Diesel spot prices: Gulf Coast and New York Harbor

Spot is the price of a bulk cargo of ULSD changing hands at a trading hub: untaxed wholesale, not a pump or rack price. It is the layer retail prices follow, usually with a lag of days to weeks.

Every quote is dated to its own trading day. EIA quotes the series for each business day but publishes it in batches, so the newest print here can run several days behind the weekly retail number. An older date on this page means EIA has not released the days in between yet, not that the data is stale.

Gulf Coast ULSD spot is the wholesale benchmark for diesel changing hands at the refineries and terminals along the Texas and Louisiana coast, PADD 3, home to the largest concentration of diesel refining capacity in the country. Because so much of the nation's diesel starts here, this hub works as the price floor the rest of the pipeline network builds on. As product moves north on the Colonial, Plantation and Explorer pipelines toward the Midwest and East Coast, pipeline tariffs and terminal handling fees get added on top of this starting price. An inland rack price in a city like Chicago or Kansas City is not part of EIA's public daily record, but it moves off this quote at its core, plus the cost of getting the barrel there.

That relationship runs through the Midwest retail number this site tracks, too. PADD 2 has enough of its own refining and pipeline access to Canadian and Bakken crude that it usually prices close to the national average rather than carrying a persistent premium, but a Gulf Coast supply disruption, a refinery outage or a hurricane that shuts in export terminals, still reaches the Midwest through this same pipeline system, arriving with the same days-to-weeks lag that separates any spot move from the pump. For the general relationship between spot, rack and retail pricing, see Retail, rack and spot: the diesel price ladder.

New York Harbor

New York Harbor ULSD spot is the wholesale benchmark for diesel delivered into the port complex spanning New York and New Jersey, the East Coast's main import gateway. Cargoes arriving from overseas and diesel moving north by pipeline from Gulf Coast refineries both clear through terminals here before reaching East Coast racks and pumps, which makes this the closest daily read on East Coast wholesale conditions. The harbor is also the delivery point for the CME Group's ULSD futures contract, the main benchmark the diesel trade hedges against, so a move here carries weight well outside the region.

Because the harbor sits at the head of the network supplying New England, the Central Atlantic and the Lower Atlantic, a move here tends to show up first in Central Atlantic pump prices, closest to the harbor, then work outward to New England and the Lower Atlantic over the following days to weeks. On Oct 6, 2026 New York Harbor sat 14.8 cents a gallon over the Gulf Coast.

The pump price over spot

The pump-over-spot table is the whole retail layer in one number: federal and state fuel taxes, transportation, storage, wholesale markups and station margin, plus timing differences between the hub and the pump. It is not a station's or a retailer's margin. Wide and widening means the pump has not followed the wholesale market down, whatever the reason.

Its latest week can trail the retail pages. Each point pairs a Monday-dated retail price with the nearest spot print on or just before that Monday, and EIA publishes the daily spot series in batches, so the newest retail week shows up here once the spot days around that Monday are out.