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Regular gasoline in Seattle averaged $5.73 a gallon on Sept. 22, 2026, according to GasBuddy analyst Patrick De Haan, cited by KIRO 7 and MyNorthwest — $1.27 above the national average of $4.46 that day. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s own weekly survey put the Seattle price a shade lower, at $5.692 a gallon for the week ending Sept. 21, 2026, up from $5.653 the week before. The gap between the two figures is ordinary; GasBuddy tracks crowdsourced daily prices while EIA surveys a weekly station sample, and both point the same direction: up, and well above what the rest of the country is paying.
Within Washington, King County is not just riding the statewide spike — it is driving it. AAA data reported by Axios Seattle put the Seattle-Bellevue-Everett metro average at $5.71 a gallon in mid-September 2026, about 15 cents above the Washington state average and $1.39 above the national figure. That tracks a pattern AAA had already flagged in the spring: when the state average hit a then-record $5.57 a gallon on April 30, 2026, King County was pricier still, at $5.82, trailing only a handful of smaller counties statewide, per KOMO News.
Why Seattle pays more than the rest of the country
De Haan attributed the latest run-up to a chain of overseas disruptions: strikes on Russian refining capacity, the war in Iran, and Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, all of which have pushed crude oil back into the $100-a-barrel range for the first time since July, according to AAA cited by the Spokesman-Review on Sept. 10, 2026. “It’s still very painful in Washington state,” De Haan said, per KIRO 7.
But global crude only explains part of why Seattle sits so far above the national line — it explains why prices are high everywhere, not why Washington is consistently near the top. West Coast refining capacity is tighter than the rest of the country’s, leaving Washington, California and Hawaii more exposed to any supply hiccup. Washington’s state motor fuel tax, 55.4 cents a gallon as of July 2025, is among the highest in the country and stacks with an 18.4-cent federal excise tax. On top of that sits the Climate Commitment Act’s cap-and-invest carbon market, which the state Department of Ecology says accounts for a modest share of pump prices — Ecology maintains that “state and federal regulations play a relatively small role in fuel prices” compared with supply and demand, while separately estimating the program’s broader economic impact at 1% to 3%. Critics of the program, including the fuel-tax tracking site What’s the Price of Gas, put the carbon program’s per-gallon add-on closer to 52 cents when combined with the state’s Clean Fuel Standard — a gap in estimates that reflects a genuinely contested policy debate, not a settled number either side has been able to force the other to concede.
Diesel and the harvest squeeze
Diesel has moved even more sharply than gasoline. The Washington state average diesel price reached $7.00 a gallon by Sept. 10, 2026, with Wenatchee at $7.12, according to the Spokesman-Review — up roughly $2 a gallon, or nearly 40%, from about $5.03 a year earlier. Nationally, diesel hit record highs in September 2026, up as much as 90% year-over-year in some states, De Haan told KIRO 7.
The Spokesman-Review’s Sept. 10 reporting quoted Donn Etherington, who farms two family cherry orchards totaling 62 acres south of Wenatchee, saying the roughly $2-a-gallon jump adds “more than $1,000 just for my normal consumption” for the diesel his tractors burn from a 500-gallon tank. “We’re eating that cost, unless the market conditions and retail prices go up,” Etherington said. “Our input costs are all up significantly. Labor, diesel, fertilizer, et cetera.” He added: “Unfortunately, as orchardists and farmers, we are gluttons for punishment.”
Etherington farms in Chelan County, not King — but the diesel price he’s quoting is a statewide one, and it lands on King County’s side of the ledger too, just further down the supply chain. Washington’s dairy, produce and grain growers east of the Cascades still move the bulk of their product through King County: trucked to the Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma for export, or distributed through King County-based grocery warehousing to reach Seattle-area shelves. GasBuddy’s De Haan put it plainly to KIRO 7: “Every aisle is going to be impacted in a different way with these high diesel prices” — a line about grocery stores anywhere, but one that lands first and hardest in the county with the region’s biggest ports and the most mouths to feed.
What it means locally
Neither the Port of Seattle nor King Metro has yet published fuel-surcharge or fare-impact figures tied to this specific September run-up, and this desk found no on-the-record county or port statement addressing it as of Sept. 22, 2026. What’s documented is the price gap itself: King County drivers are paying close to $1.30 more per gallon than the rest of the country, on top of a state that already carries some of the nation’s highest fuel taxes and its own carbon-pricing program — a combination state regulators and outside critics still don’t agree on how to weigh.
