Why your gas is 30% higher than 2019 — and what carpooling actually saves you

When Jenna and I bought our CR-V back in 2018, filling the tank cost me around $36. I did it without thinking. Last week the same tank ran $49, and I stood there at the pump genuinely a little annoyed — at the number, at the oil companies, at nobody in particular.

That's about $13 more, every single fill. And I realized I'd been doing the thing I do with a lot of money stuff: complaining about it for years without ever actually sitting down and running the numbers.

So I did. This post is the result. First, plainly, why gas is higher than it was in 2019 — separating what's global from what's local. Then the part that actually matters at my kitchen table: how much does carpooling, or hopping on transit, genuinely put back in the bank each year?

What's actually inside the price of a gallon

The U.S. Energy Information Administration splits the retail price of gasoline into four buckets:

1. Crude oil — what oil producers charge refiners. Set on global markets, mostly out of anyone in the U.S.'s hands.
2. Refining costs and margins — what refiners make turning crude into gasoline.
3. Distribution and marketing — moving fuel to your pump, plus the station's cut.
4. Taxes — the federal tax has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. State taxes swing wildly, from around 60 cents in California to about 9 cents in Alaska.

In a normal month, crude is roughly half of what you pay. Taxes are around 15%. Refining and distribution split the rest.

Why it's higher than 2019, specifically

A few things shifted at once, and none of them is a movie villain:

Crude sits in a higher band now. Before COVID, U.S. crude traded around $55 a barrel. These days it mostly lives between $70 and $85. Even when it dips, it doesn't dip as far as it used to.

Refining capacity didn't keep up. The U.S. lost roughly a million barrels a day of refining capacity between 2019 and 2023 as older refineries shut down. Less supply, same demand, fatter margins.

Some state taxes crept up. A handful of big states — California, Illinois, Pennsylvania — tie their gas taxes to inflation or fuel-economy targets, so that line on the receipt grows on autopilot.

What's not on the list: a conspiracy. Refiners aren't all in a group chat. OPEC matters but doesn't explain a 30% jump on its own. Most of the increase is just structural — higher baseline crude, fewer refineries, a few states changing the tax math.

I found that weirdly calming, actually. Not because it's good news, but because "it's complicated and structural" is at least true, and I'd rather tell my kids something true.

The household math (this is the part I wish I'd done years ago)

Here's where a lot of articles get mushy. Telling me to carpool to "bring down national gas prices" is basically fiction — U.S. gas demand is set by something like 140 million drivers, and my one CR-V is a rounding error. But for my actual household, carpooling turned out to be one of the biggest fixed costs I could attack without changing my life much.

Let me use honest, average-ish numbers:

• Drive 15,000 miles a year (close to the U.S. average)
• Car gets 28 mpg (close to average for what's on the road)
• Gas costs $3.50 a gallon

That's about $1,875 a year in gasoline. Just gas.

Now say I carpool with one other parent — there's a guy two streets over who works near me — twice a week, for a 15-mile-each-way commute. That's 30 miles a day × 2 days × 50 weeks = 3,000 miles I'm not driving. At 28 mpg and $3.50, that's about $375 a year saved on gas alone.

But it stacks. The miles I don't drive also mean:

Less wear on the car. AAA puts total operating cost — fuel, maintenance, tires, depreciation — around 18 cents a mile for a sedan. Skipping 3,000 miles saves roughly another $540.

Possibly cheaper insurance. A lot of insurers have "low mileage" tiers under 7,500 miles a year. Worth a phone call I'd been putting off.

Time. Not money, but real. Two mornings a week I'm not white-knuckling the wheel — I can answer email, or just not be the one driving.

Realistic total from a modest two-day-a-week carpool: somewhere around $900–1,200 a year. If I switched to transit instead and a pass cost $80 a month, it nets out around $1,000–1,400 a year even after paying for the pass.

When I showed Jenna the number, her reaction was the same as mine: that's a real number. That's a chunk of a car payment. That's the kids' fall activities. I'd been leaving it on the table for years because I never multiplied it out.

Why I won't tell you it "lowers prices"

You'll see other sites run the math the other direction: "if 10% of commuters carpooled, demand drops and gas falls X%." In a textbook, sure. In real life it falls apart, because gasoline demand is famously inelastic in the short run — when prices spike, people don't drive much less, and when they fall, people don't drive much more. The pump price gets set far upstream, by refiners and global crude, not by what my zip code does on a Tuesday.

So I'll keep it simple and honest: carpooling doesn't change the sticker price at the pump. It changes the total bill you pay across a year. That bill change is about a thousand bucks. That part is real, and it's the part I can actually control.

What I'm doing this week

If gas is the line you most want to go after:

1. Track your real miles. Your car has a display. Use it. The "I think I drive about..." number people give is almost always 20% off — mine sure was.
2. Run the math on one possible carpool partner. A coworker or neighbor on a similar route, two days a week. That's the realistic version. Occasional weekend rideshares don't move anything.
3. Check your state's gas tax. If you're in a high-tax state and travel, fueling up on longer trips out of state genuinely adds up.
4. If you're EV-curious, the same 15,000 miles costs roughly $600 a year in electricity instead of $1,875 in gas at average rates. Whole different math, but worth running before you assume it's not for you.

I can't talk crude markets down. Neither can you. But I called the neighbor about the carpool, and I'm calling the insurance company this week. That's a thousand dollars I get a say in.

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Numbers here reference EIA gasoline data and AAA's annual "Your Driving Costs" report. See the methodology page for sources.