Since the outbreak the US war with Iran in February, gas prices have climbed at the pump. Some estimates place the total cost of the war to US consumers and taxpayers at more than $150 billion.
Having tracked daily gas prices for the last five months, I wanted to take a closer look at how much higher gas prices have affected commuters. Using Census data on commuting patterns, Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on employment, and AAA data on daily gas prices, I find that the war with Iran cost US workers roughly $13.7 billion in additional commuting costs between February 18 and June 16, 2026, when the initial memorandum between the US and Iran was signed.
The Calculation
The data come from five separate sources.
- AAA Gas Prices. When the war began, I wrote a Python script that scraped state-level gas prices from the AAA website every day. The data are published to a Google Sheet and a series of lookup formulas deploy them to a map built in Flourish, which automatically updates every 12 hours. I calculate the daily dollar difference in gas prices from the beginning of the war on February 18 instead of year-over-year because most states saw price declines over the same period last year, meaning that benchmark would generate much higher loss numbers.
- BLS civilian labor force data. I grab state-level total non-farm seasonally adjusted labor force data from the BLS. This gives me a single estimate of total workers for each state in each month.
- Census Bureau commuting patterns. The American Community Survey collects data on commuting patterns. I take a careful approach here: I split commuters into two main groups—those who commute on their own and those who carpool. Together, those groups account for about 80% of all workers with the rest working from home (12%), taking public transportation, walking, biking, or going to work some other way. I adjust the commuting group for 2-, 3-, and 4- carpool groups such that, for example, a two-person carpool effectively carries half the cost per person.
- DOT estimates of commuting distance. These are the oldest numbers in the calculation and come from 2017. The estimates suggest that, on average, people drive around 16 miles each way for work. This clearly varies by state, and has likely changed, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. I could have used commuting time to convert to an estimate of miles driven, but I didn’t think I could do that accurately, so I stick with the 2017 national average data here.
- Fuel Efficiency. These data from the True Driving Cost website show that fuel efficiency across all vehicle types is 24.3 miles per gallon. Again, state-level data would be better, as would a reliable breakdown of the kinds of cars commuters use (i.e., do drivers in certain states use more fuel efficient vehicles?). Together, these two numbers allow me to calculate a simple constant estimate of the average round-trip fuel used on a typical American commute of 1.32 gallons–roughly 32 miles at 24.3 miles per gallon.
Now it’s a matter of putting the data together. Multiply the workforce (w) by the number of commuters (c), then by the 1.32 gallons constant, and finally by that day’s price increase (g). Sum across all 83 weekdays and all 50 states plus Washington, DC, and you get $13.7 billion. If you’re a sucker for equations:
= ∑ wms × cms × 1.32 × gds
where: m=month; s=state; d=day; and
cms = share commute alonems + share two person carpoolms 2 + share three person carpoolms 3 + share four person carpoolms 4
A quick note on the gas price data: Interestingly, and perhaps contrary to expectations, gas prices at the pump declined for most states in the early part of the war, only to accelerate quickly a couple of weeks later.
Over time, some states experienced faster growth in gas prices. Early on, Southwestern states like Arizona and New Mexico saw the biggest increases. Weeks later, Midwestern states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois lead the pack. And more recently, the Rocky Mountain states like Wyoming and Montana have seen the biggest gains. Indiana has the smallest increase over the entire period, entirely due to the Governor’s decision to pause gas sales taxes.
Are These Results Overestimated or Underestimated?
Whenever you do an analysis like this, you want to think carefully about whether the numbers are over- or underestimated. In this case, I’m confident I have an underestimate of total costs for commuters.
Fuel economy averages are likely low. I’m not confident in these data and suspect they are too high based on the growth in electric vehicles. And I don’t have state-specific numbers, so I’m wary of these estimates. But even pushing the fuel economy number from 24.3 mpg to 28 mpg—which is above the average fuel efficiency for sedans—only moves the total cost down from $13.7 billion to $11.9 billion.
Regular priced gas. I only use regular-priced gas in this exercise. A gallon of premium gas was about $0.80 more per gallon that regular-priced gas until early May but since then, the difference has risen steadily. By mid-June, premium gas cost nearly $0.84 more per gallon, on average, than regular-priced gas. Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, which includes increases in gasoline and diesel prices and goes beyond just driving, puts the total cost at more than $60 billion as of mid-June.
No behavioral effects. I don’t try to model people’s behavioral changes. Many workers probably switched from driving to public transportation, carpooling, or other forms of transportation while gas prices remain high. Based on monthly metro ridership numbers for 14 of the largest systems in the country*, year-over-year ridership grew by 0.5% in January, 2.6% in February, 7% in March, and 6% in April.
*Metros in cities: Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Maryland, Miami, NYC (MTA, Port Authority, and Port Authory Trans-Hudson), Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.
Dropping weekend commuters. I completely drop weekends (and Memorial Day) from the dataset. There are lots of people who work on the weekends, of course, but I don’t include any of them here. This is the biggest omission in the core calculation and is surely responsible for an underestimate of the total cost. If I include those days in the sample, the $13.7 billion rises to $19.6 billion.
Overall, a back-of-the-envelope calculation probably may have been sufficient for the overall number. After all, ~160M employed workers × ~73% effective car-trip share × 1.32 gal/day × ~$0.91/gal average price increase × 83 days comes to about $11.6B. But it was fun to pull the data together and get the state-specific numbers, which is what we turn to next.
What It Looks Like State by State
The burden isn’t shared equally. Large states with long commutes and high workforce populations take the biggest hit. The highest-cost state was California logged more than $1.6 billion in additional commuting costs since the war with Iran began. The lowest was Vermont and came in at roughly $25 million.
Per-capita and per-worker figures tell a slightly different story. States with higher driving rates and fewer transit alternatives–like Ohio ($108 per worker), New Mexico ($106), and Wisconsin ($105)–face a disproportionately higher costs relative to their population.
Economists have long noted that energy price shocks function as a regressive tax: lower-income workers, who are more likely to commute by car and live farther from job centers, absorb a larger share of the burden relative to their income.
Even as the war appears to continue–first, a ceasefire and now an unease increase in hostilities–most experts say gas prices will remain high until the Strait of Hormuz is fully open and some kind of lasting peace deal comes together. It’s clear—as anyone who has passed by a gas station in the last few months knows—that Americans are paying the price of the war at the pump.
