The World’s Oil Bill
What the world actually pays for oil each day, what the oil supply chain receives once tax is stripped out, and what the crude price everybody quotes is worth on the same day. The three are not the same number, and in 2026 they are further apart than they have ever been.
Change in what the world pays. The percentage beneath is the same on every unit, since it is a ratio.
The past year: What the world pays for oil
What the world pays for oil, over time. Select either of the two lines under the chart to add it and see the bill pulled apart.
Billions of dollars a day, on trading days when every input printed, in the money of the day.
Where the money goes
Every dollar spent on oil splits three ways: the crude itself, the refining and distribution that turns it into something usable and moves it, and the tax a government adds at the pump. The middle slice is the one nobody quotes, and this year it is enormous.
Prices as of 2026-10-06, the most recent day on which every input was observed. World demand 103.5 million barrels a day (IEA, 2026).
The 3:2:1 crack spread is $67.46 a barrel today, against WTI at $96.24. That is the gap a crude quote leaves out. A barrel of crude at $96.24 yields products worth $133.34 before any tax, which is why quoting crude alone understates what the world is paying by roughly 28%.
The barrel, product by product
| Product | Share of the barrel | Price, $/bbl | How it is priced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gasoline | 26% | $149.69 | US Gulf Coast conventional gasoline. |
| Diesel and gasoil | 28% | $191.73 | US Gulf Coast ultra-low-sulphur diesel. Includes off-road gasoil, which is taxed far more lightly, so the tax line treats only part of this volume as road fuel. |
| Jet and kerosene | 7% | $182.36 | US Gulf Coast jet. International aviation fuel is untaxed under the Chicago Convention. |
| LPG and ethane | 14% | $38.60 | Mont Belvieu propane, standing in for the light-ends barrel. |
| Naphtha | 7% | $91.43 | No free daily series. Priced at a small discount to crude, which is where naphtha usually sits. |
| Fuel oil | 8% | $81.80 | No free daily series. Priced at a discount to crude, which is where high-sulphur fuel oil usually sits. |
| Other products | 10% | $96.24 | Bitumen, lubricants, petroleum coke, waxes, still gas and refinery own-use. Priced at crude for want of anything better. |
How it is calculated
World oil demand is multiplied by a volume-weighted price across the product slate above, and fuel tax is added on the road-fuel share. Prices are daily settlements from FRED. The index is driven by product prices rather than crude, deliberately: an index moved by crude would not react on a day when crude was flat and refining margins blew out, which is exactly the day the world’s oil bill jumps.
Prices are US Gulf Coast benchmarks applied to world volumes, and the crude anchor is WTI rather than Brent for the same reason: the Gulf Coast refining complex runs on domestic crude, so pricing its products against Brent would mix two basins and inflate the apparent margin by whatever the Brent-WTI spread happened to be. Naphtha, fuel oil and the residual barrel are priced off crude because no free daily series exists for them, and together they are about a quarter of the barrel, which makes them the largest source of error here.
Tax is applied to road fuels only, from the OECD-heavy country sample on the gasoline prices page, scaled to approximate a world average because that sample taxes fuel well above it. This is the least precise line in the calculation. The sample average is scaled by 0.55 to approximate a world rate, and only 75% of the gasoline and gasoil pool is treated as taxed road fuel, since heating, farming, marine and off-road use is rebated or untaxed in most countries. Both assumptions push the tax line down rather than up, so the gross figure is conservative. The underlying tax data is on the gasoline prices page, covering 89 countries and US states.
The daily series publish with a lag of several business days, so this is dated to the most recent settlement rather than to this morning. Refining margins are the subject of Chapter 7 and crack spreads of Chapter 18.