What is in the price of a litre of fuel? Product, excise and VAT in every EU country

In the European Commission's Weekly Oil Bulletin for 5 October 2026, the average EU pump price was €2.01 a litre for Euro-super 95 petrol and €2.15 for diesel. Of the petrol price, 53.6% (€1.08) paid for the fuel and everything that gets it to the pump; 29.6% (€0.59) was excise duty and other indirect taxes; 16.8% (€0.34) was VAT. For diesel the split was 61.6%, 21.8% and 16.6%. Taxes were 46.4% of a litre of petrol and 38.4% of a litre of diesel; for petrol the share ranges from 30% in Poland to 56% in Malta.

This article breaks the pump price of both fuels into three slices for each of the 27 EU countries, for that one dated week, and explains why the slices differ and how quickly a change in the oil price reaches the pump.

The three slices

The Commission publishes two prices for every country and week: the price at the pump, with duties and taxes, and the price without them. It also publishes a sheet of the VAT rates and excise duties in force. Subtracting gives three slices of the pump price:

• Product and margin is the price without taxes. It covers what the ECB's fuel-price blog separates into the cost of crude oil, refining costs and margins, and distribution costs and margins (transport, marketing and running the station).
• Excise and other taxes is a fixed amount per litre set by each government, together with the "other indirect taxes" the Commission lists next to excise. The Energy Taxation Directive sets minimum rates of €359 per 1,000 litres for unleaded petrol and €330 for gas oil (diesel), which the Commission's excise page still lists in October 2026. The duties sheet used here nevertheless shows lower excise in some countries in the week below, Sweden for example, and this article does not reconcile the two.
• VAT is a percentage of the price including excise, so it is paid on the excise as well. The ECB describes it as "a fixed percentage of the pre-tax consumer price and excise duties".

The split in every EU country, week of 5 October 2026

Shares of the pump price, in per cent, sorted by the combined share of excise and VAT, highest first (ties on the unrounded values). Shares are rounded to one decimal, so a row can add to 99.9 or 100.1. The EU average is the Commission's own consumption-weighted average, split with the same weights. † marks the countries where the Commission's duty sheet and its price files do not agree (see "How the shares are calculated").

Petrol (Euro-super 95)

Diesel

Source: European Commission, Weekly Oil Bulletin: prices with taxes and prices without taxes for the week of 5 October 2026, and the Oil Bulletin duties and taxes sheet. Shares are euroflation's calculation.

What the tables show

Diesel is less taxed than petrol almost everywhere. In the Commission's duties sheet the excise on diesel is lower than on petrol in 25 of the 27 countries, and before tax diesel is the dearer fuel in 26, and the product-and-margin slice is a larger share of the diesel price than of the petrol price in all 27 (61.6% against 53.6% on the EU average). Why diesel costs more than petrol in Europe explains the other half: before tax, diesel is the dearer fuel.

The excise per litre differs several times over. Per the Commission's sheet, petrol carries €0.84 a litre of excise in the Netherlands, €0.72 in Finland and Denmark and €0.21 in Sweden (Denmark and Sweden converted from kroner and kronor at the Commission's rate for that week). On diesel, Italy is highest at €0.62 and Sweden lowest at €0.14. A low pre-tax price lifts the tax share even when the excise is middling: Malta, where petrol costs €1.34 a litre and the price before tax is the lowest in the EU (€0.59), has the largest tax share at 56.3%, although its excise (€0.55 a litre) is only the tenth highest.

The shares are not constants. A year earlier, in the bulletin of 6 October 2025, the product slice was only 43.3% of the EU petrol price (€0.70 of €1.62) and taxes were 56.7%; for diesel it was 48.7% and taxes 51.3%. Taxes were then €0.92 a litre of petrol and today they are €0.93, although the pre-tax price rose by 37 cents (from €0.701 to €1.076). Excise does not move with the oil price and VAT moves only in proportion to the price, so when the product slice grows, the tax share shrinks. Governments also changed rates in between. The ECB wrote on 31 July 2026 that several countries had cut excise duties temporarily during the 2026 oil shock, as they did after Russia invaded Ukraine, and that in most cases the latest measures expired in June; it also reports that the average VAT rate in the euro area was 18.9% in the first week of April, against 20.7% at the end of February. The Commission's sheet gives the date since which each rate applies. In the week above, for example, the duties sheet lists Poland's VAT on fuel at 8% (dated 1 March 2026; it was 23% before), although the history workbook records a return to 23% from 17 August 2026 (see the method note).

