Gasoline Prices by Country (2026): The Subsidy vs Tax Divide

Fill up your tank in Tripoli and it costs almost nothing. Do the same in Tel Aviv or Amsterdam and you will pay well over a hundred times as much for the same litre of petrol. Fuel is a globally traded commodity priced off the same barrels of crude, yet what drivers actually pay at the pump varies more wildly than almost any other everyday good on Earth. This map shows why, and the answer is politics, not geology.

Using the latest weekly data from GlobalPetrolPrices.com (13 July 2026), we mapped the retail price of gasoline in every country that reports it. The world average is $1.47 per litre. Around that average sits a spread so extreme it can only be explained by two opposing government choices: subsidy at the bottom and tax at the top.

The world gasoline price map

The pattern is unmistakable once you know what you are looking at. The palest countries, where a litre costs less than 50 cents, form a belt of oil and gas producers across North Africa, the Gulf and Central Asia, plus Venezuela. The darkest countries, above $2.00, cluster in Western and Northern Europe. Everywhere in between pays something close to the untaxed cost of the fuel plus a moderate levy.

The cheapest countries: fuel below cost

The ten cheapest places to buy petrol on the planet are, without exception, oil and gas producers that sell fuel to their own citizens below what it costs to produce or export. Libya ($0.02), Iran ($0.03) and Venezuela ($0.04) are effectively giving it away. Behind them come Angola, Kuwait, Algeria, Turkmenistan, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, all under $0.65 a litre. These subsidies are enormous: Libya spends roughly 16% of its entire economy on energy support, and Algeria and Egypt around 10% each. Cheap fuel is treated as a social contract, and unwinding it has triggered riots more than once.

The most expensive: tax at the pump

At the other extreme, the priciest countries are wealthy importers that layer heavy excise duties and value-added tax on top of the fuel. In this week’s snapshot Israel tops the world at $3.24 a litre, narrowly above the usual leader Hong Kong ($2.68), then Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, Greece, Norway and France, all above $2.19. Across the European Union, tax accounts for about 52% of the pump price, more than the cost of the petrol itself, a deliberate policy to raise revenue and discourage driving.

Look up any country in the searchable table below, in both dollars per litre and per gallon.

Why the US is the rich-world outlier

One wealthy country breaks the pattern completely. The United States, at $1.12 a litre, is cheaper than every country in the European Union and even cheaper than middle-income Brazil, India and China. America is not an unusually large oil subsidiser; it simply taxes fuel very lightly. Federal and state fuel taxes are a small fraction of European excise duties, so US drivers pay close to the raw, untaxed cost of the gasoline. It is the clearest single illustration on the map that the pump price is a tax-and-subsidy story, not an oil story.

A note on the data

These are retail pump prices as of 13 July 2026, refreshed weekly by GlobalPetrolPrices.com and converted to US dollars at prevailing exchange rates. Two caveats: the numbers for a handful of crisis economies (Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe) reflect official or subsidised rates and can understate what drivers actually pay on parallel markets. And this is a moving target: with oil prices climbing through mid-2026 on the back of the Strait of Hormuz crisis, the tax-heavy importers at the top of the list are already passing higher crude costs through to the pump, while the big subsidised producers are quietly absorbing the shock on their national balance sheets.

Related Maps

Gasoline Prices in the EU The same metric zoomed in on Europe: a weekly-updated map of petrol and diesel prices across all 27 EU member states.

Gas Prices by State Fuel prices across the United States, mapped state by state, showing how much Americans pay from California to the Gulf Coast.

Strait of Hormuz Crisis 2026: US and Iran Trade Strikes The oil-chokepoint crisis pushing crude prices higher in mid-2026, and why it feeds straight into the pump prices on this map.

Mapped: Household Price Level Index by Country Fuel is one line of the bill: how the overall cost of living compares across countries, from Switzerland to the cheapest.