Autogas (Propane) Price Per Gallon for Fleet Vehicles

Autogas is propane sold as a motor fuel for school buses, fleet vehicles, taxis and police forces. There are two published prices for it and they point in opposite directions against home heating propane, because they measure different buyers. At a vehicle refueling station, DOE put autogas at $3.59 per gallon nationally, 34% abovethe EIA residential heating average. Across the transportation sector as a whole, where big fleet contracts carry the volume, EIA's annual average was $1.848, 25.4% below residential.

The two published prices, and who each one is

The pump figure above covers, in DOE's words, both private fleet refueling stations and public refueling sites that can provide propane for vehicles and for other uses, including both primary and secondary stations. A secondary station is mostly a tank and bottle shop that will also fill a vehicle, and those run dearer than the dedicated vehicle sites, which is part of why the national average lands above home heating propane rather than below it. DOE is explicit about what the report does not capture: "Alternative fuel fleets can obtain significantly lower fuel prices than those reported in the AFPR by entering into contracts directly with local fuel suppliers." It publishes no figure for those contracts and neither does anyone else, so this page does not print one.

EIA's State Energy Data System comes at it from the other end. Its transportation-sector propane price, $1.848 per gallon for 2024 against $2.477 residential, is a volume-weighted annual average across every gallon sold as motor fuel, so the large fleet contracts dominate it. Read the two together: a fleet paying the pump price is paying more than a homeowner pays for heat, and a fleet on a negotiated supply contract is paying meaningfully less, with the gap between those two outcomes being the whole value of the contract.

Every region rose between the two reporting periods. The report is quarterly and the next edition, covering July 2026, had not appeared as of 4 October 2026.

What autogas is

Autogas is the international name for propane (or, in some markets, propane-butane mix) used as a transportation fuel. In the US the LPG vehicle fuel is essentially HD-5 propane, the same specification used for residential heating but delivered through a different supply channel. In Europe, autogas is more often a propane-butane blend with the butane fraction varying by season (summer blends include more butane, winter blends more propane, to manage vapour pressure). The US autogas industry standardises on HD-5 propane year-round.

The US Department of Energy Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC) publishes a quarterly Clean Cities Alternative Fuel Price Report that includes autogas alongside CNG, ethanol E85, biodiesel B20, electricity, hydrogen, and conventional gasoline and diesel. The autogas figure is a quarterly national survey of public refueling station prices and fleet card transactions, run for DOE by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It is the cleanest public reference for autogas pricing in the US.

Where autogas vehicles run

The largest US autogas fleet segment is school buses. Several thousand US school districts operate propane school buses (Blue Bird, IC Bus, Thomas Built all manufacture propane-powered models). The fuel economy is similar to diesel on a BTU basis but propane runs cleaner (lower NOx, much lower particulate matter), important in children-carrying applications. Fleet operations of delivery vehicles (UPS, FedEx Ground, ServiceMaster, Bimbo Bakeries among the larger operators) include autogas vehicles for medium-duty applications. Taxi and rideshare fleets are smaller in the US (large in Italy, Poland, South Korea) but exist in select markets. Police forces (some Ford Police Interceptor models are bi-fuel gasoline-propane) run autogas in cities where fleet economics favour it.

Refueling infrastructure for autogas is less dense than gasoline but more available than CNG or hydrogen. AFDC lists more than 1,000 public-access autogas refueling stations in the US, with private fleet stations adding several thousand more. Most fleet autogas operations have on-site refueling because public station density is insufficient for daily-mileage fleet operations.

What moves a fleet's autogas price below the pump figure

A fleet buying at a public dispenser is paying retail and the DOE average shows it. What a supply contract changes is the cost structure underneath, and three things do most of the work. First, the residential delivery layer disappears. Autogas at a fleet site is filled from a single bulk tank by a dispenser rather than a bobtail route: no per-house stop, no tank lease on a domestic tank, no regulator service calls, no 24-hour domestic emergency cover. Second, volume. A school district running 50 propane buses at 12,000 miles each on 7 to 9 miles per gallon burns roughly 75,000 to 100,000 gallons a year, which is industrial-scale offtake from one delivery point. EIA puts the whole industrial sector at $1.133 per gallon for 2024, 54.2% below residential, which is the published scale of what that kind of offtake is worth. What the individual contract lands at is not published by anyone, including DOE, so the only honest way to find out is to put the volume out to tender.

