Gas Prices Today: Fact Check on Trump Claim
Meta description: Drivers pay less than under Biden and Obama? AAA and Energy Information Administration figures show a different picture before the November 3 midterms.
In gas prices today, the question facing American drivers is not only what they will pay at the next fill-up, but whether a familiar political claim about those prices stands up to the numbers. President Donald Trump has repeatedly told supporters in recent weeks that motorists are still paying less than they did under former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama. The claim has been made at campaign rallies as the country heads toward the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, and it has been repeated in different forms in different states. On its face, it sounds like a simple comparison. When the figures are laid out day by day, month by month, and administration by administration, the picture is more complicated, and in important respects it points in the opposite direction from the claim as it was stated.
That does not mean every version of the comparison fails. At their highest point under Biden, national average prices were well above the levels seen in late October. The peak matters, and it is part of the story. But a claim about what drivers are paying now, compared with what they paid across a whole presidency, cannot fairly be settled by pointing only to the worst weeks of a previous term. The daily record, the monthly averages, and the running averages for each presidency all have to be considered together. When they are, the evidence assembled by the American Automobile Association, the United States Energy Information Administration, and independent analysts shows that current prices sit above the levels that prevailed for most of Biden’s time in office, and above the monthly peak recorded under Obama.
This article sets out that evidence in full, explains where the claim does and does not hold, and places the dispute in the wider context of an election in which the cost of living, and fuel in particular, has become one of the most sensitive issues for voters. It draws on published fact checks, motoring organisation data, and official energy statistics. Where a figure is a monthly average, a weekly reading, or a single day’s national average, that distinction is kept clear, because the choice of measure changes the answer.
Trump News Today: What Was Actually Claimed
The claim at the centre of this fact check was made in plain language at rallies, and it is worth stating it exactly as it was reported before testing it. At a rally in Rome, Georgia, Trump told supporters that voters are still paying lower than Biden and Obama. At an earlier rally in Ohio, he put the same point in a different form, urging supporters to remember that their gas prices are lower than when Biden was president. The Georgia and Ohio remarks were not isolated asides. The comparison with Biden has been repeated several times in the past month, according to published fact checks, and it has been made while national prices have been running above four dollars a gallon.
The timing matters. The remarks came as Americans were paying an average of more than four dollars a gallon, a level that has persisted for months, and as the midterm campaign entered its final days. Fuel costs are visible in a way that few other prices are. Drivers see them on large signs every day, they pay them weekly, and they can compare them easily with what they remember paying a year ago. That visibility is one reason the claim has attracted so much attention, and one reason a fact check can be carried out with unusual precision. Unlike many political arguments, this one can be tested against a daily national average that is published, archived, and available for comparison across presidencies.
Trump has also argued, in the same speeches, that prices will come down, and that the country is benefiting financially from higher-priced energy exports. Those are separate arguments about the future and about the wider economy, and they are not the subject of this check. The question here is narrower and more testable: are drivers, at the time the claim was made, paying less than they did under Biden and Obama, in the sense that an ordinary listener would understand those words? On the evidence of the daily and monthly records, the answer is no for most of Biden’s presidency, and no for Obama’s monthly peak as well.
Gas Prices Today: The Latest National Averages
The most recent national figures reported in late October put the scale of the current price level beyond doubt. According to AAA, the national average price of gasoline was 4.29 dollars a gallon on Monday, October 26. That was a rise of 1.23 dollars from the same date a year earlier. The following day, October 27, the AAA national average was 4.26 dollars a gallon, compared with 3.05 dollars on October 27, 2025. In other words, over the course of a year, the national average had risen by roughly one dollar and twenty cents, even before the usual state-by-state variation is taken into account.
Those two readings alone do not settle a comparison with a previous presidency, but they establish the starting point. A driver filling a tank in late October 2026 was paying substantially more than a driver filling the same tank in late October 2025. The increase is also consistent with the longer trend since Trump returned to office. On January 20, 2025, the day he returned to the White House, the AAA national average was about 3.12 dollars a gallon. By mid-October 2026, when the Ohio fact check was published, the national average was about 4.36 dollars on one day and about 4.34 dollars the next, roughly 39 percent higher than on inauguration day. That rise, over less than two years, is the backdrop against which the claim about Biden and Obama must be judged.
