Brent Oil Price Today

The panel above shows two crude oil benchmarks side by side. Brent is the international seaborne reference, blended from North Sea streams and used to price around two-thirds of the crude traded worldwide. West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, is the United States domestic benchmark, physically delivered inland at Cushing, Oklahoma. Both are light, low-sulphur crudes, and both are quoted in US dollars per 42-gallon barrel.

Because they describe different physical markets, they rarely print the same number. Tracking them together is more informative than following either alone: when the two move apart, the reason is usually regional rather than global, and that tells you something the headline oil price does not.

The Brent-WTI spread is simply the Brent price minus the WTI price. Brent normally trades at a modest premium, historically a few dollars a barrel, and the live figure above shows where that gap stands right now.

The spread widens when US crude backs up faster than it can be moved out. Strong shale output, pipeline bottlenecks or rising inventories at Cushing all push WTI down relative to Brent. It narrows when Atlantic Basin supply tightens, when US export capacity is ample, or when disruption around seaborne routes lifts Brent's risk premium. Freight economics matter too: the spread has to be wide enough to pay for shipping a US cargo to Europe or Asia, otherwise the arbitrage closes on its own.

For traders the spread is a position in its own right. For everyone else it is a practical check: if a supply contract is indexed to one benchmark while a budget is built on the other, the spread is the size of the error. A fuller breakdown sits on the Brent vs WTI comparison page, with the individual benchmarks covered on the WTI crude oil price page.

The chart above plots recent Brent and WTI history over 7, 30 and 90-day windows, which is the right resolution for spotting a trend or checking whether a move is unusual. A single day's price says very little without that context.

For longer perspective, including monthly and annual history, the Brent crude oil price history page covers the major turning points: the 2008 spike above 140 dollars, the 2014-2016 shale-driven collapse, the brief 2020 demand shock, and the 2022 supply squeeze. Knowing where those levels sit makes any current quote much easier to judge. Where prices might go next is discussed on the Brent oil price forecast page.

A barrel of Brent is 42 US gallons, or 158.987 litres, so the crude cost per litre is a small fraction of any pump price. The rest is refining, distribution, retail margin and tax, and in most of Europe the tax component alone is larger than the crude component. That is why two countries can face the identical world oil price and still show retail fuel prices that differ by a factor of three or more.

This site breaks that gap down country by country. See oil prices by country, or go straight to retail fuel: petrol prices by country and diesel prices by country, each with the crude, duty and VAT components separated out.