Midwest (PADD 2) diesel price

Stretching from Ohio and Michigan west through the Dakotas and Kansas and south through Oklahoma and Tennessee, the Midwest is EIA's PADD 2, the largest of the five districts by state count. The region refines a substantial share of what it burns and draws crude by pipeline from Canada and the Bakken, which leaves it largely insulated from the waterborne import costs that push up the coasts, so its price usually sits close to the national number rather than carrying a persistent premium or discount.

The tradeoff is redundancy: an unplanned outage at one of the region's refineries can spike the local price sharply, if temporarily, in a way the more heavily refined Gulf Coast rarely sees. Demand also swings with the farm calendar, running highest during spring planting and fall harvest.

The crude side is what makes PADD 2 unusual. Midwest refineries run heavily on Canadian crude arriving by pipeline from Alberta and on Bakken barrels out of North Dakota, rather than on waterborne imports. That gives the region a feedstock cost that can move independently of global crude, and it is why Midwest product prices sometimes diverge from the coasts for reasons that have nothing to do with refining margins. What are PADDs covers how the districts differ on exactly this kind of structural point.

Freight demand is the other distinguishing feature. This is the crossroads district: Chicago, Indianapolis, Columbus, Memphis and Kansas City are the country's main truckload interchanges, and a very large share of the miles driven in the Midwest are through-miles rather than local ones. Diesel demand here therefore tracks national freight activity more closely than regional economic activity does, which is worth remembering before reading a Midwest price move as a Midwest story.

Two seasonal loads sit on top of that. Spring planting and fall harvest put farm equipment and grain hauling on the same fuel at the same time across the Corn Belt, and winter cold-flow requirements push northern terminals onto blended fuel from roughly October through March. Neither is large next to the trucking base, but both arrive on a schedule and both land in the same weeks the pipelines from the Gulf are moving winter-grade product north.

How Midwest diesel compares with the US average

The gap is Midwest 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, Midwest diesel ran 8.7 cents a gallon over the US average ($6.286/gal against $6.199/gal), the fifth lowest of the 10 regional breakouts that week. That is 13.4 cents above its 52-week median of -4.7 cents.

Over the past 52 weeks the gap has run from -33.9 cents (week of Apr 6, 2026) to +17.6 cents (week of May 11, 2026). Since EIA's June 2022 survey redesign, Midwest diesel has priced above the US average in 27 of 226 weekly surveys, and the gap has averaged -9.2 cents a gallon in December through February and -5.0 cents in June through August, so on average Midwest diesel has sat 4.1 cents lower against the US average in winter than in summer.

The chart above starts in July 2021. Weekly Midwest 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.