Gulf Coast (PADD 3) diesel price

Texas and Louisiana anchor PADD 3, the Gulf Coast, together with Arkansas, Mississippi and New Mexico, and this district holds the largest concentration of refining capacity in the country. The Colonial, Plantation and Explorer pipelines that carry diesel to the East Coast and Midwest all start here, and Gulf refiners export heavily by tanker on top of that. Because this district is the source rather than the destination, the Gulf Coast typically prices at or below the national average, the low end of the map that every other region's transport cost gets added on top of.

Hurricane season is the defining risk: a storm that shuts in refineries or export terminals can tighten supply here and across the pipeline system at once. Refinery turnarounds and export demand are the other regular movers.

More than half of US refining capacity sits inside PADD 3, concentrated along the Houston Ship Channel, the Texas coast and the lower Mississippi, and the district makes far more distillate than it burns. That surplus is the point: the Gulf Coast is not a regional market that happens to be cheap, it is the origin the rest of the country's price is built out from. What are PADDs has the district map and why the Gulf sits at the bottom of it.

Prices propagate outward from here on a pipeline schedule. Colonial and Plantation carry Gulf product up the eastern seaboard and Explorer runs north into the Midwest, so a Gulf Coast move reaches PADD 1 and PADD 2 terminals over the following days as barrels priced at the origin arrive down the line. That lag is why this district's number reads as a leading indicator for the ones it supplies rather than as a regional curiosity, and it is the mechanism behind the ordering visible on the region board.

The export channel is the second claim on Gulf diesel and the one that decouples this price from a purely domestic story. Cargoes load from Gulf terminals for Latin American and European buyers, and when distillate demand firms up overseas the Gulf number follows even in a mild US winter. A Texas fleet can watch its cost rise in a week when nothing changed on the road in Texas, and the cause is usually on a ship.

Diesel is also seasonal here in a way the pump price hides. Winter-grade fuel has to stay fluid below the temperature at which diesel gels, so refiners and terminals cut it with kerosene or treat it with additives as the season turns, and the kerosene those blends draw on competes with jet fuel for the same cut of the barrel. The blending cost is small next to crude, and it is one of several winter costs that land on a northern-delivered gallon and not on a Gulf-priced one.

Hurricane risk deserves its own line because of how it compounds. A storm here can take out refining capacity, the export docks and the head of the pipeline system in a single landfall, and the outage shows up as a price move in districts a thousand miles away. Refinery turnaround season, concentrated in spring and fall, is the smaller, scheduled version of the same effect.

How Gulf Coast diesel compares with the US average

The gap is Gulf Coast diesel minus the US average from the same EIA Monday survey, in cents per gallon, so a move elsewhere in the country shifts it even in a week the local price holds still.

For the week of Oct 5, 2026, Gulf Coast diesel ran 38.0 cents a gallon under the US average ($5.819/gal against $6.199/gal), the second lowest of the 10 regional breakouts that week. That is 5.0 cents below its 52-week median of -33.0 cents.

Over the past 52 weeks the gap has run from -48.7 cents (week of May 11, 2026) to -17.1 cents (week of Aug 24, 2026). Since EIA's June 2022 survey redesign, Gulf Coast diesel has priced below the US average in every one of the 226 weekly surveys, and the gap has averaged -30.4 cents a gallon in December through February and -31.4 cents in June through August, so it has held about the same through the year.

The chart above starts in July 2021. Weekly Gulf Coast prices go back to the week of Mar 21, 1994 on the diesel price history chart, which also tables every region's annual average and record high and low.