How propane is priced: from Mont Belvieu to your tank

Propane reaches a home tank through a stack of costs, and the price on the invoice is the whole stack, not the commodity alone. It starts as a wholesale hub price, mostly set at Mont Belvieu in Texas or Conway in Kansas, then picks up the cost of moving the gas by pipeline, rail and truck, and finally the retailer's own costs: delivery in small loads, the tank, service calls and margin. Each layer is a real cost, which is why the delivered residential price commonly runs two to three times the hub price, and wider still when the hub is cheap.

Where propane comes from

Propane is a natural gas liquid, pulled out of raw natural gas at processing plants, with the rest coming off crude oil at refineries. The US Energy Information Administration puts roughly 80 percent of US propane supply at natural gas processing as of recent years, up from about 60 percent before 2010, with refineries making the balance. That matters for price because propane is a byproduct. It gets produced as a consequence of gas and oil activity, on a fairly steady schedule, whether or not the weather is cold.

The two hubs set the base

Wholesale propane in the US keys off two trading hubs. Mont Belvieu, east of Houston, sits on the Gulf Coast next to the petrochemical plants and the export terminals, and its salt caverns hold the largest concentration of natural gas liquid storage in the country. Conway, in Kansas, is the Midwest's counterpart. EIA calls these the two major hydrocarbon gas liquid trading hubs. The daily Mont Belvieu spot price is the number the rest of the chain builds on.

The chart above is the live Mont Belvieu spot, the ground floor of every propane price in the country. Everything else in this guide is a markup over that line.

From hub to rack to tank

The hub price is not what a dealer pays and it is nowhere near what a household pays. Two markups sit in between. The first is the wholesale or rack price: the cost to move propane from the hub through pipeline, rail and terminal to a regional loading rack where dealers fill their trucks. The second is the retail markup, the retailer's cost to run bobtails, own and service customer tanks, carry inventory and take the risk of a cold winter.

EIA is direct about why the residential number sits so far above wholesale: propane is delivered by truck in small quantities to homes with limited on-site storage, and the price carries the cost of that truck delivery on top of pipeline and rail transport to bulk distributors. It adds that the delivered price varies with the volume dropped, the frequency of delivery, how far the dealer is from supply and how much competition there is locally. Households farthest from the supply hubs generally pay the most.

Worked example: one week, hub to tank

Take the last week the price survey ran, dated March 30, 2026. Mont Belvieu spot had traded at 72.4 cents a gallon through the prior week, with a brief spike to 83.5 cents on the survey Monday itself. The US wholesale propane price that week was $1.041 a gallon, so moving the gas from the hub to the regional rack added roughly 30 cents over where the hub had been trading. The US residential price was $2.674 a gallon.

The spread charted above is that last layer: the residential price minus the wholesale price, about $1.63 a gallon in that final survey week. That is the retailer's whole world in one number, delivery, tanks, service and margin. Stack it up and the delivered price was about 3.7 times the low-70s hub. The multiple runs wide precisely because most of the retail markup is a fixed cost per gallon that does not shrink when the commodity does. When the hub is cheap, the delivered price looks like a bigger multiple, not because anyone marked it up further but because the fixed costs are a larger share of a smaller number. Since that week the hub has fallen further, to about 68 cents on July 6, 2026 on the live spot page above, while the residential survey is paused until October.

Why two houses pay different prices

The same logic explains why neighbors can pay different prices. A customer who takes a full bobtail load pays less per gallon than one who takes a quarter load, because the delivery cost is spread over more gallons. A customer who owns their tank is a different cost to serve than one who rents. Distance from the bulk plant, the number of dealers competing in a county and the type of contract all move the final number. None of that shows up in the hub price, and all of it shows up on the bill.

The Fill Line reports the hub, wholesale and residential prices as EIA publishes them, and explains how the stack fits together. It does not forecast where any of them go next and it never tells a reader when to buy, lock or fill.

The Fill Line is a free weekly read of the public propane numbers. Stocks, the Mont Belvieu spot and the weekly supply balance update year round; the state price survey resumes in October. One email a week on what moved.