State figures reported in the same period underline that the national average was not an outlier driven by a single region. On October 26, the average in Pennsylvania was 4.44 dollars a gallon, and in New Jersey it was 4.17 dollars, according to AAA figures cited in published reporting. Those state averages sit on either side of the national figure, which suggests a broad-based elevation in prices rather than a local spike. A regional refinery issue in the Great Lakes was reported to have pushed prices up in that area during the same week, even as prices fell in a majority of states, but the national average remained above four dollars throughout.
The Biden Comparison: Most Days Were Cheaper
The sharpest test of the claim comes from the daily record under Biden. Biden served for 1,460 full days as president, from January 2021 to January 2025. On how many of those days was the national average higher than the level recorded on the day of the Ohio rally in mid-October 2026? According to a CNN fact check that used AAA figures, the answer is 76 days. That means that on about 95 percent of Biden’s days in office, the national average was lower than it was on that October day. Put another way, a driver on that October day was paying more than drivers paid on roughly nineteen out of every twenty days under Biden.
The same pattern holds for the following day. The national average on the Tuesday after the Ohio rally was about 4.34 dollars a gallon. The number of Biden days on which the average exceeded that level was 77. Again, that leaves the overwhelming majority of Biden’s presidency below the current level. The 76 and 77 days in question were not scattered randomly across four years. All of them fell in May, June, or July 2022, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of that year sent global energy prices sharply higher. The last time under Biden that the national average exceeded the October Tuesday level was July 25, 2022, almost two and a half years before Trump returned to office.
That concentration in a single summer is crucial to understanding why the claim can sound plausible while still being misleading. If a speaker picks the single worst moment of a previous presidency and compares the present with that moment, the present will look cheaper. The peak national average under Biden was about 5.02 dollars a gallon on June 14, 2022, according to AAA, and the highest recorded monthly average under Biden was 5.03 dollars in June 2022, according to the Energy Information Administration. Both figures are well above the late-October 2026 levels. Trump could therefore accurately say that gasoline is cheaper today than it was at its highest point under Biden. What he said, in the form reported, was broader than that. He said drivers are paying lower than when Biden was president, without limiting the comparison to the peak. Judged as a general statement about Biden’s presidency, the daily record contradicts it.
The Ohio state figures tell a similar story. On the Monday of the Ohio rally, the state average was about 3.87 dollars a gallon, and on Tuesday it was about 3.85 dollars. During Biden’s term, the Ohio average was lower than those levels on about 90 percent of days. On inauguration day in January 2025, Ohio drivers were paying about 3.10 dollars on average. The October figures were about 25 percent higher on Monday and about 24 percent higher on Tuesday than that inauguration-day level. The last time under Biden that the Ohio average exceeded the October Tuesday level was November 8, 2022, more than 26 months before Trump returned to office. The state picture, in other words, mirrors the national picture: a brief period of very high prices in 2022, followed by a long period in which prices were lower than they are now.
The Obama Comparison: A Lower Monthly Peak
The comparison with Obama is, if anything, clearer. The highest monthly average price recorded under Obama was 3.96 dollars in May 2011, according to the Energy Information Administration. That is the peak month across eight years in office. It sits below the late-October 2026 national averages of 4.29 dollars and 4.26 dollars, and below the mid-October figures of about 4.36 dollars and 4.34 dollars. It also sits below the highest average monthly price recorded so far under Trump in his current term, which the Energy Information Administration puts at 4.60 dollars in May 2026.
That monthly-peak comparison is important because it removes any argument about daily fluctuations. Even if a speaker chooses the single most expensive month of Obama’s presidency, current prices are higher. The same point can be made with longer-run averages. Across Obama’s eight years, the average price calculated from official data and reported in recent analysis was 2.969 dollars a gallon. Across Trump’s first term, the equivalent average was 2.476 dollars. Those long-run averages are not directly comparable as a measure of what a driver pays on a given day, because they cover different economic conditions, different global oil markets, and different periods of war and peace. They do, however, show that the claim that current prices are lower than under Obama cannot be sustained by pointing to a typical Obama-era price level either. The typical level was lower, and the peak month was lower as well.
It is worth pausing on why the Obama comparison might have entered the argument at all. Obama’s presidency included a period of high prices in 2011, when global oil markets were unsettled, and it is easy to remember that period as one of expensive fuel. Memory, however, is not a reliable guide to averages. The monthly record shows that even that high point did not reach the levels seen in the spring of 2026 or in late October 2026. A claim that rests on a remembered sense of expensive fuel in an earlier era therefore fails when it is checked against the archived monthly data.
