Seattle gas prices in real terms, July 2026
A gallon of regular cost $5.24 at the Seattle pump in July 2026. The series is deflated to the latest month, so that is also this month’s figure in today’s money; what moves is what the old prices are worth. A year ago’s gallon comes to $4.72 in today’s dollars, which puts this month up 11.1% in real terms.
The gap between the two lines is the whole post. The nominal line keeps setting records because dollars keep getting smaller; the real line says whether a tank of gas is actually taking more out of a Seattle paycheck than it used to. Measured that way the record is $6.54, set in June 2008 — today’s price is 20% below it. The cheapest gas of the series, in the same money, was $2.06 in February 1999. The record-at-the-pump post made that comparison at May’s high; this is the same pair of lines a couple of releases on.
Deflated with the CPI-U, so “today’s dollars” means the latest period the price index covers. Prices are a monthly average for the Seattle CBSA, not a spot price at any one station, and Washington’s fuel taxes and its clean-fuel standard are inside the number — this is what people paid, not what the crude cost.
One gap in the record: BLS collected this price for Seattle from 1978, stopped in the late 1980s, and only resumed in January 1998. The chart starts where the series resumes rather than drawing a straight line across the missing decade.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics average-price series, regular unleaded gasoline, Seattle CBSA, via FRED APUS49D74714, drawn from the January 1998 resumption — BLS published no Seattle price between the late 1980s and then. Real series deflated by CPI-U to the latest available period. Auto-generated each build.