What this page is showing you
The headline figure above is the U.S. Energy Information Administration's weekly retail price for regular conventional gasoline, sourced from FRED series GASREGW. EIA samples a fixed national panel of retail outlets every Monday morning and publishes the weighted average in the afternoon. The figure includes all federal, state, and local taxes paid by the consumer at the pump. It excludes premium and midgrade fuel, which the EIA tracks on separate series.
This tracker exists for one reason: most gas-price pages either bury the number under ads or push a free trial. We do neither. The bold number above re-renders on a one-hour schedule against the FRED API, and the only call-to-action is "go look at the rest of the live data".
How EIA computes the U.S. average
The weekly retail price is a volume-weighted average across five PADD regions (Petroleum Administration for Defense Districts — left over from World War II rationing, still the way EIA slices the country). PADD 1 covers the East Coast, PADD 2 the Midwest, PADD 3 the Gulf Coast, PADD 4 the Rocky Mountains, and PADD 5 the West Coast. Roughly 900 retail outlets phone in their Monday morning posted prices and EIA applies regional consumption weights — California and Texas pull the U.S. number much harder than Wyoming.
Reformulated gasoline (RFG) — sold in metro areas that exceed federal smog thresholds — is on a separate series. GASREGW reports the all-formulations weighted retail price, so it's the closest single number to "what an average American driver paid this week."
Why local prices look different
The U.S. average masks gaps of $1.50/gallon or more. State fuel taxes range from under 9 cents (Alaska) to north of 65 cents (California, Pennsylvania, Illinois). Distance from refining centers matters too: Gulf Coast prices (PADD 3) typically trade 20–40 cents below the national average because most U.S. refining capacity sits there, while West Coast prices (PADD 5) trade well above it. If you want a state-level breakdown, see our state energy price comparison and the closely-related gas cost calculator for a trip-budgeting tool that uses these inputs directly.
How gas connects to the rest of the economy
Retail gasoline prices are downstream of crude oil — see our Brent and WTI tracker — but the pass-through is not instant. The rule of thumb is that a $10/bbl move in WTI shows up at the pump as a roughly $0.25/gal change with a two-to-three week lag. Gasoline is also the single largest line in the CPI energy basket, so big pump-price swings ripple into headline inflation within a month. And because gasoline is a near-universal cost, sustained spikes tend to compress real wages faster than almost any other CPI line item.
Caveats
GASREGW is a retail snapshot, not a futures price. It does not predict next week's pump price — for that, watch the crude oil tracker and the RBOB gasoline futures contract. The weekly series also has revision risk: EIA occasionally re-states a prior week if late retailer reports change the volume weights. Revisions are usually under a cent.