AAA recorded an all-time high average retail diesel price of $6.45 a gallon on September 18. EIA had the on-highway average at $6.29 on September 14, up $2.55 from a year earlier.
Those are pump prices. The index that decides what a fuel escalation clause actually pays out is a different number, and it’s worse: refinery and terminal diesel in the Producer Price Index is up 77.8% between August 2025 and August 2026.
What the August PPI Shows
First, a date correction that matters. The material price data circulating this week is the August PPI, which BLS released on September 10. AGC and ABC published their analyses the same day. None of the price figures are from September 18.
By AGC’s reading of the BLS series, liquid asphalt is up 16.4% year over year. Aluminum mill shapes are up 27.3%, steel mill products 23.4%, copper and brass mill shapes 20.9%.
ABC’s analysis puts overall construction input prices up 1.2% month over month in August and 8.9% year over year, with nonresidential input prices up 1.2% and 8.8% on the same basis. Its list of subcategories running above 10% annually includes iron and steel, softwood lumber, switchgear, and copper wire and cable.
Not everything moved up. Crude petroleum rose 5.2% in August and unprocessed energy materials 1.5%, but natural gas fell 11.6%.
What Contractors Say They’re Doing
An Equipment World reader poll in June found 81.5% of responding contractors changing business strategy over diesel, 40.3% raising bid prices or hourly rates and 31.1% adding fuel surcharges. That’s a self-selected online poll with no published sample size, so read it as a temperature check rather than a measurement.
An AGC member survey found 55% had projects canceled, postponed or scaled back in the past six months, with about a third of those attributing it to rising costs. Same caveat: self-selected membership survey, no margin of error.
Average hourly earnings for construction production and nonsupervisory workers rose 5.0% over the same twelve months, which means fuel isn’t moving alone.
The Index Is Not the Pump
Two different diesel measures are doing work in this story and they don’t mix. The 77.8% is a refinery-level index. The $6.29 and $6.45 are retail, from two different sources on two different days. Blending them produces a number that isn’t true.
For anyone writing escalation language this quarter, the refinery index is the one to peg to, because it moves first and publishes on a schedule. On fuel-heavy scopes the gap between an index-based escalation and the actual fuel bill is where the margin goes. That’s paving, earthwork and long haul, which is most of what a corridor job like the I-24 Southeast Choice Lanes is made of over a 50-year concession.
One attribution note. AGC and ABC are trade associations with an advocacy interest in these figures. The percentages belong to their analyses of BLS data, not to BLS.