Your Gas Price Could Drop to $2.50

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 27, 9:15AM EDT

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Goldman Sachs forecasts that the price of crude could decrease sharply.
In some states, gas prices have already dropped to less than $3 a gallon.

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Your Gas Price Could Drop to $2.50 — © bigtunaonline / iStock via Getty Images

After $5 a gallon gasoline prices and $100 a barrel oil at the start of the Ukraine war, both of those numbers could fall by half by next year. Goldman Sachs forecast the price of Brent crude futures contracts could decrease to the low $50s a barrel by late 2026. This is due to an expected increase in the global oil surplus next year. West Texas Intermediate crude, which is usually priced below Brent, could decline even further.

“We expect the oil surplus to widen and average 1.8 million barrels per day in 2025 Q4 (through) 2026 Q4, resulting in a nearly 800 million barrel rise in global stocks by end 2026,” the U.S. investment bank said in a client note.

Both the United States and OPEC+ are producing oil at record levels.

Gasoline prices are primarily driven by oil prices. The average price for a gallon of regular gas is $3.21 now. That is down from $3.35 a year ago. In some states, mostly those near Gulf of Mexico refineries, the price has already dropped to below $2.80 a gallon. The prices are $2.71 in Mississippi and $2.73 in Oklahoma.

The third component of gas prices, after oil and refineries, is state taxes per gallon. The tax per gallon in California, the highest, is $0.8655. The lowest is Alaska at $0.3353.

A drop in gas prices would help bring down inflation. Gasoline accounts for over 3% of the average household’s budget.

Avoid These States with the Highest 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.