Why diesel costs more than petrol in Europe — refineries, imports and taxes

In the European Commission's Weekly Oil Bulletin for 5 October 2026, a litre of diesel cost €2.15 at the average EU pump and a litre of Euro-super 95 petrol €2.01, a premium of 14 cents for diesel. Diesel was the dearer fuel in 24 of the 27 member states; only Denmark, Greece and Malta had it cheaper. That is not the normal order of things. Averaged over the whole of 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025, EU diesel cost less than petrol; only 2022 and 2026 so far turned it round.

The reasons sit in three places: what a refinery can make from a barrel of crude, where Europe gets the diesel it does not make, and how each country taxes the two fuels. The 2026 premium also reflects a supply shock from the war in the Middle East and attacks on Russian refineries, which the section on crack spreads describes. This article takes the reasons in turn, with the data and the source of every step.

Today's prices, side by side

The table reads the same Commission data as the fuel prices page and changes every week. The figures quoted in the text below are those of the bulletin for 5 October 2026.

A recent flip, not a law of nature

The Commission's EU average, weighted by consumption, shows how recent the diesel premium is.

Average of the weekly EU figures published for each year, prices with and without duties and taxes. Source: Commission Weekly Oil Bulletin, price history.

Look at the last column. Before tax, diesel is usually the dearer fuel, though in 2021 the premium was close to zero. In the first bulletin of October it was dearer than petrol before tax in 26 of 27 countries in 2019, 14 in 2020, 22 in 2021, 26 in 2022, 26 in 2023, 23 in 2024, 24 in 2025 and 26 in 2026; the only country where it was cheaper in 2026 was Malta. What flips at the pump is tax. In the same bulletins diesel was dearer at the pump in 7 countries in 2019, 1 in 2020, 5 in 2021, 23 in 2022, 13 in 2023, 8 in 2024, 9 in 2025 and 24 in 2026.

In the week of 5 October 2026 the pre-tax premium was 24.8 cents (€1.324 against €1.076 per litre). Duties and taxes (excise duty, other levies and VAT) took €0.93 out of a litre of petrol and €0.82 out of a litre of diesel, so diesel's tax advantage of 10.6 cents covered less than half of its pre-tax premium. Why diesel is the dearer fuel before tax is the subject of the rest of this article.

Refineries make a mix, and Europe's mix does not match its tanks

A refinery gets a range of products from every barrel and can shift that mix only within limits. The EIA explains that crude oil is heated and separated by boiling point, then converted by further processes into gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products. Complex refineries can upgrade heavier streams into more valuable products, and some have a degree of flexibility between gasoline, distillate and jet fuel. But "the limited ability of refineries to shift yields from one product to another can sometimes allow product prices to diverge." The EIA's own example: in 2022 the wholesale price of US diesel averaged about 50 cents a gallon above gasoline (front-month futures at New York Harbor), yet US refinery yields moved toward diesel only from 29.7% to 30.3%.

European refineries make more diesel than petrol. In 2024, Eurostat's energy balance shows EU refineries turning out about 210.7 million tonnes of gas oil and diesel oil against 100.2 million tonnes of motor gasoline (Eurostat, nrg_cb_oil). US refineries are the reverse: the EIA reports 19.57 gallons of finished motor gasoline and 12.47 gallons of distillate fuel oil per 42-gallon barrel of crude in 2023.

Even so, European roads burn far more diesel than petrol:

Source: Eurostat, energy balances (nrg_cb_oil) and trade by partner (nrg_ti_oil, nrg_te_oil); non-EU trade is the total minus the flows between member states. Road use includes 12.5 million tonnes of biodiesel blended into diesel and 5.7 million tonnes of biogasoline blended into petrol, which refinery output does not, so the rows do not add up: non-road use, transfers between products and stocks also enter the balance.

The petrol surplus goes abroad: 37.1 million tonnes of motor gasoline left the EU in 2024, 10.0 million of it for the United States. The diesel shortfall is made up from outside: 38.3 million tonnes of road diesel came in from outside the EU against 22.6 million tonnes sent out.

