Fuel Prices on Six Continents (2026): What a Litre Costs Around the World

A litre of petrol is the same product almost everywhere on Earth — refined from the same crude, burned in the same engines. Yet what you pay for it varies by a factor of nearly a hundred. FuelWide now tracks pump prices across 130+ countries on six continents — Europe, North America, Asia, and as of this week Africa, Latin America and Oceania — all normalised to euros per litre so the numbers actually compare. Here's what the world pays.

The world at a glance

The pattern is no accident. Taxes, not oil, set the order. European pumps carry the heaviest excise duties and VAT on the planet, which is why the EU average is roughly double the US price. At the other end sit producer states that subsidise fuel as a public benefit — and that's where the world's extremes live.

The cheapest fuel on Earth

The bottom of the world table is a lesson in petro-politics. In Libya, petrol officially costs about €0.03 a litre — effectively free, a subsidy the state has defended through a decade of upheaval. Venezuela is the same story at roughly €0.04, though scarce supply means the real price at informal sellers can be far higher. Angola (€0.28), Algeria (€0.30) and Egypt (€0.31) round out Africa's subsidised producers, while in the Gulf, Kuwait (€0.32) and Saudi Arabia (€0.58) keep pump prices a fraction of the world market.

Cheap fuel sounds like a blessing, but the fiscal cost is enormous — Nigeria's decision to end its petrol subsidy in 2023 tripled pump prices overnight and still dominates its politics. Today Nigeria sits at about €0.52/L: no longer among the world's very cheapest, and a live case study in how quickly "cheap forever" can end.

The most expensive

Hong Kong remains the world's priciest place to fill a tank at about €2.88 a litre — a deliberate policy in a city that wants fewer cars. Europe supplies most of the rest of the top tier: the Netherlands (€2.30), Denmark and Germany (around €2.10) tax petrol hard and spend the proceeds broadly.

The surprises are outside Europe. In Africa, Senegal (€1.51) and Ivory Coast (€1.33) pay near-European prices — import-dependent economies with a hard currency peg and no oil of their own. In South America, Uruguay (€1.66) out-prices most of Europe's south. And in the Pacific, New Zealand (€1.42) and the islands pay a steep logistics premium on every imported litre — New Caledonia reaches €1.48.

What it means for a real car

Averages get vivid when you put a car under them. Take a Toyota Corolla doing 19,300 km a year (12,000 miles):

• United States: about $1,300/year
• Brazil: about R$8,000/year (≈$1,430)
• Germany: about €2,680/year (≈$3,060)
• India: about ₹128,000/year (≈$1,640)

Same car, same distance — the fuel bill more than doubles depending on the flag on the pump. Every car page on FuelWide now has a "this car around the world" table that runs this maths for 15 markets in local currency, and the trip calculator prices any journey in any of the 130+ countries we track.

How we compare fairly

Cross-country price comparisons are notorious for mixing units, grades and currencies. Ours are built on three rules. Every price is a national average pump price including taxes, normalised to EUR per litre at ECB reference rates. Official weekly government bulletins (EU Oil Bulletin, US EIA/AAA, UK gov.uk, Statistics Canada) are used wherever they exist. Where no official bulletin exists — most of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania — we curate GlobalPetrolPrices.com aggregation and label it with its own confidence level, spelled out in our methodology. Averages are averages: your street corner will differ.

The full, sortable world table — every country, petrol and diesel, in € and local currency — lives at fuelwide.com/fuel-prices.