The Price of Premium Gasoline Is Going Up, And There's No Easy Cure

If you’ve noticed the gap between the cost of regular and premium gas getting wider, you’re not imagining things. Premium gas is getting disproportionately more expensive. Sadly, there isn’t necessarily one specific cause to the issue — Russia’s war in Ukraine, the impacts of environmental regulations and limited refining capacity all appear to be factors, meaning there’s not likely to be a quick cure.

Bloomberg reports that the average difference in price between regular and premium gas is now about 75 cents in the U.S., which is 15 percent higher than it was this time last year. At least it’s not as bad as it is in the U.K, where the difference between premium and regular gasoline is 25 percent higher than it was a year ago. And odds are good that things will only get worse as we head into the summer.

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“The current record seasonal strength in octane pricing doesn’t portend well to a smooth transition to summer-specification gasoline,” Callum Bruce, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, told Bloomberg.