Los Angeles Gas Prices

Los Angeles gas prices this week

The Los Angeles metro averaged $5.883 per gallon for regular gasoline in the week ending Oct 26, 2026. The metro average fell $0.140 from the previous week, and it is $0.005 below the California statewide average of $5.888. Against the national average of $4.269, Los Angeles is $1.614 more expensive.

Los Angeles has the highest gasoline prices of any large U.S. metro. The EIA average covers Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Santa Barbara counties, a market of more than 18 million people.

What drives prices in Los Angeles

• California’s combined taxes and cap-and-trade costs are the highest in the country.
• The state’s unique reformulated gasoline cannot be replaced with imports from Texas or the Midwest.
• Local refinery outages can add 30 to 50 cents within days.

Metro averages smooth out station-level differences, but they are still the right baseline for budgeting. A station a few blocks from a highway ramp can easily charge 20 cents more than one on a secondary road in the same county.

Areas covered by the Los Angeles average

The metro series includes the core city and the surrounding communities that share its fuel distribution network: Long Beach, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Anaheim, Riverside, Burbank. Prices in outlying counties can run 10 to 25 cents lower or higher depending on local taxes and distance from the nearest terminal.

Commuting cost in Los Angeles

Los Angeles traffic makes fuel economy worse than the EPA sticker suggests. A 20-mile commute can take an hour, and idling in traffic burns fuel without moving miles.

A simple benchmark: a 30-mile round trip at 28 MPG costs about $6.30 per day at the current Los Angeles average. Over 260 working days that is roughly $1639 per year. Use the commute cost calculator with your real mileage, and the gas mileage calculator if you are not sure what MPG your car actually returns in city traffic.

How to pay less at the pump in Los Angeles

1. Start with membership warehouses: Costco, Sam's Club, and BJ's typically undercut nearby stations by 10 to 30 cents.
2. Check stations one exit past your usual stop — highway-adjacent stations price for convenience, not for locals.
3. Use a station-level app for the final address; use this page to judge whether the price you see is normal for the metro.
4. Fix the cheap things first: tire pressure, air filter, and removing unused roof racks each return 2 to 6 percent of fuel economy.

How this page is built

The Los Angeles series is the EIA's published metro retail average, updated weekly and restated in dollars per gallon including taxes. We rebuild this page every week after the survey release and print the survey week at the top so there is no ambiguity about the date. See the methodology and data sources pages for details.