What a Gas Station Actually Makes on a Gallon #
In 2025 there were about 55 cents per gallon to divide between everyone who handles fuel after it leaves the terminal: the wholesaler, the hauler and the station. That is our calculation from Energy Information Administration data, and two independent routes through the federal figures arrive at the same number. The method is set out below.
The station's share of that pool is the part operators ask about. NACS, whose State of the Industry data covers retailers representing more than 35,000 stores, puts the retail gross fuel margin above 40 cents per gallon in 2025. That sits inside the federal envelope, leaving roughly 15 cents for freight and wholesale.
Very little of the station's 40 cents survives the cost of selling the fuel, which is what the rest of this page is about.
How We Calculated It: Two Federal Routes to One Number #
Route one, the EIA price breakdown. The Energy Information Administration splits the retail price of gasoline into crude oil, refining, distribution and marketing, and taxes. With regular averaging $3.10 a gallon across the year, it attributes 17.8% of the price to distribution and marketing. That is 55 cents.
Route two, the price spread. Take the average pump price for the year and subtract the average Gulf Coast wholesale price, which leaves about 108 cents. Remove 18.4 cents of federal excise tax and the 33.55 cent average of state taxes and fees, and 56 cents remain.
The two routes use different data and agree within a cent. Three caveats keep the figure honest: Gulf Coast spot is not the rack price a station actually pays, the state tax average is dated January 2026 rather than averaged over the year, and the distribution and marketing bucket includes the wholesaler's margin as well as the station's.
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Gross Margin Is Not Profit #
NACS estimates that net fuel margin, after the retail expenses of actually running the forecourt, lands closer to 10 to 15 cents per gallon. The gap is credit card interchange, labour, electricity, maintenance on the dispensers, environmental compliance and the cost of the tanks themselves.
Card fees alone are the largest single deduction and they scale with the fuel price rather than with volume, which means the operator's cost of selling a gallon rises every time the commodity does. A high pump price is not a good year for a station; it is a working capital problem with a thinner net margin attached.
Any benchmark that quotes fuel margin without saying whether it is gross or net is not a usable benchmark.
Why the Margin Pool Is Wider Than It Used to Be #
Federal data shows the widening independently of any trade survey. EIA's distribution and marketing share of the pump price sat above its ten-year average in 2025, and the gap between Gulf Coast wholesale and the average pump price has widened in every year since 2021. NACS puts retail margins before 2020 closer to 22 cents a gallon.
The price gap carries taxes as well as margin, and some states index their fuel taxes, so not all of that widening is margin. The EIA share is measured net of tax, though, and it points the same way.
The causes are not primarily price gouging. Card interchange rose with fuel prices, credit costs rose, and retailers held wider margins to defend a net figure that barely moved. Consolidation removed many price-following independents, and flat demand removed the volume growth that once justified running thin. A wider pool has mostly offset costs that arrived at the same time.
The Store Behind the Pumps #
For most operators, fuel is the traffic generator and the store is the business. Inside sales carry the gross profit that fuel cannot, which is why the industry tracks inside sales as a share of total revenue and why foodservice has become the strategic centre of new store formats.
This is the reason a station's fuel margin, on its own, tells you almost nothing about whether the site is profitable. Two stations holding identical margins per gallon can sit on opposite sides of viability depending on what happens after the customer parks.
Benchmarking Against the Federal Establishment Record #
The federal record counts roughly 111,124 gasoline stations nationally, a base that has been slowly contracting for two decades as smaller sites close and larger formats replace them. Census County Business Patterns gives establishment and employment counts by industry and geography, which is the right frame for judging local competitive density.
The margin figures on this page come from two places. The whole terminal-to-pump pool is our calculation from EIA data, re-run each year from the published series. The station's share comes from NACS's member survey, which is self-reported. Where the two overlap, they agree, and that agreement is the reason to trust either.