San Diego County drivers are paying the most for gasoline they've seen in nearly four years, with the average price for regular unleaded hitting $6.371 per gallon Saturday. That's just 6.3 cents shy of matching the county's all-time record, and it capped a 12th straight day of price increases at the pump.
The average rose 4.5 cents on Saturday alone, according to figures reported by Times of San Diego, which cited AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. The current average sits just 6.3 cents below the county record of $6.434 set on Oct. 5, 2022, and marks the county's highest price point since October 2022. Compared to a week ago, local drivers are paying 17.2 cents more per gallon, and prices have climbed 62.7 cents over the past month alone.
Zoom out further and the numbers get starker. San Diego County's average has jumped 68.9 cents over the past 39 days, and gasoline has risen on 38 of those 39 days. Since Feb. 28, when a joint U.S./Israel war on Iran began and sent oil prices surging, the county average has climbed a full $1.685 per gallon, per the same report.
Middle East Conflict Keeps Squeezing the Pump
The February military action against Iran is the throughline analysts keep pointing to. AAA has said that lingering volatility around the Strait of Hormuz, combined with elevated crude-oil costs, continues to drive up pump prices across the region, according to the Times of San Diego report. Energy analysts told CBS News that fuel prices are likely to stay elevated until shipping resumes through the strait, a bottleneck that has kept both crude costs and refinery margins under pressure.
Nationally, the picture is less dramatic but still headed upward. The national average gasoline price is 1.2 cents higher than a week ago and 38.6 cents higher than a month ago, the same report noted, rising less than two-tenths of a cent per day over the past week. Even so, the national average is described as being at its highest amount this late in the calendar year, an assessment attributed to Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy.
How San Diego Stacks Up Against the Rest of California
San Diego's pain at the pump isn't happening in isolation. Just days earlier, on Sept. 22, AAA reported California's statewide average gasoline price at $6.19 per gallon with diesel reaching $8.44 per gallon, according to NBC Bay Area. Some San Jose stations were charging almost $6.80 a gallon for regular gas and $8.79 for diesel, that station's report found, underscoring how the price spike has hit pockets statewide unevenly, with San Diego running notably higher than the reported state average.
Earlier in September, before the latest run-up, the national average had reached $4.475 per gallon in a Sept. 19 report from Times of San Diego, a level still far below what San Diego County drivers are paying at the pump today. For comparison, the county's price a year ago sat $1.601 lower than the current average, illustrating just how sharply costs have accelerated since the conflict began disrupting oil markets.
A Familiar but Distant Ceiling
San Diego drivers have flirted with $6-plus gas before. Back in September 2025, the county average rose to $4.779 per gallon, which was described at the time as the county's highest level since that May, a modest figure by comparison to today's numbers. The current record, $6.434 a gallon, was set on Oct. 5, 2022, and remains the ceiling this latest run has not yet broken — though at 6.3 cents away, it's the closest San Diego County has come in years.