How did a continent end up making a mix that does not match its demand? The Commission's 2014 impact assessment says demand for middle distillates such as diesel and jet fuel grew faster than supply between 1990 and 2008, leaving the EU dependent on trade to balance them. It quotes the industry body Europia: tax incentives and structural changes in transport had turned a petrol-to-diesel ratio of about 2:1 twenty years earlier into about 1:3 by the early 2010s. Eurostat's road-fuel balance for 2024 is about 1:2.4 (74.4 against 175.2 million tonnes). Eurostat's overview of oil statistics lists the switch from gasoline to diesel among the technical changes behind the long-term fall in EU oil demand, and shows road transport in 2024 running 63.2% on gas and diesel oil and 26.9% on motor gasoline.

The Russian gap, and the ban of February 2023

For years the missing diesel came more from one supplier than from any other. In 2021 Russia sent 18.8 million tonnes of road diesel to the EU, 46% of the 41.2 million tonnes the EU imported from outside the bloc (Eurostat, nrg_ti_oil). The EIA, using Vortexa data, puts Russia's share of north-west Europe's seaborne diesel imports at 53% between October 2021 and September 2022.

Council Regulation (EU) 2022/879 of 3 June 2022 began to end that. It inserted Article 3m into Regulation (EU) No 833/2014, which prohibits buying, importing or transferring Russian crude oil and the petroleum products listed in its Annex XXV. Contracts concluded before 4 June 2022 could still be carried out until 5 December 2022 for crude oil and until 5 February 2023 for refined products. Crude delivered by pipeline was exempted for the time being, because of what the regulation's recital 16 describes as a "specific dependence" of several member states on pipeline crude, with "no viable alternative supply in the short term". Since 21 January 2026 a second rule, Article 3ma, added by Regulation (EU) 2025/1494, also bans imports of petroleum products made in a third country from Russian crude. Importers need not prove the origin of the crude for products from the partner countries in its Annex LI: Canada, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States, joined in October 2025 by Australia, Japan and New Zealand and in 2026 by Liechtenstein.

The effect showed once the transition ended. Russia still sent 18.1 million tonnes in 2022, 41% of the EU's road diesel imports from outside the bloc; its share then fell to 3% in 2023 and to practically nil in 2024. Saudi Arabia (8.2 million tonnes), the United States (7.8), India (5.4), the United Arab Emirates (3.3) and Kuwait (2.9) were the largest suppliers in 2024. The EIA drew the consequence in 2023: Europe's loss of Russia "as a significant diesel fuel supplier means it will need to import from more distant regions". The ECB's Economic Bulletin 2/2023 noted a "sharp increase" in the diesel crack spread after the invasion and found that, about six weeks after the ban, European crack spreads were still "higher than before the onset of the war".

The crude oil behind the diesel

The grade of crude matters as well as the refinery. The EIA classifies crude by density (API gravity) and sulphur content. Brent, the most widely used global crude benchmark in the EIA's description, is priced off light, sweet streams produced in the North Sea (its basket has also included US WTI Midland since 2023). Russia's main export blend, Urals, is a medium sour crude of 30 to 32 degrees API and 1.3% to 1.5% sulphur, according to the EIA's country analysis. Lighter crudes need less processing to make high-value products such as gasoline and diesel. Heavier and sourer crudes need more equipment: in the EIA's words, processing heavy-sour crude "requires additional refinery units—including crackers, cokers, and hydrotreaters—to yield light products", and sour crude "requires more complex refinery processing to meet low-sulfur fuel specifications".

Europe's refineries are not all alike. The 2014 impact assessment says north-west Europe had a higher share of simple refining capacity than the Mediterranean or central and eastern Europe, and that complex refining is what enables higher yields of valuable products "such as diesel". Many inland refiners ran Russian crude; the EIA noted in 2016 that Mediterranean Urals, "a Russian crude oil many inland European refiners process", had been on average more than $2 a barrel cheaper than Brent for most of that year. The IEA's 2022 fact sheet said Russia supplied roughly 20% of European refinery crude throughputs, with the Druzhba pipeline system carrying about 750,000 barrels a day to refiners in eastern and central Europe.

