Diesel Price

The value on this page is a market-reporting distillate price derived primarily from a heating-oil market blend. It tracks the direction of U.S. diesel closely, but it is not the EIA U.S. Gulf Coast Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel spot assessment, and on individual days the two diverge materially. Measured against our own EIA-sourced rows for the same dates, the gap reached -9.3% on 2026-08-05 and +12.6% on 2026-07-15.

Method note: until August 2026 our own catalogue described this series as the EIA Gulf Coast assessment. Measurement of the served data showed approximately 98% of observations originated from the heating-oil blend. We corrected the label on 2026-08-09 and added a conformance test that fails our build if the description drifts from the served data. The general property this illustrates: a distillate price is fully specified only by instrument, location and assessing body; a quote missing any of the three is ambiguous.

Diesel and heating oil are both No. 2 distillates from the same part of the barrel, which is why one is often used as a proxy for the other and why futures desks historically hedged diesel with the heating-oil contract. But road diesel is ultra-low sulfur (15 ppm) and carries road taxes and specification premiums; heating oil historically allowed far more sulfur and prices against a different demand curve - winter heating rather than year-round freight.

In mild weather the two track tightly. In a cold snap, heating-oil demand can pull the blend away from what trucks are actually paying at the rack. If your use case is freight cost modeling or fuel-surcharge calculation, a diesel-specific assessment such as the EIA series is usually the better anchor; if you need a liquid, frequently-updated distillate signal, the blend serves well.

For a frequently updated market signal: this page (DIESEL_USD). For the EIA's spot assessment methodology: ULSD_DIESEL_USD, which carries the EIA New York Harbor ultra-low-sulfur series - published on the EIA's schedule, so it updates less often but is a named, documented government assessment. For retail pump prices - what consumers pay, including taxes - use a retail series rather than any spot number; spot and retail can move days apart.

General rule: match the assessment to the decision. Fuel-surcharge formulas typically name a specific published index; substituting a correlated proxy introduces error concentrated on exactly the days the two series diverge, which are the days a surcharge calculation is most likely to be disputed.