The national average price of regular gasoline hit $4.52 a gallon in May 2026, its highest level since the summer of 2022 and just 49 cents below the all-time U.S. record. The surge is not the product of a refinery accident or a Gulf Coast hurricane. It traces directly to a diplomatic breakdown between Washington and Tehran that has put the world’s most important oil chokepoint, the Strait of Hormuz, at the center of a pricing crisis felt at every American gas station.
Station-level data tracked by GasBuddy and AAA confirmed the $4.52 figure in the second week of May. The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail series posted a national average of $4.500 for the week ending May 11, up nearly five cents from the prior week. For the driver of a midsize sedan with a 14-gallon tank, a fill-up now costs roughly $63.
Trump rejects Iran’s counteroffer and reveals a halted military strike
President Trump dismissed Iran’s latest negotiating proposal in blunt terms. “I didn’t even finish reading it,” he told reporters, calling the multi-point counteroffer “a piece of garbage,” according to Washington Post reporting that also captured his assessment that the ceasefire is now “on massive life support.”
Hours later, Trump disclosed in a social media post that he had ordered, and then called off, a military strike against Iranian targets. He said he paused the operation because Gulf allies had requested space for “serious negotiations” to continue. The sequence rattled oil markets. Brent crude futures jumped as traders priced in the risk that a miscalculation could further restrict tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply passes each day, according to EIA estimates.
The full text of Iran’s counteroffer has not been released by either government. Iranian officials have defended their response publicly, framing it as consistent with national security interests, but the specific demands, whether related to enrichment timelines, sanctions relief, or military guarantees, remain unknown outside classified channels. That gap leaves analysts relying on anonymous briefings and regional media to reconstruct what went wrong at the negotiating table.
How close prices really are to the record
Pinning down the exact all-time high depends on which federal snapshot you use. An EIA analysis of 2022 pricing places the national weekly peak at $5.01 per gallon in June of that year. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics, drawing on the same underlying EIA data, rounds the figure to roughly $5.03 in its own data spotlight. The discrepancy likely comes down to rounding conventions and whether the number reflects a weekly average or a single-day reading.
Either way, the current national average sits between 49 and 53 cents below the peak. That is a gap of roughly 10 percent, meaningful but not insurmountable if crude prices keep rising. For context, the run-up to the 2022 record took about six weeks from the $4.50 range to the $5.01 peak, driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a global scramble for non-Russian barrels.
The gas-tax proposal and what it would actually save
Trump has floated suspending the federal gasoline tax as a relief measure while the Strait of Hormuz remains restricted, according to the same Washington Post report. The federal excise tax on gasoline is 18.4 cents per gallon, unchanged since 1993. A full suspension would save that sedan driver about $2.58 per fill-up, or roughly $10 a month for someone filling up weekly.
That is not nothing for a household stretching a paycheck, but it is a fraction of the increase drivers have already absorbed. The national average has climbed more than 80 cents per gallon since January 2026, meaning the tax holiday would offset less than a quarter of the price increase to date.
Congress would need to act; the president cannot unilaterally suspend a legislated excise tax. Previous gas-tax-holiday proposals, including one pushed by the Biden administration in 2022, stalled on Capitol Hill over concerns about lost Highway Trust Fund revenue, which funds road and bridge maintenance nationwide. A handful of states, including New York and Connecticut, have at various points enacted their own temporary suspensions of state-level fuel taxes, but those measures did not require federal approval and covered only the state portion of the tax.
Why the connection from Hormuz to the pump is hard to isolate
The link between a restricted Strait of Hormuz and higher American gas prices is real but less direct than it appears. The United States imports relatively little crude from the Persian Gulf compared with buyers in Asia. Oil, however, is priced on a global market. When traders fear that millions of barrels a day could be delayed or rerouted, benchmark prices rise everywhere, and those increases eventually reach U.S. refineries and then U.S. gas stations.
Several other forces are pushing prices at the same time. Seasonal demand typically rises heading into summer as Americans drive more. Refinery maintenance outages in the Midwest and Gulf Coast tightened gasoline supply through April. OPEC+ production decisions also play a role; the cartel’s output targets influence how much spare capacity exists to absorb a disruption. And state-level taxes and blending requirements mean that a driver in California is paying a very different price than a driver in Mississippi.
No federal agency has published a model isolating the Hormuz effect from these overlapping factors in real time. That means confident claims that “the Iran crisis added X cents per gallon” are not supported by available data.
What happens if diplomacy stays stalled through June 2026
Two data points will matter more than headlines in the coming weeks. The first is the EIA’s weekly retail gasoline report, published every Monday. If the national average crosses $4.75 in that series, the 2022 record will be within a single bad week’s reach. The second is any verifiable movement on the diplomatic front: a published framework, a named envoy, or a concrete change in Hormuz shipping patterns reported by tanker-tracking services such as those compiled by MarineTraffic.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, drawn down heavily during the 2022 crisis and only partially refilled since, remains a tool the White House could deploy. But an SPR release addresses short-term supply psychology more than it changes the underlying math of a major chokepoint under threat.
Without progress on either track, the current trajectory points toward more pain at the pump. The 2022 spike proved that American gas prices can move fast once the supply picture deteriorates. That episode also showed prices can fall just as sharply when supply fears ease. Right now, the diplomacy that could calm those fears is, by the president’s own description, barely alive.
