Wholesale vs Retail Propane Price: Understanding the Spread
For the week ending 5 October 2026, propane at the Mont Belvieu hub was $0.933 per gallon, the rack price to collect it from a supplier's terminal was $1.054, and the US residential average was $2.598. The spread between the hub and the homeowner is $1.665 per gallon, and EIA publishes a price for the step in the middle, so most of it can be placed rather than guessed at. All three figures come from EIA tables.
What is Mont Belvieu?
Mont Belvieu, Texas, is the primary natural gas liquids (NGL) trading hub in North America and the spot benchmark for almost every propane gallon in the US market. The benchmark price is published daily by OPIS (Oil Price Information Service), now part of Dow Jones, with EIA publishing a daily series of its own (eer_epllpa_pf4_y44mb_dpgD) and FRED mirroring it as DPROPANEMBTX. Front-month propane futures trade on CME (formerly NYMEX), settling against the Mont Belvieu cash benchmark.
Mont Belvieu is the price at which an NGL trader can transact a rail-car or pipeline-shipment of propane at the hub. It is not the price any homeowner can transact at. Treating Mont Belvieu as a consumer price is the most common analytical mistake on propane-pricing pages elsewhere.
The spread, broken down
There are three published propane prices between the trading hub and the homeowner, not two, and the middle one is the useful one. EIA publishes a weekly wholesale/resale price, which its table definitions define 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" . That is a loading-rack quote, not a measurement of what any particular distributor pays delivered, and EIA does not survey it: OPIS collects the terminal quotes and supplies them to EIA, which weights them into state and national averages (EIA methodology, April 2024). Used carefully it still cuts the hub-to-homeowner spread in two: a hub-to-terminal leg, and everything from the terminal onward. Every row below is a published value from one of the three EIA tables or the difference between two of them.
| Step | CurrentNow | Season avgSeason | Where the figure comes fromSource |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mont Belvieu spot, the floor | $0.933 | $0.646 | EIA daily series eer_epllpa_pf4_y44mb_dpgD |
| plus hub to terminal rack | +$0.121 | +$0.283 | Difference between the two EIA series below and above |
| rack price at a supplier's terminal, buyer collects | $1.054 | $0.928 | EIA weekly W_EPLLPA_PWR_NUS_DPG, from OPIS terminal quotes |
| plus terminal rack to homeowner | +$1.544 | +$1.624 | Difference between the two EIA series above and below |
| US residential retail | $2.598 | $2.553 | EIA weekly W_EPLLPA_PRS_NUS_DPG |
The Mont Belvieu row is the most recent daily quote at or before each survey week's end date, so the three prices line up on the same calendar.
The shape of it is the point. Moving propane from the Mont Belvieu hub into the terminal network, the pipeline and storage leg, accounted for $0.283 per gallon on average across the season. Everything from the loading rack to a tank behind somebody's house accounted for $1.624, roughly 6 times as much.
Where the split falls matters, and it is easy to get backwards. The rack quote is taken at the terminal with the buyer providing their own transport, so the tanker-truck run from that terminal into a local distributor's bulk plant is not in the hub-to-rack leg. It sits in the $1.624, alongside the bobtail delivery to the house, the tank and its service, the account and emergency-call overhead, the compliance cost, the dealer's winter price risk and the dealer's margin. The useful reading is not that trucking is cheap; it is that once propane has reached a terminal, the commodity and its long-haul transport are a small part of what a homeowner pays, and the local business of storing, hauling, metering and servicing is most of it.
EIA does not publish a split of that larger leg into those categories, and neither does any other free source, so this page does not print one. If you want to know what your own dealer charges for the tank and the service, those are line items you can ask them to itemise.
Why the spread varies by region
The persistent regional ranges in the EIA per-state data reflect four structural factors: distance from Mont Belvieu (Gulf Coast pays close to wholesale; Northeast pays the most because it sits at the end of the pipeline network), regional pipeline and terminal access (areas served directly by product pipelines pay less to bring propane in), winter severity (cold states carry a higher risk premium), and distributor competitive density (rural states with co-op distribution tend to run tighter spreads).
Those factors show up as a very wide range in the published state averages. For the week ending 5 October 2026, EIA put North Dakota at $1.608 per gallon and Florida at $4.864, which against the same $0.933 hub price is a spread of $0.68 in one and $3.93 in the other. Both states buy the same commodity at the same benchmark. Nearly everything between those two numbers is distribution, not propane.
When the spread widens or narrows
Retail moves more slowly than the hub in both directions, so the spread is widest when wholesale has fallen and retail has not yet followed, and narrowest when wholesale has spiked and retail is still catching up. Across the 26 survey weeks of the 2025-2026 season the spread averaged $1.91 per gallon. For the week ending 5 October 2026 it was $1.665.
The extreme case is on the record. In the week ending 27 January 2014 the residential survey hit $4.010 per gallon, still the all-time high in the series, during the polar vortex. Our polar vortex page goes through what happened that winter.
What this means for a homeowner
Knowing the hub price is useful, but it is the wrong yardstick for your quote. The spread to Mont Belvieu ranged from $0.68 to $3.93 across states in the latest survey week, so there is no single dollar figure above wholesale that marks a fair price nationally.
Compare against your own state instead. Take your state's EIA weekly average as the benchmark, and treat a quote well above it as the prompt to get a second one. The hub price is the thing to watch for direction, not for level: it is published daily by EIA and mirrored on FRED, and our Mont Belvieu page carries it year-round, including through the months when no residential reading is published.