Market Data

What Mont Belvieu Propane Spot Is, and Why $0.68 Sets the Price You Pay

The EIA daily spot benchmark at Mont Belvieu, Texas is the reference price under nearly every U.S. propane supply contract. Here is how it is measured and what moves it.

The Mont Belvieu propane spot price, currently $0.68/gal as of Jul 6, 2026 and sliding, is the Energy Information Administration's daily benchmark for propane traded at the Mont Belvieu, Texas storage and pipeline hub, and it is the reference against which most U.S. industrial and wholesale propane contracts are indexed. If your plant burns propane, this number, plus a transport and margin adder, is very likely the price formula on your invoice.

Why one Texas hub prices the whole country

Mont Belvieu, about 30 miles east of Houston, is the largest natural gas liquids complex in the world: hundreds of millions of barrels of salt-dome storage, the fractionators that split raw NGL streams into purity propane, butane, and ethane, and pipeline connections to Gulf Coast refineries, petrochemical crackers, and the export docks that ship U.S. propane abroad. Because so much physical volume clears there, the hub is where marginal supply meets marginal demand, and the transaction prices reported from that trading become the daily spot assessment EIA publishes. A propane retailer in Ohio or a heat-treat shop in Wisconsin does not buy at Mont Belvieu, but their supplier's contract almost certainly keys off it.

What actually moves the number

Propane is not drilled for; it is a byproduct of natural gas processing and, to a lesser degree, crude oil refining. That means supply tracks gas and oil production rather than propane demand, so the price does the balancing. Three forces dominate: crude oil and natural gas prices, which set the value of the barrels propane competes with and the cost floor beneath it; the inventory cycle, in which storage builds through summer and draws down through the heating season; and exports, which now take roughly half of U.S. production and link Mont Belvieu to Asian petrochemical demand. Cold snaps, cracker feedstock switching, and export-terminal capacity all show up in the daily print. The benchmark is with no prior-year reading archived yet.

Mont Belvieu propane spot, Jul 6, 2026: $0.68/gal. Ranged from $0.67 (Jul 2, 2026) to $0.79 (Jun 10, 2026) across the archived history. The latest print sits in the lower third of that range.

A propane buyer in Ohio never trades at Mont Belvieu, but the hub's daily print, plus a freight adder, is the formula on the invoice.

What the hub price means for a fired furnace

Consider a 4 MMBtu/hr propane-fired furnace running at a 60% average firing rate across 4,000 operating hours a year. At roughly 91,500 Btu per gallon, that burns about 104,918 gallons annually, roughly $70,925 at the current $0.68/gal hub price, before the delivered adder. Every one-cent move at Mont Belvieu shifts that bill by about $1,049 a year. That is why procurement teams track the hub print rather than waiting for the supplier's invoice: the benchmark moves daily, and the invoice follows it.

Put your burner rating, duty cycle, and the live hub price into the furnace energy cost calculator to see what propane adds per load. Price your furnace fuel

Published 2026-07-13.