Pain At The Pump Not So Bad For Americans

But petrol is actually more affordable in the US now than it was for large parts of the late 2000s and the early 2010s.

Dividing the average national price of  US gasoline by the average hourly earnings of U.S. workers shows that, at the current price of more than $4 per gallon, Americans have to work 7.7 minutes to afford a gallon of gas.

That’s below the 10.7 minutes needed in June 2022 and almost exactly the 21st century average.

Gasoline was more affordable in the 1990s, when Americans had to work little more than 5 minutes for one gallon of gas, but looking at the past 25 years, the current price is nothing extraordinary when taking wage growth into account.