# Diesel Hit $6 in Mississippi. Here Is Who Pays First, From the Delta Harvest to Jackson's Fuel Bill. > Mississippi diesel averaged $6.05 a gallon on Friday, up 84 percent in a year, while the national average set another record at $6.44. The bill lands in a specific order: farmers in the middle of harvest, owner-operators who pay for fuel before they get paid for the load, then a city that just passed a budget with no room in it. *Economy · By Jackson Wire Staff · September 19, 2026* A gallon of diesel in Mississippi cost $6.05 on Friday, according to AAA, up 38 cents in a week and $2.77, or 84.5 percent, from a year ago. The national average hit $6.44 the same day, a record, and the Energy Information Administration's weekly on-highway survey put the Gulf Coast at $6.03, the cheapest region in the country. Cheapest is not cheap. On March 4, before the war, AAA had Mississippi diesel at $3.545. The state's price has risen $2.51 a gallon, about 71 percent, in six and a half months. The cause is not a shortage of crude oil in the ground. It is the machinery that turns crude into diesel and the shipping that moves it. The United States and Israel struck Iran on Feb. 28, and Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz to most shipping within days. Vessel traffic through the strait fell about 95 percent, according to Al Jazeera's reporting, and Brent crude went from about $80 a barrel on March 2 to more than $100 by March 12. The International Energy Agency called it the largest supply shock in the history of the oil market and organized a 400 million barrel emergency release on March 21. Brent sat near $103 this week. Diesel has outrun crude for a second reason. In January the European Union banned imports of fuel refined from Russian crude in third countries such as India and Turkey, and the affected refineries' shipments fell 69 percent in the following three months, according to reporting on the sanctions. With less foreign diesel available, American refineries have exported more. The EIA's September outlook says U.S. distillate inventories, the category that includes diesel, will fall below 100 million barrels this month for the first time since 2003 and stay below the five-year low through much of 2027. The premium a refiner earns turning a barrel of crude into diesel, the crack spread, hit an all-time high of $102.20 a barrel on Aug. 17. The EIA's forecast, revised upward this month, has diesel averaging $5.55 a gallon in the fourth quarter of 2026 and $4.40 across 2027. Both numbers were raised by more than 30 cents from the August outlook. That is the agency's way of saying the pump price already exceeds what it expected, and that relief, when it comes, will be slow. The first people to pay are the ones who cannot wait. Mississippi's soybean and cotton harvest is under way, and diesel is the fuel of every combine, grain cart, and truck to the elevator. Reuters reported Friday that farm fuel costs are running about $7 an acre higher for soybeans than last year. Mississippi growers told USDA they intended to plant about 2.3 million acres of soybeans this year, according to Farm Progress, which puts the state's added soybean fuel bill in the range of $16 million on that estimate alone, before corn, cotton, rice, and the drying and hauling that follow. Sean McDonald, a Jones County poultry and row crop farmer, told WJTV his fill-ups have gone from about $650 to $1,200, and that some dry-weather soybeans will not be worth the fuel it takes to cut them. "But it's still the fact that we have to," he said. Truckers come next, and the smallest operators come first among them. An owner-operator pays for diesel at the pump and collects for the load weeks later. Ronnie Tran told WDAM in May, when Mississippi diesel was $4, that filling his tanks had gone from $600 or $700 to $1,000 or $1,200. At Friday's price the same tanks cost roughly half again as much. Large carriers pass the cost through: most freight contracts carry a fuel surcharge pegged to the EIA's weekly number, and FedEx Freight's surcharge for Sept. 9 through 15 was 55.4 percent of the base rate. Overdrive, the owner-operator trade publication, reports spot freight rates at an all-time high, which is what happens when fuel costs push marginal trucks off the road. Then the cost reaches everything that arrives by truck, which in Mississippi is nearly everything. The surcharge travels from the carrier's invoice to the wholesaler's to the grocer's shelf. Reuters' Friday report on farmers carried the same warning in its headline: food prices may rise. The City of Jackson is already in the line. In April, WLBT reported that the city bought 16,059 gallons of fuel for $61,528.63 in the billing period ending April 12, about $3.83 a gallon, with the police department, fire department, and JTRAN the largest users. Mississippi pump prices had jumped $1.15 a gallon, 45 percent, between Feb. 27 and April 22. At April's volume, every additional dollar on a gallon adds about $16,000 a week to the city's fuel bill, or roughly $835,000 a year. Much of the police fleet burns gasoline, which has risen less than diesel, so the exposure is concentrated in the fire trucks and the buses. That exposure arrives after the budget closed. The council held the millage flat at 63.03 mills on Sept. 3 and adopted a general fund budget that the Wire previously reported is 16.8 percent smaller than the prior year, with Public Works taking the deepest cut. Fuel is not a line the council can debate away. When it runs over, the money comes from somewhere else in the same department. The state's own fuel tax is a small piece of the price, and it went up anyway. Under the 2025 Build Up Mississippi Act, the diesel excise tax rose from 21 to 24 cents a gallon on July 1, with another 3 cents scheduled for July 2027. At $6.05, the tax is about 4 percent of the pump price, and this year's increase is half a percent of it. Seventy-four percent of the new revenue goes to the Mississippi Department of Transportation. Nobody in the Legislature has proposed suspending it, and the search of this year's bills turns up no diesel relief measure. School districts opened the year with diesel near $5.60, NPR reported in late August, and bus fuel is another budget line set months before the price moved. Jackson Public Schools and the metro districts set their transportation budgets on last year's prices. The difference will show up at midyear amendments. What's next: The EIA publishes its weekly on-highway diesel price every Monday, and the Sept. 21 figure will show whether Friday's $6.44 national record holds. The agency's next Short-Term Energy Outlook is due Oct. 6 and will revise the fourth-quarter forecast again. The Mississippi diesel excise stays at 24 cents until July 1, 2027, when it rises to 27. The Jackson City Council's next regular meeting is Sept. 22, and the first fuel-driven budget amendment, if one is coming, would surface in the monthly claims dockets Public Works and the Fire Department bring to the council. The question worth asking the city is how many gallons of diesel JTRAN and the Fire Department burned in the last four weeks, and what the budget assumed per gallon when it passed. --- _Sources: AAA state and national averages (Sept. 18); U.S. Energy Information Administration weekly on-highway diesel prices and the September 2026 Short-Term Energy Outlook as reported by Land Line and Rigzone; Reuters (Sept. 18) on farm fuel costs; WJTV; WDAM (May 9); WLBT (April 28) on City of Jackson fuel purchases; Farm Progress on Mississippi soybean acreage; FedEx Freight's published fuel surcharge table; Overdrive; NPR (Aug. 27); Al Jazeera and the IEA on the Strait of Hormuz; Transport Topics and Mississippi Today on the 2025 fuel tax law; prior Wire reporting on the city budget. The $16 million soybean figure is a Wire estimate: Reuters' national $7-per-acre increase applied to Mississippi's intended 2026 soybean acreage._ --- [The Jackson Wire](https://www.thejacksonwire.com/) · [Read on the web](https://www.thejacksonwire.com/article/diesel-six-dollars-mississippi-who-pays-first-jackson-budget-harvest)