Mont Belvieu propane spot price

Mont Belvieu propane is $0.919/gal as of Oct 6, 2026, the latest daily FOB spot price EIA publishes for the hub. The chart above plots every daily price since Jul 9, 2021, and the table compares the latest figure with a week, four weeks and a year ago and with the 5-year median for the date.

Mont Belvieu is a small town in Chambers County, Texas, east of Houston, sitting on top of a salt dome. The caverns washed out of that dome hold the largest concentration of natural gas liquids storage in the world, and the fractionators, pipelines and export docks built around them make the place the physical center of the US propane market. Propane arriving from gas processing plants across Texas, the Midcontinent and the Rockies is separated out, stored there, and then either shipped by pipeline to domestic markets or loaded onto ships at Gulf Coast terminals for buyers overseas.

Because so much physical volume changes hands there, Mont Belvieu is the price the rest of the market quotes against: this FOB spot number is the US wholesale propane benchmark, the reference price every regional rack and delivered price is ultimately a markup over. Supply contracts around the country are written at a differential to it, futures and options settle against it, and the inland hub at Conway, Kansas is usually quoted as a spread to it rather than on its own terms. The number on this page is EIA's daily spot price in dollars per gallon, free on board at the hub, which means it is the value of barrels sitting at Mont Belvieu and carries none of the pipeline tariff, terminal fee, trucking or dealer service standing between the hub and a residential tank.

Inside the hub, traders also price propane by the storage system holding it. OPIS, the price-reporting agency whose daily assessments ICE and CME propane futures settle against, publishes TET propane (the original Texas Eastern storage location, now owned by Energy Transfer and also quoted as LST, for Lone Star), non-TET propane (Enterprise Products Partners' Mont Belvieu storage) and Other Non-TET (Targa's storage). The labels name a place, not a grade of fuel. The prices usually move together, but they can split by cents a gallon when one system's export dock or pipeline backs up. EIA publishes one Mont Belvieu series and its definition names only the location, so treat this page's number as the hub-level benchmark rather than either OPIS assessment; Mont Belvieu TET vs non-TET propane explains the labels.

Retail is a different market on a different clock. The residential price EIA surveys through the winter includes everything the hub number leaves out, and it moves slowly: dealers buy on contract, pre-buy ahead of the season and carry inventory, so a hub move takes weeks to reach a delivery ticket and rarely arrives in full. The residential-minus-hub table above tracks the distance between the two. Two forces move this price alongside winter weather: the pace of US export loadings on the Gulf Coast, on US propane exports, and the inventory behind them, on Gulf Coast propane stocks.