U.S. households face serious pain beyond gas prices as diesel nears record highs

By Myra P. Saefong

A spike in diesel fuel won't show up immediately. But in a few weeks, the cost will hit every box moved on a truck, every loaf of bread and every package delivered.

At $5.62 a gallon on May 10, 2026, diesel is just 21 cents below the record-high price from June 2022, according to data from GasBuddy.

Diesel is the main fuel source of the trucks, trains and tractors that are crucial to the economy - and in the U.S., prices per gallon have been climbing close to a record high.

The surge in gasoline prices since the Iran war started in late February has been a big focus, given that it's the fuel for everyday American drivers.

Yet diesel has a much wider impact than gasoline prices, said Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, and a rise to record-high prices would be "very ominous."

'Diesel is the fuel that powers the U.S. economy - from tractors, to trucks and trains.' Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy

"Diesel is the fuel that powers the U.S. economy - from tractors, to trucks and trains. This is how goods get to where they need to go," he said.

The average U.S. price for diesel was at $5.620 a gallon on Sunday, just 21 cents below the record-high price of nearly $5.83 from June 2022, data from GasBuddy show.

At $4.475 a gallon Monday, the average price of gas was still around 56 cents below the June 16, 2022, record high of $5.034.

"Gasoline is what consumers feel at the pump," said Felipe Germini, founder and managing director at Germini Energy. When gas prices spike, the impact is immediate for consumers, who see that price rise when they fuel up on the way to work, he said.

Gasoline is primarily used as a fuel for transportation, and light-duty vehicles such as cars, sport-utility vehicles and small trucks account for about 91% of all gas consumption in the U.S., according to the Energy Information Administration.

Yet most of the goods sold in the country move by truck, and a high percentage of these trucks are diesel-powered. Jeff Lenard, a vice president at NACS, a trade association for the nation's retail fuel industry, estimates that around 4 cents per gallon in the additional cost for gasoline can be attributed to the higher cost of diesel and transporting fuel to stations.

While many drivers can cut back on driving to reduce gas demand, there aren't any alternatives to reduce demand for the diesel that powers the trucking, farming and construction industries, Lenard said.

Related: Inflation is getting worse. Just how bad is it going to get?

Diesel is "what the economy runs on," Germini told MarketWatch. A price spike in that fuel doesn't show up on anyone's credit card immediately, he said. "It shows up two or three weeks later in the price of every box that moved on a truck, every loaf of bread, every package delivered."

Producer price inflation is likely to come first, and consumer price inflation would come second, Germini said. Record-high diesel prices would hit the supply chain first, including freight rates, he said. That would feed higher prices for core goods, with a lag of four to eight weeks before it would show in consumer-price-index data.

"That sequencing is what makes diesel approaching its 2022 highs the bigger concern, even when the headlines follow the gas station sign on the corner," he said.

The pain from high diesel prices would also outlast the price itself, he explained, because by the time those prices roll over, the inflation it caused would still be "working its way through the grocery aisles and freight invoices," said Germini.

Diesel prices are likely to surpass their record highs from 2022, maybe as soon as this week, said Tom Kloza, chief energy adviser at Gulf Oil.

Wholesale prices for diesel in the Great Lakes states, which include Illinois and Michigan, are all above $5 a gallon, he said. With federal and state taxes, there will be "quite a few" truck stops and fuel stations posting prices above $6 a gallon there.

And demand for diesel from other countries - mostly Latin America and South America - moves up almost every calendar quarter, he told MarketWatch.

Last week, the U.S. exported over 1.8 million barrels per day of refined petroleum products known as distillates, which is almost entirely diesel, said Kloza. If you add that offshore demand to the domestic demand of about 3.7 million barrels per day, that's about 5.5 million barrels per day of total demand for this fuel, he said.

Read: Record oil exports could drive U.S. diesel and gas supply shortages just as summer travel starts

While U.S. refiners are "motivated to make as much of this higher profit margin product as possible, they probably can't get beyond 5 million barrels per day of production, he said. So that leaves a basic deficit of about 500,000 barrels per day.

Supplies are already tight. Total U.S. distillate inventories were at 102.3 million barrels as of the week ending May 1, according to the EIA. That's about 11% below the five-year average for this time of year.

"There may be a note of panic when they dip below 100-million barrels, which is likely before May is over, said Kloza.

In 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the market "overreacted," he said, and saw retail prices for gasoline and diesel rise to record highs. That was on the possibility that perhaps 1 million barrels per day of Russian crude and diesel would not make it to market, but only a few hundred thousand barrels per day were affected back then, he said.

The current situation, with the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, is "clearly a much more serious disruption" to the oil market, Kloza said.

See: The U.S. produces the most oil in the world. So why are gasoline prices so high?

-Myra P. Saefong

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05-11-26 1453ET