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Expect Your Home Heating Oil Will Rise $1,000 This Year

Families filling their heating oil tanks this winter are about to feel a budget shock that government inflation figures barely capture. The gap between official numbers and what people actually pay at the pump and the furnace may be large…

By Douglas A. McIntyre

Published October 8, 2026, 9:40am ET · 1 min read

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Home heating oil prices are expected to rise 34% this year to $5.26 per gallon. For a 240-gallon tank delivery (about the safe-fill national average) and average consumption over four months, the dollar price will be roughly $960 higher than last year. That’s for three full tanks of use over the season. That’s at an average outside temperature of 30 degrees.

No wonder people worry about inflation

This is an example of why CPI isn’t a good measure of how most people live. Gas prices are up 40% to about $4.36 based on today’s price. Diesel, which gets passed up the supply chain, is $6.26, up 71% year over year.

Supply chain issues, plus drought and flood depending on the location, have cut grain production. Beef cattle eat grain.

A mismatch exists between what the government says inflation is doing and what many families experience. No wonder consumer sentiment has dropped 13% in the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers. Those surveyed think inflation will be at 4.6% at the end of this year. The CPI puts that figure closer to 3.2%.

The chances of a recession early this year or next depend largely on the inflation rate. Oil and gas costs may well rise. Taken together, home heating oil and gas could push winter spending up by $1,200 year over year.

Those numbers rob consumers of discretionary income. That, in turn, batters GDP.

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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