Inflation Report: Running Averages Tell the Same Story
Beyond daily and monthly peaks, analysts have also compared the running average for each presidency as a whole. That measure smooths out short spikes and gives a sense of what a typical driver paid over the full period to date. According to weekly figures from the Energy Information Administration and analysis reported in late October, regular gasoline has averaged 3.458 dollars a gallon since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. That figure, for the first time in the current term, moved narrowly ahead of the 3.455 dollars averaged across Biden’s four years in office, from January 2021 to January 2025. The difference is small, three-tenths of a cent, but the direction is significant: the current term’s average is no longer below Biden’s full-term average. It has moved above it.
A fairer like-for-like comparison, lining up the first 91 weekly readings of each presidency, is kinder to the current administration, but it still does not support the claim as stated. Over the first 91 weeks of Biden’s administration, from January 2021 to October 2022, prices averaged 3.517 dollars a gallon. That period includes the 2022 spike, which pushed the early Biden average up. The current term’s average of 3.458 dollars sits below that early-Biden figure, but that is a comparison of an early, spike-affected slice of one presidency with a longer, later slice of another. It is not the same as saying that drivers today are paying less than they did under Biden in general, and it does not change the daily finding that prices were lower on about 95 percent of Biden’s days than they were on the October rally days.
The weekly reading that pushed the running average over the line was itself striking. The government’s latest reading, published on a Tuesday in late October, put the national price at 4.269 dollars a gallon for the week of October 26. That weekly figure sits far above the full-term average of 3.458 dollars, which illustrates how much prices have risen in recent months. A running average moves slowly, because it includes many earlier, lower weeks. A single high week does not transform it overnight, but when high weeks accumulate, the average follows. The late-October data show that process under way.
Why Prices Rose: War, Markets, and the 2022 Spike
No fact check of fuel prices is complete without explaining why prices moved as they did, because the causes differ sharply between the two periods being compared. Under Biden, the highest prices were caused largely by a foreign war that the United States opposed. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted global oil and gas markets, sent prices spiking around the world, and produced the June 2022 peak of about 5.02 dollars a gallon. That spike was global, it affected many countries at once, and it faded as markets adjusted, even though prices remained elevated for a time.
Under Trump in his current term, published reporting links the recent rise to a different war: the war with Iran that began earlier in 2026. Analysts and fact checkers have noted that the peak under Trump came largely because of a war he chose to start, in the framing used in published fact checks, and that fuel and fertiliser prices, along with tariff policy, have weighed on farmers and other voters in the Midwest in particular. Oil markets have been rattled by conflict in the Middle East, and the latest weekly readings reflect that disruption. This article does not seek to adjudicate the wider merits of either conflict. The point for a price comparison is narrower: the causes of the two peaks were different, and neither peak, on its own, describes the typical price level across a whole presidency.
Other factors also affect pump prices, and they are often overlooked in political debate. Refining capacity, seasonal demand, state fuel taxes, and regional supply disruptions all move prices from state to state and week to week. The Great Lakes refinery issue reported in late October is a reminder that a national average can hide regional spikes, just as a national peak can hide a long period of lower prices. Seasonal patterns matter too. Prices often rise in spring and summer, when driving increases, and fall in winter. A comparison that takes a single week in October and sets it against a single week in June, without noting the season, will mislead in the same way that a comparison of peaks misleads.
What the Administration Has Tried to Do About Prices
Trump has not simply asserted that prices are lower than under his predecessors. His administration has also taken steps intended to bring prices down, and those steps form part of the record that voters will judge. In July, the White House promoted the launch of 25 Freedom Fuel gas stations in the north-east of the United States, all selling fuel at 3.47 dollars a gallon. The stations were presented as a direct attempt to offer cheaper fuel in a region where prices had been high. Trump has also previously pressed fuel retailers to lower prices at the pump, accusing them of price gouging at a time when oil prices were starting to fall, and he has pushed Congress to pass legislation that would allow sales of higher-ethanol gasoline.
Those measures have not, on the published evidence, brought the national average down to the levels seen for most of Biden’s presidency. The Freedom Fuel price of 3.47 dollars, while below the national average in late October, was a localised offer at a limited number of stations, not a national price. The pressure on retailers and the ethanol proposal are longer-term levers, and their effects, if any, would show up over months rather than days. The administration has also, according to published reporting, pulled virtually every lever available to it in an effort to lower prices before the election, including steps taken by Republican leaders in several states to cut fuel taxes. That effort is itself evidence that the administration regards high prices as a political problem, whatever the public claim about comparisons with previous presidencies.