By Eurostat's count, Russia supplied 25% of the EU's crude oil imports in 2021 (112.4 of 444.4 million tonnes), including 34% of Germany's (27.7 of 81.3 million tonnes). In 2024 the figure was 2.5%, with the United States (70.0 million tonnes), Norway (65.9), Kazakhstan (52.3), Saudi Arabia (34.7) and Libya (34.4) the largest suppliers. Hungary and Slovakia, which kept the pipeline exemption, still took 87% and 86% of their crude from Russia.

A refinery cannot swap one crude slate for another overnight: its room to change what it makes is limited by its configuration and the crude grades it can take. The EIA says refiners can shift yields among gasoline, distillate and jet fuel but are "limited by refinery configuration, crude oil inputs grades, and the high costs of modifying refinery infrastructure". An example came in March 2026. After Druzhba deliveries to Hungary and Slovakia were suspended on 27 January 2026, the two governments warned the Council that their refineries were "originally optimized for Russian crude oil" and that, with the forced transition to other crude types, "diesel production in Hungary and Slovakia will inevitably decrease temporarily" (Council document 7207/26). They added that central and eastern Europe consumes more diesel than it produces. None of the sources cited here measures how much a change of crude adds to the diesel premium; this is the clearest case.

The IEA's commentary on Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries shows how slowly the units that make diesel can be restored. It notes that secondary units such as hydrocrackers and hydrotreaters "increase yields of lighter products" such as diesel and "improve their quality", and that repairs to such units, particularly after serious damage, can take six to eight months on average, against typically one or two weeks for minor damage to a distillation unit.

Crack spreads: what diesel earns over crude

A crack spread is the price of a refined product minus the price of crude oil, a rough indicator of the gross margin a refinery earns before its costs. The EIA publishes daily New York Harbor spot prices and a Brent spot price; they are a US benchmark, not the European market, but they show the shape of the shift.

Source: EIA daily spot prices: Europe Brent, New York Harbor ultra-low sulfur diesel and conventional regular gasoline, converted at 42 gallons a barrel; euroflation's calculation, mean of the days on which all three prices exist. Differences are computed from unrounded values, so they can differ by 0.1 from the rounded columns.

In 2021, unusually, the gasoline crack was the larger of the two, by $2.4 a barrel. In 2022 the diesel crack was $26.9 a barrel above the gasoline crack, against $4.0 in 2024, and the daily diesel crack peaked at $116.5 a barrel on 11 May 2022, about nine months before the ban on refined products took effect; the ECB links the rise to fears of losing Russian supply after the invasion and notes that spreads narrowed around the ban itself. In 2026 the gap is larger still ($30.5 on the annual mean). The IEA's September 2026 Oil Market Report says refining margins in the Atlantic basin reached record levels in August "led by sharply higher diesel cracks", that diesel and gasoil account for nearly 30% of global oil demand, and that net diesel and gasoil exports from the Gulf averaged 390,000 barrels a day in August, just over a quarter of pre-war levels, with Russian product exports almost halted after Ukrainian attacks on its refineries. "Pre-war" here means before the war in the Middle East that began this year; the ECB attributes the surge in refined fuel prices to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which cut global refined-product exports, and to Ukrainian attacks on Russian refining capacity. Gulf and Russian exports together were 1.6 million barrels a day lower than in February, when they made up almost 45% of global seaborne diesel and gasoil trade. In a separate commentary the IEA reports diesel cracks above $100 a barrel in September in both the US Gulf Coast and north-west Europe.

For euro-area drivers the ECB's July 2026 blog puts a figure on it: refining costs and margins contributed €0.13 to a litre of diesel in the last week of February, in line with the average since 2021, and €0.35 in the first three weeks of July, against €0.23 for petrol. The ECB's September 2026 staff projections say refined transport fuel prices have risen by significantly more than crude, with "elevated EU-specific refining margins for diesel and, to a lesser extent, for petrol".

