U.S. Gas Prices Fell 10% — June 2026 Report

If filling up has felt cheaper lately, it isn't your imagination. As of June 10, 2026, the average price of regular gasoline across the 570 U.S. Costco stations we track is $4.14 a gallon — down 45.9 cents, or 10.0%, from $4.60 a month ago. Premium and diesel have fallen almost as hard, and the decline reaches nearly every warehouse in the country: 563 of the 570 stationswith a month of history are cheaper today than they were in mid-May. Just three are more expensive. The relief is real — and so is the bigger picture: a gallon of regular still costs about a dollar more than it did a year ago. And the U.S. isn't alone: the same forces pulled Costco prices down across Canada and Australia over the very same 30 days — though the UK was the odd one out.

National averages of posted prices at tracked U.S. Costco stations, $/gal. Snapshot taken June 10, 2026 — this article is not updated.

A slow drift turned into a slide in late May

The month split cleanly in two. Through May 21 the national average barely moved, peaking at $4.61 on May 17. Then the floor gave way: from May 26 onward prices fell on 14 of 15 days, including an 8.8-cent single-day drop on May 29 — the steepest of the month — and the average has shed about 42 cents in those two weeks alone.

The Midwest is leading the drop

The national number actually understates what happened in the middle of the country. Indiana's Costco average collapsed by $1.03 a gallon — a 25% drop in one month — and Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and Michigan each fell 68 cents or more. Two Indianapolis-area warehouses, Fortune Park and Castleton, cut regular by $1.17, the biggest station-level moves in the country, and Costco gas is back under $3 at four Indiana warehouses — as low as $2.94 in Merrillville, the cheapest Costco pump in the nation right now.

Biggest 30-day fallers by state-average price of regular at Costco, May 12 – June 10, 2026.

The cheapest and most expensive states right now

Even after a month like this, geography still rules the pump. The gap between the cheapest and priciest state averages is $2.22 a gallon— Indiana's $3.09 against California's $5.31 — driven as always by state gas taxes, fuel blends, and regional refining.

State-average price of regular across tracked Costco stations, June 10, 2026. Puerto Rico is excluded — its pumps price in dollars per liter.

Why prices are falling — and why they're still high

To make sense of June's slide you need February's shock. When the United States and Israel went to war with Iran at the end of February, the Strait of Hormuz— the channel for roughly a fifth of the world's oil — was effectively closed within days, and Middle East producers shut in more than 11 million barrels a day of output versus pre-war levels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. AAA's national average for regular, which sat just under $3 a gallon in late February, peaked at $4.56 on May 21 — its highest level in four years. That is the backdrop for everything in this report: June's relief is a war premium deflating, not a return to normal, which is why a gallon still costs about a dollar more than it did a year ago.

What changed in late May is that the war premium started leaking out. Israel and Iran halted attacks and Washington talked up a deal, and crude slid for three straight weeks — Brent posted its biggest monthly loss in six years in May and settled at a seven-week low on June 9, at $91.45, with WTI at $88.20. Three other forces pressed in the same direction. OPEC+ approved its fourth consecutive monthly quota increase on June 7, adding another 188,000 barrels a day for July. The record 172-million-barrel release from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, announced in March as part of a 400-million-barrel coordinated IEA drawdown, has been flowing into the market for weeks. And demand cooled on schedule: after a record 45 million Americans traveled for Memorial Day, U.S. gasoline demand dropped from 9.25 to 8.59 million barrels a day in the holiday's wake, per AAA, while China's May crude imports fell about 29% to an eight-year low.

The last piece is the one you can see from the driver's seat: station margins. Industry analysts put retail gasoline margins near 50 cents a gallon in early June, against a two-year norm around 34 cents — fattened on the way up, with plenty of room to compress on the way down. That is why pump prices kept falling a few cents every day even when crude wobbled. It is also Costco's home turf: warehouse clubs run the thinnest fuel margins in the business and reprice fast, which is how the Costco average fell 46 cents over a month in which AAA's national average fell 37.

And the Midwest? The mid-continent runs largely on pipeline crude from Canada and the Bakken rather than seaborne barrels, and its pump prices had spiked with the national panic anyway — so as the premium deflates, Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky are giving it back fastest. AAA's state table tells the same story as ours: Indiana is now the cheapest state in the nation at a $3.39 all-station average. That slide doesn't stop at the border: Canada's Prairie provinces price off the same U.S. Midwest wholesale racks, and our June 2026 Canada report found Manitoba and Saskatchewan falling hardest of all.

How Costco compares with the AAA average

Nationally the two averages look deceptively close — $4.14 across Costco's pumps versus AAA's $4.15 as of June 10— but that is geography, not pricing. More than a quarter of Costco's U.S. gas stations sit in California and Washington, the country's two most expensive fuel states, which drags Costco's simple national average up. Put the comparison on equal footing, state by state, and the club discount is unusually wide right now:

AAA state averages versus Costco state averages from our tracker, both June 10, 2026. AAA covers every station statewide while Costco warehouses cluster in metro areas, so treat the gap as indicative.

Those gaps of 30 to 53 cents are wider than the 5-to-25-cent discount Costco typically holds. That is the flip side of the industry's inflated margins: when most stations are slow to pass falling wholesale costs through, the club gap stretches.

Will gas prices keep falling?

Every forecast on the table is really a forecast about the Strait of Hormuz. The EIA's June outlook, released June 9, expects retail gasoline to average $3.90 a gallon for 2026 as a whole— which implies further declines — but it assumes shipping through the strait resumes in the third quarter. GasBuddy's summer forecast runs hotter: a $4.80 average from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the most expensive summer since 2022, with a run at the all-time $5.02 record possible if the strait stays shut deep into summer. Its analyst Patrick De Haan sketched both branches in early June: a reopening could pull the national average down to $3.65–$3.85 within three to four weeks, while continued closure could push it past $5 before July 4.

Near term, two things favor more relief: those overstuffed retail margins still have room to compress as long as crude holds below $100, and NOAA is forecasting a below-normal Atlantic hurricane season, trimming the seasonal risk to Gulf Coast refineries. The catch: refineries entered June running at about 95% of capacity with gasoline inventories roughly 5% below their five-year average, so there is no slack in the system if anything breaks.

California is its own story. The state lost roughly 17% of its refining capacity in under a year — Phillips 66's Los Angeles refinery shut in late 2025 and Valero's Benicia plant closed on January 31 — and UC Davis economists estimatethe closures alone will eventually add about $1.21 a gallon versus the old equilibrium, before a Low Carbon Fuel Standard update due July 1 that could add up to 65 cents more. Even after a month of national declines, AAA's California average is $5.84 — and Costco's own California average, $5.31, is the highest of any state we track. If you fill up there, the club discount matters more than ever.

Frequently asked questions

Costco pump prices are a snapshot observed June 10, 2026 and will differ at the pump today. This site is independent and not affiliated with Costco Wholesale Corporation.