA's annual Highway Statistics.

There are also estimates for historical average annual gasoline prices back to 1970 available for each state in the State Energy Data System (SEDS). The prices are in dollars per million British thermal units ($/MMBtu), and include federal and state gasoline taxes, but exclude local taxes. There are two ways to obtain the price estimates from the SEDS data:

To obtain the prices from the SEDS data, use the CSV file for Prices. In the file, the code for gasoline prices (for the transportation sector in $/MMBtu) is: State Abbreviation (in column A) and MGACD (in column B); example, for Alaska: AK— MGACD.

To convert the price estimates from $/MMBtu to $/gallon: there are estimates for the annual average number of Btu in a barrel of motor gasoline in Appendix B — Thermal Conversion Factors. Starting with 1970 (column M in the CSV file, row for US — MGTCK), multiply the number of MMBtu/barrel by the prices in $/MMBtu in the other tables/files, and divide the result by 42 (the number of gallons in a barrel). For example: for U.S. average in 2008: ($25.52817/MMBtu * 5.218 MMBtu per barrel ) / 42 = $3.17/gallon.

Discussion on SEDS prices data.

Last updated: February 2, 2012