Wholesale Propane Price Per Gallon (US, 2026)

There are three wholesale propane prices in regular use, and they are not the same. This page covers all three, with the current week reading for each.

Three wholesale prices, one supply chain

The first wholesale price is the Mont Belvieu spot price, covered in detail on the Mont Belvieu page. That is the daily price at which physical propane changes hands in underground salt-dome storage in Chambers County, Texas. It is the benchmark every other propane price ultimately references. As of the most recent EIA quote on this site, Mont Belvieu was around $1.130 per gallon.

The second wholesale price is the rack price. Rack pricing is the spot wholesale price at a regional terminal where a propane retailer can load a tanker truck. Each major terminal (Conway KS, Hattiesburg MS, Hannibal MO, Selkirk NY, dozens more) posts a daily rack price, typically Mont Belvieu plus a basis differential covering pipeline transport and local terminal economics. Rack differentials run 3 to 8 cents per gallon for Mid-Continent and Gulf Coast terminals, 10 to 30 cents for Atlantic and New England terminals, and can blow out during peak winter demand. OPIS and Argus publish daily postings terminal by terminal on subscription, which is why terminal-level rack analysis mostly lives behind a paywall.

The third price is the free public average of that same rack layer, which is the part most propane explainers miss. EIA publishes it weekly as series W_EPLLPA_PWR_NUS_DPG, and its own table definitions define it as "the rack price charged for ... propane; that is, the price paid by customers who purchase ... free-on-board at a supplier's terminal and who provide their own transportation" . Two things follow, and both are worth stating precisely. It is a price at the loading rack, so it does not measure what any particular distributor pays delivered into its own storage. And EIA does not survey it: its methodology states that "Wholesale propane prices are provided to EIA directly from OPIS", and EIA weights those terminal quotes into state, regional and national averages using its prime supplier volumes. As of the week ending 19 October 2026, the US figure was $1.242 per gallon. Its gap to Mont Belvieu spot is the pipeline-and-terminal layer. Its gap to residential retail is everything downstream of the rack, including the haul from terminal to the distributor's bulk plant, the bobtail delivery to the house, tank service and margin.

This season at the EIA weekly wholesale/resale level

The chart below tracks the EIA weekly wholesale/resale price weekly across the full 2025-2026 heating season. Unlike the smooth retail series, the wholesale series is choppy. It opened at $0.854, dipped to its season low of $0.789 in late October, and held around 80 cents through November. The first cold-driven jump came in the week ending 8 December (to $0.922), and the season peak of $1.103 arrived in the week ending 2 February before the series eased back to $1.041 by the season's last reading, for the week ending 30 March 2026.

Why three wholesale numbers and not one

Two of the three measure genuinely different transactions, and the third measures the second one in public. Spot is the inventory clearing price at the benchmark hub, where pipeline and rail-car volumes change hands. Rack is the cost to load a tanker truck at a specific regional terminal, with the pipeline and terminal economics baked in, posted daily and terminal by terminal on subscription. The EIA weekly wholesale/resale price is a volume-weighted national and state average of that same rack layer, published free. What it buys you over a single terminal posting is comparability and a history; what it costs you is that no single terminal's posting, and no single distributor's purchase price, is recoverable from it.

For a retailer running a 6,000-gallon-per-week residential delivery operation, the three serve different purposes. Spot says where the market is heading and whether to fill summer storage aggressively. The posting at the terminal the retailer actually loads from is the real purchase price for next week's truckloads. The EIA weekly average is the benchmark to argue about: it is what a reader, a journalist or a regulator can open, which is why this site uses it and why the retailer should expect customers to quote it back.

Wholesale-to-retail spread, by region

The spread between the EIA weekly wholesale/resale rack (national average) and residential retail (national average) for the most recent week sits at $1.45 per gallon. That is the all-in cost of converting a wholesale truckload purchase into a delivered residential fill, plus dealer profit. Inside it sit the bobtail delivery, the tank and its service where the tank is leased, the regulator and leak-check inspections NFPA 58 requires, 24-hour emergency call coverage, insurance and weights-and-measures compliance, the dealer's exposure to a cold winter it has already priced against, and the dealer's margin.

How that splits is the part nobody publishes. EIA stops at the two prices; no free source breaks the gap into those categories, and a dealer's tank cost and margin are its own business. So this page gives you the published gap and the list of what is in it, rather than a cents-per-gallon allocation that would be our invention. If you want the itemised version for your own account, the tank lease and the service plan are the two lines a dealer will put on paper. Our wholesale vs retail page splits the full hub-to-homeowner spread into the two legs EIA does publish a price for.

Why the wholesale price moves day to day

The largest drivers of week-to-week wholesale propane price movement are inventory and weather. EIA publishes the Weekly Petroleum Status Report every Wednesday at 10:30am Eastern, which includes US propane inventory levels (in million barrels) broken out by PADD region. A larger-than-expected inventory draw (say 5 million barrels in a single week) signals tight supply and tends to lift Mont Belvieu spot by several cents per gallon within the trading day. A larger-than-expected build does the reverse.

The second driver is weather forecast revision. Heating degree day forecasts from the National Weather Service drive expected demand. When the 6-10 day outlook revises colder, traders bid up forward contracts and the spot price follows. Cold-snap forecasts that affect the Midwest (PADD 2, the largest residential propane region) move the market more than cold-snap forecasts affecting California (PADD 5, low propane usage). The third driver is crude oil, since propane competes with naphtha as a steam-cracker feedstock for ethylene production; large moves in WTI or Brent translate into smaller but real moves in propane via the petrochemical demand channel.

Finally, export demand. US LPG exports (propane plus butane) are published monthly by EIA. When the FOB Houston-to-Japan or FOB Houston-to-Northwest-Europe price differential widens, more barrels move to ship terminals and less to domestic storage, which tightens the domestic Mont Belvieu market. The LPG exports page covers this channel in detail.

Rack pricing: what dealers actually pay

For homeowners curious what their distributor pays at the terminal, the publicly available signal is approximately Mont Belvieu spot plus 5 to 10 cents per gallon for a Mid-Continent rack, plus 15 to 30 cents per gallon for an East Coast rack during winter. Add to that a typical 0.5 to 2 cents per gallon for the propane gas association assessment where applicable. A bobtail driver loading at a Hattiesburg rack in late January might be paying the dealer's account roughly $1.00 to $1.30 per gallon all-in, against the Mont Belvieu reference around $1.130. The dealer then delivers and bills retail in the $2.30 to $3.50 range depending on customer class and region.

Wholesale price history and what to read into the current level

Looking at the EIA weekly wholesale/resale series in context, October 2025 averaged $0.821 per gallon, the lowest October for this series since 2020 (the Octobers of 2021 through 2024 averaged between $0.88 and $1.61). The peak of $1.10 in the week ending 2 February was within the normal cold-snap range and well below the polar vortex 2014 January peak, when this series touched $3.547 in the week ending 27 January 2014. The season closed at $1.041 for the week ending 30 March 2026, and the most recent reading, for the week ending 19 October 2026, is $1.242. Between heating seasons EIA publishes this series once a month at most (it published a reading each month from April to September 2024 and none in that window in 2026), so the year-round Mont Belvieu daily series is the wholesale signal to watch in the summer.

Related

• Mont Belvieu daily spot price (the benchmark)
• Wholesale vs retail: the spread, broken down
• Commercial vs residential propane price per gallon
• Agricultural propane price per gallon
• How US LPG exports move the propane price
• Seasonal patterns

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