New Zealand fuel prices
New Zealand imports all of its refined fuel, so pump prices blend the global oil price, the exchange rate, shipping, and excise duty and levies, currently around 77c a litre, plus GST and the carbon cost of the Emissions Trading Scheme. See where every cent of a litre goes.
Diesel carries lower excise at the pump because most users pay Road User Charges separately.
Why the exchange rate matters
Crude oil in NZD terms vs the NZD/USD exchange rate. A weaker dollar makes every barrel more expensive, even when oil is flat.
*Click on the indicator key to hide or show indicators
Source: Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ)The Real Economy (opens the full chart page)
Fuel demand & imports
Real data from MBIE's Oil Statistics, quarterly back to 1974: how much petrol New Zealand actually uses, and how much of it arrives by ship.
million litres, national, per quarter
million litres, national, per quarter
What this means
- About 77c of every litre of petrol is tax: fuel excise, ACC levy, and GST on top of everything. That tax share is why pump prices never fall as far as crude.
- New Zealand's fuel is refined offshore, so shipping costs and the Singapore benchmark (MOPS) matter more than West Texas or Brent headlines alone.
- When the NZ dollar weakens against the US dollar, imported fuel costs more: a 10 cent fall in the exchange rate adds roughly 10–15 cents per litre at the pump.
Fuel demand and imports are live from MBIE Oil Statistics. Pump prices, crude oil, the exchange rate and taxes are now live too, from MBIE's weekly fuel price monitoring (parsed from a manually-downloaded file while automated access to it remains blocked - see methodology).