While Americans Paid $148B Extra on Gas Amid War, Big Oil Made $130B in Profits

As Americans have been forced to shell out an extra $148 billion on gas and diesel in eight months of war on Iran, Big Oil has reaped record profits — with U.S. companies having made over $130 billion in profits, a new analysis finds.

According to The New York Times, these profits were spread across 50 large U.S. oil and gas companies. Many of these companies, like Valero Energy, reported their highest-ever quarterly profits in recent months.

The calculation of oil and gas companies’ collective profits between April and September is conservative, the Times notes, and doesn’t include two months of the war.

Even still, $130 billion is nearly three times more than the industry’s profits this time last year. ExxonMobil more than doubled and Chevron nearly tripled profits in Q3 compared to 2025, and both companies are forecasted to potentially make record profits for the full year.

Meanwhile, prices for consumers have not just hit record highs amid the war, but have also sustained an average price above $4 a gallon for a record amount of time.

According to a tracker set up by Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab, Americans have paid an extra $147 billion on gas and diesel since the start of the war, amounting to over $1,100 per household. Moody’s Analytics has estimated that, when higher prices for jet fuel are accounted for, the war has cost U.S. households $1,184 more just on these fuel prices alone.

These extra costs compound upon an existing affordability crisis across the country, lining the pockets of oil and gas executives as Americans struggle to afford basic necessities like housing and groceries.

“Over time, all the excess cash we’re accumulating will ultimately be directed toward our owners,” Valero Energy’s chief financial officer Homer Bhullar said in a call with Wall Street analysts last week.

Polling by Gallup finds that the war on Iran and gas prices rank as one of the top issues for voters this midterm election season, following the economy as the top concern.

Despite this, President Donald Trump has not just downplayed the war’s impacts on U.S. households, but has openly bragged about the oil and gas industry’s profits spurred by his aggression. “Because of the price of oil, Texas and Oklahoma and North Dakota and all these places, we’re making a fortune,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona this month.

“I can just see the fake headlines: ‘President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump.’ But I said, ‘I don’t give a damn. I’m gonna say it. We’re making a freaking fortune,’” Trump told a crowd in Georgia last weekend.

Several states with Republican-controlled legislatures have implemented temporary gas tax holidays ahead of the midterm elections, hoping to take heat off GOP candidates. However, the measures are just a band-aid on a much larger problem: a war that the Trump administration seems desperate to end, but that they only know how to prolong.