In Houston, a gallon of regular gasoline sold for $3.522 the week of August 31, 2026. In San Francisco that same week, the average was $5.552 — a gap of just over two dollars for the identical grade of fuel. Nationally, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly survey put the average retail price for regular gasoline at $4.071 a gallon for that week, a figure that sits 89.4 cents above where it stood a year earlier.
A Two-Dollar Gap Between Houston and San Francisco
The distance between the two cities is not a one-week accident. Houston sits inside the agency’s Gulf Coast region, where refineries cluster along the coastline. San Francisco sits inside the West Coast region, which has posted the highest average of any EIA region in every recent weekly release. Los Angeles averaged $5.532 the same week and Seattle averaged $5.412, both inside that same higher-cost region, while Gulf Coast cities have consistently anchored the cheaper end of the agency’s survey.
Houston’s price fell two and a half cents from the week before to $3.522, essentially returning to where it sat two weeks earlier, according to the EIA’s historical price series for the Houston pricing area. San Francisco moved the opposite direction, rising eight cents on the week to $5.552, per the agency’s San Francisco price series. The order between the two cities is not new. The same data shows Houston averaged $2.827 two years ago, when San Francisco averaged $4.641 — a roughly two-dollar gap that has held through the two years of comparisons the EIA itself publishes, even as both cities’ prices climbed.
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The National Average Is 89 Cents Higher, and Diesel Runs $5.60
Averaged across every region the EIA tracks, a gallon of regular gasoline cost $4.071 for the week ending August 31, 2026 — up 89.4 cents from the same week in 2025 and down 1.4 cents from the week before, according to the agency’s Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update. Two years earlier, the national average worked out to $3.289, using the 78.2-cent two-year change the agency itself reports alongside the current figure. On-highway diesel, the fuel that moves groceries, prescriptions, and heating oil from a warehouse to a store shelf, averaged $5.599 a gallon nationally the same week, up $1.865 from a year earlier.
Diesel showed the same coastal split as gasoline. California’s diesel average came to $7.218, more than $1.60 above the Rocky Mountain region’s $5.555 and nearly $2 above the Gulf Coast’s $5.360. For a retiree who does not drive a truck, that gap still matters, since delivery costs built into diesel prices eventually show up in the price of what arrives on a store shelf.
Regional Swings Sitting Underneath the National Number
The national dip of 1.4 cents was not evenly shared. The Midwest region fell nearly nine cents to $3.847 and the Rocky Mountain region dropped more than nine cents to $4.266, while the East Coast rose more than a penny to $3.937 and New England rose seven cents to $4.096. Ohio’s statewide average alone fell more than 18 cents on the week, while Colorado’s fell more than 25 cents.
For a household living on a fixed Social Security check, those regional swings can matter more than the headline national figure, since the bill that comes due is set by the pump nearest home rather than the average printed in Washington. A retiree in Cleveland and a retiree in Denver both saw meaningfully cheaper gas than the week before, even while the West Coast crept higher.
How the Weekly Number Gets Built
The prices behind each week’s release come from a sample of 1,000 retail gasoline outlets that the EIA contacts by phone, email, text, or the internet, collecting the cash, self-serve price offered at the pump as of 8:00 a.m. local time each Monday, according to the agency’s published survey methodology. The individual prices are weighted by each outlet’s annual sales volume to produce the national, regional, state, and city averages published every Tuesday around 10:00 a.m. Eastern time.
This release covered the survey week ending August 31, 2026, and posted September 1. As of this article’s publication, the EIA’s own page still listed September 9, 2026 as the date of the next weekly update, meaning the $4.071 national figure and the Houston-to-San Francisco spread above remain the most current numbers the agency has published.
What the Two-Dollar Gap Adds Up to at the Pump
A retiree relocating from Houston to San Francisco, or driving between the two cities for a family visit, is not weighing a rounding error. At the week’s prices, filling a 15-gallon tank cost about $52.83 in Houston and $83.28 in San Francisco, a difference of $30.45 for the identical amount of the identical grade of gasoline. Spread across a year of regular driving, a gap of that size becomes one of the larger line items a fixed-income household can influence simply by where it lives or where along a route it chooses to fill up.
The EIA’s next release, due September 9, 2026, will show whether the $4.071 national average and the more-than-two-dollar spread between the country’s cheapest and most expensive large cities held, narrowed, or widened again.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Financial Wire editorial team.
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Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