Third, the federal alternative fuel tax credit. Section 6426 of the Internal Revenue Code provides a credit of 37 cents per gallon for alternative fuels including autogas used in highway vehicles. The credit has lapsed and been reinstated repeatedly, so check its current status with the IRS rather than assuming it applies. When it does apply it widens the gap to gasoline, which DOE put at $4.09 per gallon in the same period, before any energy-density adjustment.

The energy density adjustment

One important caveat on comparing autogas to gasoline on a per-gallon basis: propane has lower energy density than gasoline. A gallon of HD-5 propane contains 91,452 BTU against gasoline at approximately 116,090 BTU per gallon (regular E10). Propane vehicles get fewer MPG than the same vehicle on gasoline (typically 10 to 25% lower MPG), which partly offsets the per-gallon price advantage.

On a cost per mile basis, however, propane often still wins for fleet applications when the contract pricing is competitive. A propane school bus at 8 MPG on $1.50 per gallon autogas costs $0.19 per mile in fuel; the same bus on diesel at 7 MPG and $4.00 per gallon costs $0.57 per mile. The per-mile gap funds the up-front incremental capital cost of the propane vehicle in roughly three to five years for typical fleet duty cycles.

Public autogas station pricing

For owners of personal propane vehicles (a small but stable US segment), the public refueling station price is the relevant number. Public autogas stations typically price in the $2.20 to $3.20 per gallon range depending on region, with regional variation similar to the residential propane survey: lowest in the Mid-Continent, highest in New England and the Lower Atlantic. A handful of major urban markets (Houston, Atlanta, Indianapolis, Phoenix) have multiple public autogas stations in competition, which keeps retail station pricing tight to wholesale.

The Propane Education and Research Council and the National Propane Gas Association maintain station locator tools that show public-access autogas stations and their pricing where available. The AFDC station locator (afdc.energy.gov/stations) is the federal reference.

Autogas fleet contract structures

Fleet autogas contracts mirror commercial propane contracts for industrial accounts. The dominant structures are:

• Cost-plus on Mont Belvieu: Most common for medium-to-large fleets. Daily Mont Belvieu spot plus a fixed differential of 35 to 75 cents per gallon covering delivery, dispenser amortisation, and dealer margin.
• Fixed-price seasonal: A locked per-gallon price for a defined season or annual contract period. Premium of 10 to 25 cents per gallon over likely cost-plus for the budget certainty.
• Indexed to AFDC quarterly: Some municipal contracts (school districts, municipal fleets) tie to the quarterly DOE AFDC autogas price published for the region.
• Per-mile turnkey: Some private fleet propane providers (Roush CleanTech, Alliance AutoGas) offer turnkey conversion plus fuel supply plus maintenance for a fixed per-mile rate, simplifying the fleet's accounting.

The economic case for autogas, summarised

The autogas economic case for a fleet operator rests on four elements: lower per-gallon fuel cost, lower maintenance cost (propane combustion is cleaner than gasoline or diesel, extending spark plug life and oil change intervals), lower exposure to gasoline and diesel price volatility, and (when applicable) the federal alternative fuel tax credit. The economic case against rests on three elements: lower MPG than gasoline or diesel, the up-front capital cost of propane vehicles and refueling infrastructure, and the operational inconvenience of less-dense public refueling infrastructure.

For a high-mileage centrally-fueled fleet (school buses, delivery vans), the economics typically favour autogas. For mixed-use or low-mileage fleets, they typically do not. The DOE AFDC publishes total-cost-of-ownership calculators that handle this math.

Related

• Forklift propane price per gallon
• Commercial vs residential propane price per gallon
• HD-5 propane specification
• Wholesale propane price per gallon
• How US LPG exports move the propane price

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