How fast oil price changes reach the pump, and why the percentage is smaller

The ECB's July 2026 blog, written by ECB economists who state that the views are their own, traces how an oil shock reaches the pump. Brent rose from late February to a peak of $138 a barrel in early April, and the price of refined diesel rose by more than 90% over the same period; the average euro-area pump price of diesel rose by around 34%, from €1.63 to €2.18 a litre. Three points from the blog help read those numbers.

• Pass-through is fast and complete. In general the ECB finds it "within one or two months" and complete: a rise of €0.10 a litre in the crude price usually becomes a rise of €0.10 in the pre-tax pump price. VAT then adds its percentage on top. The EU-average VAT share of 16.8% of the petrol pump price in the tables is a rate of about 20% on the price before VAT, so 10 cents more before tax is about 12 cents more at the pump (euroflation's arithmetic).
• The fixed part of the price dampens the percentage change. Excise is a fixed amount per litre, and the ECB counts VAT with it as a "largely fixed" share of the price, so a given percentage rise in crude is a much smaller percentage rise at the pump. A footnote adds that an elasticity of around 0.3 (a 1% rise in oil prices lifting retail prices by 0.3%) is in line with a short-term forecasting model for euro-area energy inflation, though the elasticity changes over time.
• Refining margins can amplify the move. In 2026 refined diesel rose by more than crude did: the ECB puts the pump-price rise at €0.55 a litre against €0.35 for crude, and says refining costs and margins went from €0.10 a litre of diesel in February to €0.26 in March (monthly averages). That margin sits inside the product slice of the tables above.

On the way down the evidence is less settled. The ECB writes that earlier euro-area studies found no asymmetry or were inconclusive on whether pump prices fall more slowly than they rise (the "rockets and feathers" question), that more recent work suggests pass-through may be slower on the way down, and that this could reflect lags in replacing inventory, uncertainty about whether a crude price move will last, or weaker competition when costs fall. It adds that further analysis is needed to establish whether and why this happened in the recent shock.

How the shares are calculated

For each country and fuel, the pump price with taxes is P and the price without taxes is N, both in euros per 1,000 litres as the Commission publishes them (it converts non-euro currencies). With the country's VAT rate v from the duties sheet, VAT is P − P ⁄ (1 + v); excise and other taxes are P ⁄ (1 + v) − N; the product and margin slice is N. Each is divided by P. The EU average uses each country's 2024 consumption of the fuel, from the bulletin's consumption sheet, as weights; they reproduce the Commission's published EU averages for that week exactly.

As an internal-consistency check, the excise and other taxes derived this way were compared with the duties sheet (excise plus other indirect taxes, converted at the exchange rate of the week). In 23 of the 27 countries the two agree to within 2% of the pump price. Cyprus, Germany and Ireland (both fuels) and Spain (petrol) do not, and are marked †: the Commission's two files disagree, and the shares shown are what its price files imply. For Poland the history workbook lists a VAT rate of 23% from 17 August 2026, while the duties sheet and the price files are consistent with 8%, and the shares use 8%. Poland carries about a tenth of the EU weights: at 23% the EU average would read 53.6 / 28.8 / 17.6 for petrol and 61.6 / 20.9 / 17.5 for diesel. All prices are what member states report to the Commission as the price most frequently charged, and the bulletin is published on Thursday for the Monday before.

The tables are a snapshot, not a series. The live prices, with their weekly and yearly changes, are on the fuel prices page, the petrol ranking and the diesel ranking.

The short version

• Taxes were 46.4% of an EU litre of petrol and 38.4% of a litre of diesel in the week of 5 October 2026; for petrol the share ranges from 30% in Poland to 56% in Malta.
• Excise is a fixed amount per litre and VAT is a percentage, so when the oil price rises the tax share falls: 56.7% a year earlier for petrol, 46.4% now.
• In that week diesel carried less excise than petrol in 25 of 27 countries, and the fuel slice was a bigger share of the diesel price in all 27.
• In general a rise in the crude price reaches the pre-tax pump price within one or two months, cent for cent; VAT adds about a fifth on top, and because excise is fixed the percentage move at the pump is smaller. Whether prices fall as fast as they rise is unsettled.

Figures: European Commission, Weekly Oil Bulletin (prices with and without taxes, week of 5 October 2026; duties and taxes sheet; price history), Directive 2003/96/EC, and the ECB blog "From well to pump: how fuel prices are formed" (31 July 2026). Quotations are from the English originals. euroflation is an independent tracker and is not affiliated with the European Commission, the ECB or the EU. Nothing here is financial advice.