Methodology

Every figure on this site is either published directly by a government source or calculated from published observations using the rules below. Nothing is estimated, interpolated or forecast. Sources are listed on the data sources page.

Prices

Prices are EIA spot prices, free on board (FOB), in nominal U.S. dollars per barrel: WTI at Cushing, Oklahoma (RWTC) and Brent in Europe (RBRTE). They are physical spot assessments, not futures settlements, so they can differ slightly from the front-month futures prices quoted in the news.

Values are stored exactly as EIA publishes them. When EIA revises a past value, the revision replaces the stored value at the next update and the change is logged.

Averages

• Monthly and annual averages are EIA's own published figures wherever EIA has released them. EIA computes these from complete data, and its daily series occasionally lacks a day, so EIA's averages are treated as authoritative.
• For the current month or year, which EIA has not yet averaged, the figure is the mean of the daily prices published so far and is labelled “to date”.
• Decade averages are the mean of the monthly averages in that decade.
• Trailing periods (past month, past year, and so on) are the mean of the daily observations in the period.

Highs, lows and records

Highs and lows are the highest and lowest published daily prices in a period. When two days tie, the earlier date is shown. Daily moves compare each published price with the previous published price, which can be several calendar days earlier across weekends and holidays. Percent changes are not calculated when the earlier price is zero or negative, because a percentage of a negative number has no useful meaning; this affects WTI around April 20, 2020.

Streaks count consecutive published observations that meet a condition, such as WTI at or above $100.

The Brent–WTI spread

The spread is Brent minus WTI, calculated only on dates when EIA published both prices. A positive spread means Brent was more expensive. Dates when only one market traded, such as a U.S. or U.K. holiday, are left out rather than treated as zero. Period spreads average those matched dates.

Inflation adjustment

Real prices restate nominal prices in the dollars of the most recent month for which BLS has published CPI-U:

real price = nominal price × CPI-U(latest month) ÷ CPI-U(period)

• Daily and monthly prices use that month's CPI-U.
• Annual prices use the BLS annual average CPI-U. For a year BLS has not yet averaged, the mean of the months published so far is used and the year is marked “partial CPI”.
• BLS did not publish CPI-U for October 2025. Prices from that month are shown in nominal terms only and are excluded from real-price calculations.
• CPI-U is stored from 1913, before the first WTI observation in January 1986. Years before that cannot be adjusted.

A different index, such as the GDP deflator or the energy component of CPI, would give different real prices. CPI-U is used because it measures the general cost of living for most U.S. households.

Monthly pages, tools and price episodes

• Monthly history pages exist for months from 2000 with at least 15 published WTI prices.
• The price change calculator compares EIA monthly averages. Its annualized rate is (end ÷ start)^1/years − 1 and is shown only for spans of at least a year with positive prices at both ends.
• Crude oil vs gasoline pairs each Monday retail gasoline survey with the WTI weekly average for the week ending the Friday before. “WTI per gallon” is $/bbl ÷ 42, a unit conversion. Lag figures are Pearson correlations of week-to-week changes over consecutive weeks only.
• Price episode pages measure a fixed window around each event: the last price before the event (or the window's first price), the peak or low that follows, and the opposite extreme after it. Episodes before 1986 use EIA's U.S. crude oil first purchase price, a different series from the WTI and Brent spot prices, which was under federal price controls until 1981.

U.S. production, reserves, stocks and trade

• Values keep EIA's units: Mbbl/d is thousand barrels per day; Mbbl is thousand barrels; MMbbl is million barrels; b/cd is barrels per calendar day. Any conversion, such as Mbbl to million barrels, is labeled.
• Field production includes lease condensate. State pages exist for states producing at least 1 Mbbl/d in the latest full year; federal offshore production is reported separately from the states.
• Proved reserves are EIA's year-end estimates of crude oil. The reserves-to-production ratio divides year-end reserves by EIA's estimated production from reserves in the same year, from the same report, so both use the same crude oil definition.
• Strategic Petroleum Reserve figures are weekly ending stocks from the Weekly Petroleum Status Report. They are kept separate from proved reserves, which are oil still in the ground.
• Imports and exports by country are crude oil only; totals for crude oil and petroleum products are shown separately and labeled. Country pages exist where annual volume peaked at 50 Mbbl/d or more with at least 5 years of data.
• Refinery capacity is operable atmospheric crude oil distillation capacity as of January 1, by state; individual refineries are not listed.

Updates

Data is updated each week after EIA's release, with additional checks during the week. A full weekly refresh re-downloads each series' complete history so that revisions are picked up. If a source is unreachable or returns data that fails validation (for example, a history much shorter than what is already stored, or values outside a plausible range), the update for that series is rejected and the last good data stays online. The status of each series is shown on the data sources page.

Rounding

Prices are shown to the cent. Calculations use unrounded values and round only for display, so a figure may differ by a cent from one computed from rounded numbers.