This Is the State With the Highest Gas Tax

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 30, 10:30AM EDT

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This Is the State With the Highest Gas Tax — © MasaoTaira / iStock via Getty Images

The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline has soared to over $4 nationwide. This broke a record that has stood since 2008 and was triggered by crude oil prices that have risen above $110 a barrel. Crude was $58 per barrel a year ago. Unfortunately, these prices may not drop soon.

The primary trigger of the run-up in the price of crude is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian oil has been sanctioned, which takes a huge amount of supply off the market. Globally, there is no ready supply for this shortage.

Gas prices can be affected by several factors. Among these are crude prices, refinery capacity and transportation costs. Another major component of what a gallon of gas costs is federal and state taxes. In light of the staggering rise in the price of gas, some states may roll back what they collect, which averages about $0.50 a gallon across all states now.

To determine the state with the highest gas tax, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data on state gas taxes in January 2022 from the American Petroleum Institute. These are different from state to state, and even from city to city. Even as gas prices have soared nationwide, there are still dozens of major metropolitan areas in which gas prices are well below $4 per gallon.

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The state with the highest gas tax is California. Here are the details:

State gas tax: 68.2 cents per gallon
Average gas price as of March 17, 2022: $5.79 per gallon (the highest)
State taxes as percentage of gas price: 11.8% (fifth highest)
Annual miles traveled per driver: 11,020 miles (14th fewest)

Data on total state gas taxes did not include the federal gas tax of 18.4 cents per gallon. Supplemental data on average prices per gallon for regular gas by state came from AAA. Prices were current as of March 17, 2021. Annual vehicle miles traveled per driver was calculated using data on total vehicle miles traveled in 2020 from the Federal Highway Administration and an estimate of the number of licensed drivers in 2020 based on that agency’s data for the number of licensed drivers in 2019, and 2020 population data came from the U.S. Census Bureau.

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Click here to see which states have the highest and lowest gas taxes.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.