# Retail, rack and spot: the diesel price ladder > There is no single diesel price. A gallon carries a different number at each step from refinery to truck: a spot price at the trading hub, a rack price at the terminal, and the taxed retail price at the pump. Each sits above the last. _Updated Jul 10, 2026._ There is no single diesel price. A gallon of diesel carries a different number at each step from the refinery to the truck: a spot price at the trading hub, a rack price at the terminal, and the retail price at the pump. Each one sits above the last, and mixing them up is the most common mistake in reading a fuel quote. A spot number is not what a trucker pays, and a pump number is not a wholesale cost. ## Spot: the wholesale hub Spot is the price of a bulk cargo of fuel changing hands at a trading hub, quoted daily on business days and untaxed. This site carries EIA's two ULSD spot series, New York Harbor and the Gulf Coast. Spot is the fastest-moving public number in the market and it is the layer the pump follows, usually with a lag of days to weeks. What it is not is a price any truck buys. Read it for direction, not as a quote. [Chart: Gulf Coast ULSD spot price](https://mondaydiesel.com/spot/gulf-coast) ([data](https://mondaydiesel.com/spot/gulf-coast.md) — chart image: https://mondaydiesel.com/charts/spot/gulf-coast/chart.png) ## Rack: the terminal wholesale Above spot sits the rack, the wholesale price at a terminal loading rack where tanker trucks fill up to deliver to stations and fleets. Rack is where a fuel buyer with volume actually transacts, and it varies terminal to terminal. EIA does not publish daily rack prices, so this site does not carry them, and you should never read a spot number as your rack quote. Rack is a real price we simply do not have a public daily feed for. ## Retail: the pump, with taxes inside Retail is the top of the ladder and it is the DOE number. It carries everything below it plus the cost of running a station and, crucially, the fuel taxes. EIA breaks the retail price into crude oil, refining, distribution and marketing and taxes, and crude alone has averaged about 51 percent of the retail on-highway diesel price from 2004 through 2025. Taxes are the wedge that the wholesale layers do not carry at all. [Chart: US pump price vs Gulf Coast spot](https://mondaydiesel.com/margin/us-vs-gulf-coast) ([data](https://mondaydiesel.com/margin/us-vs-gulf-coast.md) — chart image: https://mondaydiesel.com/charts/margin/us-vs-gulf-coast/chart.png) ## Reading the ladder: the retail-minus-spot gap The chart above is this site's proxy for that whole retail layer: the US pump price minus the nearest-business-day Gulf Coast spot. It is not a station's margin. It holds the federal and state fuel taxes, roughly 60 to 80 cents a gallon combined, plus distribution and the retailer's own costs. When the gap is wide and widening, the pump has not followed the wholesale market down, for whatever reason. ## Why spot moves first The reason spot leads the pump is inventory and contract. A truck stop is selling fuel it bought days or weeks ago, and it reprices against its own replacement cost and the competition across the road, not against a screen that ticks all day. Rack and retail buyers lock volume on terms that lag the hub. So a move in the spot market takes time to work its way up through the rack to the pump, which is why a sustained change at the hub is an early read on the DOE number, and why a one-day spot spike that reverses may never reach retail at all. Direction travels up the ladder; noise gets filtered out along the way. Every rung is quoted in cents per gallon, at EIA's three decimals for the retail and spot series. A quote without a location and a level attached is close to meaningless: a diesel price only tells you something once you know whether it is a Gulf Coast spot, a Chicago rack or a California pump. ## Worked example: one gallon, hub to pump In early July 2026 Gulf Coast ULSD spot traded near $3.25 a gallon while the US pump price for the week of Jul 6 was $4.578 (both figures are live above). That gap, about $1.33 a gallon, is everything between the hub and the pump: taxes first, then the cost of moving and selling the fuel. Spot usually moves before the pump does, so a sustained move at the hub is an early read on where retail is heading, not a promise of it. Monday Diesel carries the spot hubs, the retail survey and the gap between them, and labels which layer every number lives in. It does not present spot as a price you pay and it does not forecast the pump. Monday Diesel is a free weekly read of the DOE diesel number and what it does per mile. Built entirely from EIA's public data, in your inbox before dispatch, one email a week. ## Related data + guides - [ULSD spot prices](https://mondaydiesel.com/spot) - [Gulf Coast ULSD spot price](https://mondaydiesel.com/spot/gulf-coast) - [US pump price vs Gulf Coast spot](https://mondaydiesel.com/margin/us-vs-gulf-coast) - [What is the DOE diesel price?](https://mondaydiesel.com/guides/what-is-the-doe-diesel-price) - [Why diesel costs more than gasoline](https://mondaydiesel.com/guides/why-diesel-costs-more-than-gasoline) - [Glossary](https://mondaydiesel.com/glossary) ## Common questions ### What is the difference between spot and retail diesel? Spot is an untaxed bulk cargo price at a trading hub. Retail is the taxed pump price a truck actually pays. Retail sits well above spot and follows it with a lag of days to weeks. ### What is a diesel rack price? The wholesale price at a terminal loading rack, where tanker trucks fill for delivery to stations and fleets. It sits between spot and retail. EIA does not publish daily rack prices, so this site does not carry them. ### Why is the pump price so far above the spot price? Taxes mostly. Federal and state fuel taxes, plus distribution and station costs, sit between the wholesale hub and the pump. That gap is the retail layer, not a station's profit margin. ### Does the spot price predict the pump price? It leads it. Spot moves first and the pump follows over days to weeks, so a sustained spot move is an early signal on where retail is heading rather than a guarantee of it. --- Canonical URL: https://mondaydiesel.com/guides/retail-rack-and-spot