Market Data

What the Industrial Natural Gas Price Is, and Why It Sits Above Henry Hub

A plain-English guide to the EIA series factories actually pay: what $/Mcf covers, how it is measured, and the delivery, transport, and demand charges that separate it from the wellhead spot price.

The U.S. industrial natural gas price, the average delivered cost to manufacturers, is $4.90/Mcf (per thousand cubic feet) as of the latest EIA reading in Apr 2026, and it typically runs above the Henry Hub spot benchmark because it bundles interstate transport, local distribution, and demand charges on top of the raw commodity. Henry Hub currently trades at $3.29/MMBtu; converted to the same energy units, the delivered industrial price runs about $4.73/MMBtu, roughly $1.44 over the hub.

Units first: Mcf, MMBtu, and therms

The EIA quotes this series in dollars per thousand cubic feet (Mcf), a volume. Markets and most large-user contracts quote in dollars per million Btu (MMBtu), an energy content. The bridge is the heat content of pipeline gas: one Mcf carries about 1.037 MMBtu, so dividing the delivered $4.90/Mcf by 1.037 gives roughly $4.73/MMBtu for apples-to-apples comparison with Henry Hub's $3.29/MMBtu. Utility bills for smaller meters often use therms instead; ten therms make one MMBtu. Getting the units straight matters because the most common benchmarking error in plant energy reviews is comparing a $/Mcf bill against a $/MMBtu market price and concluding, wrongly, by about 4%, that the utility is overcharging.

The bill stack: commodity, transport, distribution, demand

What separates the delivered price from the hub price is a stack of real services. The commodity itself is priced off a trading hub, Henry Hub in Louisiana is the national reference, though regional hubs can sit above or below it (that spread is called basis). Interstate pipeline transportation moves the molecules from producing basins to the city gate, billed as reserved capacity whether fully used or not. The local distribution company then carries the gas the last miles and adds its regulated delivery charge, metering, and, for firm-service customers, demand charges that pay for peak-day capability. Large plants connected directly to interstate pipelines skip the distribution layer, which is why the biggest industrial users pay closer to hub-plus-transport while smaller factories on utility service pay the full stack. The EIA series averages all of them, which is what makes it the honest benchmark for what industry actually pays; it is currently down about 7.7% from a year ago.

U.S. industrial natural gas price, Apr 2026 (EIA): $4.90/Mcf. Archived range: $4.41 in Sep 2025 to $8.43 in Feb 2026. Henry Hub spot is $3.29/MMBtu as of Jul 6, 2026.

The hub price is the cost of the molecule. The delivered price is the cost of the molecule at your burner tip, and only the second one belongs in your cost sheet.

What one Mcf costs a plant: a worked example

A plant with a steady process-heat load of 10,000 Mcf a month, a heat-treat operation, a food processor with ovens and boilers, a mid-size foundry, spends about $49,000 a month on gas at the current $4.90/Mcf. Every $0.50/Mcf move in the delivered price shifts that bill by $5,000 a month, which is why the trend on this series (currently falling) belongs on the same dashboard as scrap rates and labor hours. When benchmarking, compare your all-in bill divided by Mcf consumed against the live EIA number: paying materially above the national average is normal for small meters and interruptible-averse operations, but a persistent gap is the signal to review transport elections, basis exposure, and whether firm service is buying more insurance than the process needs.

Use the natural gas cost per batch calculator to turn burner ratings, cycle times, and the live delivered price into a per-batch fuel cost. Cost your gas per batch

Published 2026-07-13.