Heating Oil Prices in Western Mass, Every Winter Since 1990

The winter of 1990 to 1991 cost the typical oil-heated house in this region about $969 to keep warm. The winter of 2025 to 2026 cost about $3,179. In between sit thirty-odd winters that swing by thousands of dollars for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the price of oil, and this page is that record.

The method, plainly: the region's heat index prices a typical oil-heated home's full season of heat at each week's delivered fuel price, and a winter's figure here is the average of its October-through-March weeks. That is what heating through the winter at the prices as they came would have cost, which is how households actually buy, tank by tank, rather than locking a season in one week.

The Shape of Thirty-Five Winters

The floor of the whole record is $649, the winter of 1998 to 1999, at the bottom of the late-90s oil glut. The ceiling is $3,815 in 2022 to 2023, the winter after the invasion of Ukraine moved every energy price at once. Between them the line tells the macro-history of oil: cheap through the 1990s, the long climb to 2008, the shale-era relief of the mid-2010s, and the post-2021 step up to a level it has not left.

Two things make this the right chart for a housing site. First, the swing is the size of a property tax bill: the gap between a cheap winter and a dear one is larger than the median tax bill's twenty-year rise, and it arrives with no vote and no warning. Second, it is the cost that varies most by house: a tight small house and a leaky Victorian differ by multiples of this figure, which is why the age of the stock here is a heating fact before it is a charm fact.

What This Does Not Mean

The figure is an index for a typical oil-heated home, not anyone's bill: your house's size, insulation and thermostat set it, and electricity, wood and propane households live on different lines entirely. The winters are also priced, not weathered: a mild winter at high prices can cost more than a bitter one at low prices, and this series deliberately measures the price part.

The live version of the figure, updated weekly with this week's actual prices, is the heat index. How propane and a heat pump compare at this week's prices is the decision page, and the oil-against-heat-pump record shows that comparison flipping through the same thirty-five years this page prices.