Looking ahead, analysts are cautious about a rapid fall before the election. Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, wrote in an October 26 blog post that gas prices are unlikely to decrease significantly before Election Day on November 3, despite the measures taken by Trump and by state leaders. He also noted that with the national average for gasoline likely to remain above four dollars a gallon, and diesel above six dollars heading into the election, the relief motorists and policymakers have been hoping for remains elusive. That assessment, made a week before polling day, sets a realistic expectation for voters: even if prices ease in some states, a sharp national fall before Tuesday is unlikely on the evidence available.
US News Today: How Voters Are Responding
Fuel prices do not exist in a vacuum. They feed directly into how voters judge a president’s handling of the economy, and the polling evidence in the run-up to the midterms shows that judgement is, for now, negative. According to an October 8 poll from Navigator Research, 76 percent of registered voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of gas prices, while only 20 percent approve. The same poll found that 73 percent of registered voters heading into the November election disapprove of his handling of inflation and the cost of living, while only 23 percent approve. Those figures, reported in published analysis, suggest that the claim about lower prices is not landing with most voters, whatever its merits as a matter of arithmetic.
The disapproval figures also help explain why fuel has become such a prominent theme in the final days of the campaign. In earlier elections, fuel prices were often treated as a secondary issue, behind jobs, health care, and national security. In 2026, with the national average above four dollars, with diesel above six dollars, and with the cost of living cited repeatedly by voters in surveys, fuel has moved to the centre. Candidates in competitive states have been forced to address it directly, and the president’s own rallies have returned to it again and again. The fact check, in that sense, is not an abstract exercise. It is a test of a claim that is being made to voters who are paying the prices in question every week.
There is also a political asymmetry at work. When prices are low, a president rarely gets full credit, because voters tend to attribute low prices to global markets. When prices are high, a president often gets full blame, even when global markets are the main driver. That asymmetry may be unfair, but it is a consistent feature of American politics, and it applies to presidents of both parties. Biden faced it in the summer of 2022, when prices peaked after the invasion of Ukraine. Trump faces it now, with prices elevated after the war with Iran and with global markets unsettled. The fact check does not resolve that political question. It simply establishes what the prices were, so that voters can judge the claim on its own terms.
What Happens Next: Tuesday’s Vote and Beyond
The immediate next step is the midterm vote itself on Tuesday, November 3. Voters will not be voting on a fact check, but they will be voting in a context in which fuel prices are high, in which the president’s claim about those prices has been tested and found wanting in its general form, and in which analysts expect little significant relief before polling day. If prices remain above four dollars nationally, and above six dollars for diesel, the issue will still be live when voters cast their ballots, regardless of what happens to the national average in the days after the election.
Beyond Tuesday, the question is whether prices will fall back toward the levels seen for most of Biden’s presidency, or whether they will remain elevated while Middle East tensions persist. That will depend on factors that no single administration fully controls: global oil supply, the course of the war, refining capacity, and seasonal demand. It will also depend on domestic policy choices, including tax decisions by states, ethanol policy, and any further efforts to increase supply or to pressure retailers. Analysts will watch the weekly Energy Information Administration readings and the daily AAA averages for the first sign of a sustained fall. A single week of lower prices will not, on its own, change the running averages discussed above. A sustained fall over several months would.
For readers, the most useful habit is to distinguish between three different claims that are often run together. The first is that prices today are lower than at the worst moment under a previous president. That claim, for Biden, is true. The second is that prices today are lower than under a previous president in general, or on a typical day. That claim, for both Biden and Obama on the evidence presented here, is false. The third is that prices will fall in the future, or that a particular policy will bring them down. That claim cannot be settled by looking backward; it can only be judged when the future arrives. Keeping those three claims separate is the best defence against being misled by a comparison that picks its moment carefully.
In the end, the fact check returns a clear verdict on the claim as it was made at the rallies. Drivers in late October 2026 were not, in general, paying less than they did under Biden and Obama. They were paying more than they did on about 95 percent of Biden’s days in office, more than the monthly peak under Obama, and more than they paid on the day Trump returned to office in January 2025. The peak under Biden was higher, and that fact should not be hidden. But a peak is not a presidency, and a single summer is not four years. On the full record, the claim does not hold.
Source: Houston Chronicle