Gas is up in every state. Americans are still filling up.
Pump prices are about 40% higher than a year ago. Gasoline use has not budged, so households have paid roughly $590 more since the Iran war began, and rural states feel it most.
Regular gas averaged $4.33 a gallon this week, according to AAA, about 40% more than a year earlier. Prices rose in every state. Diesel rose faster, by about 71%.
How much that costs a household depends on where it lives. This week The Wall Street Journal mapped Brown University estimates of the extra cost since prices spiked in March. Wyoming topped the list at $975 per household; Oregon was lowest at $339. Those estimates multiply each state's price increase by how much gas its households normally use.
That assumption has held up. Americans have kept buying about as much gasoline as a year ago and paying the higher price, and Arrivalist card data shows where that bill weighs most: in rural states, where gas already takes the biggest share of spending.
The biggest increases were in Michigan (+61%), Wisconsin (+60%), Oklahoma (+56%), New Mexico (+54%) and Ohio (+53%). California still has the most expensive gas, at $6.22 a gallon, but the Pacific states saw the smallest increases: Washington (+22%), Oregon (+22%), Hawaii (+26%) and Alaska (+28%).
Diesel is up about 71%, led by Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas. That cost lands first on farms and freight.
Americans kept filling up
From March to September, the average price of regular gas was 30% higher than a year earlier, according to the US Energy Information Administration. The amount of gasoline Americans used barely moved: over the seven months it was essentially unchanged from a year earlier, and no month was more than 3% off.
Much of that driving, to work, school and the store, is hard to cut quickly. So the higher price went straight into household budgets: from the start of the Iran war on February 28 through October 9, the same gallons would have cost about $78 billion less at last year's prices. That is roughly $590 per household, or $300 per adult, in line with the Brown estimates.
That is the cost the Brown estimates describe. In card data it shows up as a bigger slice of spending: gas stations took 5.9% of all card spending from July to September, up from 5.5% a year earlier.
Rural states carry the heaviest load
A gallon costs about the same in North Dakota ($4.16) as in New Jersey ($4.27). What it means for a household budget is very different. In North Dakota, gas stations take 10.7% of all card spending, the highest share in the country. In New Jersey the share is 3.2%.
The top of the list is rural: North Dakota, West Virginia, Montana, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Maine, Kentucky and South Dakota. Longer distances and fewer alternatives to the car make fuel a bigger slice of spending. Gas took a larger share than a year earlier in 47 of the 49 states with comparable data.
For destinations, a bigger fuel bill is now part of every drive-in visitor's budget, most of all for visitors from rural states. Whether it trims trips or spending once visitors arrive is the next question, and one we are measuring.
