Diesel closed out Friday at $6.06 a gallon nationwide, the highest the fuel has ever averaged, after AAA's daily fuel tracker logged its third fresh milestone in just seven days. The climb caps six months of steady increases tied to the ongoing war between the United States and Iran. Regular gasoline is not far behind, averaging $4.30 a gallon nationally, up 13 cents in the past week alone.
Those numbers land hardest on people who earn their living behind the wheel. Latino workers are heavily concentrated in construction, trucking, landscaping and gig driving — jobs where a full tank isn't optional, and where record fuel costs eat directly into take-home pay rather than a company's overhead budget.
A Milestone That Keeps Slipping Further Away
Diesel's climb has been unusually steep even by the standards of a volatile year. The fuel first broke the old 2022 record on Sept. 4, at $5.85 a gallon, then kept adding a few cents almost daily through the following week, passing $5.98 on Thursday before crossing the $6 line outright on Friday. GasBuddy's head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, called it the third national diesel record set in a single week.
More Than One War Behind the Spike
The Iran conflict and the resulting slowdown in tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz get most of the attention, and they remain a major factor. But De Haan has also pointed to a second, less-discussed driver: Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries have knocked out processing capacity that once supplied the world with refined diesel, tightening global supply on a separate front entirely. Axios reporting on the price run-up notes the same dynamic. That combination — a shipping chokepoint in the Persian Gulf and a refining shortfall tied to a different war — is why analysts say diesel has outpaced gasoline in recent weeks.
Six Months Since the First Strikes
The run-up traces back to Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel first struck Iran and the national average for gasoline stood at $2.98 a gallon. Prices have not dipped back to that level since, even during a brief ceasefire lull earlier in the summer. Both fuels now cost roughly 45% to 60% more than they did a year ago.
What the War Has Cost Households So Far
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy puts the average added household fuel cost at $670.63 as of today, with the nationwide total topping $89.6 billion. A separate tracker from Brown University's Watson Institute, cited by Axios, put the six-month figure at $763 per household as of Sept. 7, with the national total crossing $100 billion. Texas has taken the largest hit of any single state at roughly $11 billion, followed by California at about $8 billion and Florida at about $5 billion.
Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi has published a separate, much larger figure — he told NPR in July that the war's total cost to a typical household, including higher interest rates and taxpayer-funded military spending on top of fuel, runs to roughly $1,100. That number measures something broader than pump prices alone, so it isn't directly comparable to the fuel-only estimates above; by Zandi's own breakdown, the gasoline, diesel and jet-fuel portion of that total comes to closer to $600.
Concentrated in Industries Where Latino Workers Are Overrepresented
Hispanic workers account for roughly one in five people employed across the U.S. economy overall, according to federal labor data. That share nearly doubles in the trades: a Census-based analysis from the National Association of Home Builders puts Hispanic workers at close to one-third of the national construction labor force, with Texas, California and Florida together employing just over half of that workforce. In Texas specifically, Hispanic workers make up roughly six in ten construction jobs — meaning the diesel record lands squarely on the industry that moves materials to job sites and the crews who show up in trucks every morning.
Texas itself pays below the national average at the pump — $3.83 a gallon for regular as of this week — but its size means the state has still absorbed the largest total added fuel bill in the country. California tells a different story: regular gas there is averaging just under $5.90 a gallon, extremely high by any historical measure, but still short of the roughly $6.02-to-$6.14 range the state itself hit during an earlier spike a few months ago.
Gig and Trade Workers Feel It Directly
For drivers who supply their own vehicle, there's no corporate fuel budget standing between them and the pump. Leslie Sherman-Shafer, who drives for Uber in the Bay Area, told the Associated Press back in March that a fill-up had jumped from around $25 to closer to $40 as the war began pushing prices up. We don't get reimbursed for gas. We rely on the generosity of the tip,
she said.
In Atlanta, Lyft driver Theodore Connor described a similar math problem to Atlanta Black Star earlier this summer: roughly $700 of every $1,500 he brings in over a five-day week now goes straight to gas, pushing him to pick up weekend construction shifts to close the gap. Delivery platforms have responded unevenly — DoorDash budgeted more than $50 million for temporary driver fuel relief back in the spring, but that program was tied to a single quarter and hasn't kept pace with the latest run-up in prices.
What to Watch Next
Self-employed drivers and contractors who track their mileage can still claim the IRS's 2026 standard rate of 72.5 cents per mile against taxable income, even without help from an employer or platform. Beyond that, the path forward depends on two separate fronts holding steady or easing: how much oil moves through the Strait of Hormuz, and how quickly Russian refining capacity comes back online. Until one or both improve, analysts expect diesel and gasoline to keep testing new highs before the year is out.
