Weekly oil price monitoring

The Ministry of Economic Development carries out weekly monitoring of “importer margins” for regular petrol and automotive diesel.  The weekly oil prices monitoring report is reissued every Tuesday with the previous week's data.

The importer margin”¹ is the amount available to retailers to cover domestic transportation, distribution and retailing costs, and profit margins.

The purpose of this monitoring is to promote transparency in retail petrol and diesel pricing and is a key recommendation from the New Zealand Petrol Review [706 KB PDF].

Graph documents

• Graphs [148 KB PDF]
• Data used to produce weekly graph [52 KB CSV]
• Data used to produce weekly graphs [250 KB XLSX] 

Notes to the data

The data is sourced from: US Energy Information Agency, Argus, International Energy Agency, Hale & Twomey, Pricewatch and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

All data are presented as non-weighted weekly averages and adjusted to $NZ as appropriate based on the prevailing exchange rate.

New Zealand petrol and diesel retail prices represent weekly average retail prices from Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch, and do not necessarily reflect regional variation. Biofuel blends, bulk discounts and discounts available through supermarkets are excluded.

The “importer cost” is the international price of refined petrol and diesel, adjusted to a New Zealand equivalent. This is calculated by adding estimates of the quality premium, cost of freight, insurance, losses, and wharfage to the Singapore international benchmark petrol and diesel price. This information is provided by Argus and Hale & Twomey.

The importer margin¹ is the difference between the retail price less duties, taxes, levies, the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and the importer cost. That is, the margin available to the retailers to cover domestic transportation, distribution and retailing costs, and profit margins.

More information on importer margins and costs is published in the annual Energy Data File.

Taxes and levies are described here.

The costs associated with the ETS are provided by Hale & Twomey based on the prevailing carbon price from the New Zealand Carbon Market.