Taxes: the part that works in diesel's favour

Most governments tax a litre of diesel less than a litre of petrol. The Energy Taxation Directive sets EU minimums per 1,000 litres of €359 for unleaded petrol and €330 for gas oil from 1 January 2010. In the Commission's duties sheet for the week of 5 October 2026 the excise on diesel is lower than on petrol in 25 of 27 countries, equal in Belgium (€0.600 a litre) and higher in Lithuania (€0.500 against €0.466). The gap is widest in Greece and the Netherlands, where diesel carries about 29 cents a litre less excise than petrol (€0.410 against €0.700, and €0.550 against €0.840). The ECB's blog puts the euro-area average excise since 2021 at €0.52 a litre for diesel and €0.66 for petrol. VAT is a percentage of the price before VAT, excise included, so it takes more from the dearer fuel.

The effect shows in the pump comparison. In Greece, where the excise gap is widest, a litre of diesel costs €0.04 less than a litre of petrol although its price before tax is €0.26 higher. In Belgium, where both fuels carry the same excise, the pre-tax premium reaches the pump with VAT added and diesel is €0.39 dearer. Governments also change rates at short notice. The ECB notes that several countries cut excise duties temporarily during the 2026 oil shock and that most of the latest measures expired in June. Some ran on: Council decisions authorised Sweden to tax below the EU minimum until 30 November 2026 and Croatia until 31 January 2027, so the October figures above include temporary rates, and a decree can change the gap between the two fuels as a crack spread can.

How the whole pump price splits into product, excise and VAT in every EU country is in What is in the price of a litre of fuel?.

How to read the diesel premium

• Look at the price before tax. It leaves out the tax differences, so it shows more clearly what the market charges for diesel against petrol, and the Commission publishes it every week with the pump price.
• Ask what the country taxes. A pre-tax premium of 26 cents is a 4-cent discount at the pump in Greece; one of 32 cents is a 39-cent surcharge in Belgium.
• Supply adjusts slowly, but not never. Refinery units and crude slates are hard to change, yet the ECB notes that past margin spikes usually faded as refiners changed their product mix, and that this one may fade more slowly. Markets also price a ban before it starts.
• Compare like with like. The cracks above are New York Harbor prices; the pump prices are the Commission's.

Live prices for every country are on the fuel prices page, the diesel ranking and the euro-area diesel page; the German page is an example of a single country.

The short version

• Diesel is dearer than petrol at the pump in 24 of 27 EU countries (bulletin of 5 October 2026), but on the EU average it was cheaper in 2021, 2023, 2024 and 2025.
• Before tax, diesel is usually the dearer fuel: the EU premium was 24.8 cents a litre in that week, and taxes on diesel were 10.6 cents lower than on petrol.
• Europe makes less diesel than it burns: in 2024 it imported a net 15.7 million tonnes of road diesel and exported a net 33.0 million tonnes of petrol.
• The Russian supply, 46% of imports from outside the EU in 2021, was banned from February 2023; replacing it meant buying from further away, and many refineries had been running Russian crude (Hungary and Slovakia say theirs were optimised for it).
• Crack spreads show the squeeze: the diesel margin was far above the gasoline margin in 2022 and again in 2026, when the IEA reported record Atlantic basin margins after the Gulf and Russian diesel exports fell.

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Figures: European Commission (Weekly Oil Bulletin, prices with and without taxes and duties and taxes, history to 5 October 2026), Eurostat (energy balances and trade, nrg_cb_oil, nrg_ti_oil, nrg_te_oil), the EIA, the IEA, the ECB, the Council of the EU and Council Regulations (EU) 2022/879 and 2025/1494. euroflation is an independent tracker and is not affiliated with the European Commission, Eurostat, the ECB or the EU. Nothing here is financial advice. Quotations are from the English originals.