Retail heating fuel price in Bethel

About this data

What a gallon of gasoline and a gallon of heating fuel actually cost in about

100 Alaska communities, surveyed twice a year since 2005.

This is the number that makes rural Alaska legible to someone who has never

been there: the same gallon that costs $3 on the road system costs $14 in a

village off it. Heating fuel matters more than gasoline in most of these

places, because it is what keeps the house above freezing for eight months.

Known issues & gotchas

• The host matters. www.commerce.alaska.gov is behind DataDome and 403s

every plain client; maps.commerce.alaska.gov serves the same data. Same

trap as dcced_business_licenses, aea_pce and dcced_taxable.

• Period labels are inconsistent across years — eight distinct spellings

for what are really two surveys a year. ReportingDate is authoritative.

• Not every community reports every survey. Gaps are the survey's, not the

fetch's: 67 gasoline rows and 102 heating-fuel rows carry no price.

• This is a survey, not a census of pumps. One reported price per community

per survey, from one respondent. Treat it as the community's price level,

not as an average across sellers.

• gasoline_price is deliberately a new measure, not the existing

gas_price. That slug already conflates retail gasoline ($/gal, AAA) with

natural gas ($/mcf) — a defect recorded in docs/REVIEW_2026-09-09.md §2 —

and adding a third meaning to it would make it worse. Migrating the AAA

series onto gasoline_price is the obvious follow-up, and is not done here.