Make money doing the work you believe in
Correcting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s lies before Congress on 6/3/2026.
Over the course of March and April, 2026:
Gas: up sharply. This is the standout. The national average sat around $4.06 at the start of April, climbed through the spring as the Iran conflict kept crude elevated, and peaked at $4.56 for Memorial Day weekend, the highest in four years and about $1.38 higher than a year prior. It has since eased: the average dropped 12 cents to $4.42 by May 28 amid reports of peace talks with Iran, and AAA's current national average is around $4.29. So the two-month arc is a steep rise followed by a modest pullback, but still far above where it was.
Groceries: up. The most recent CPI release (April, published May 12) showed food-at-home prices rising 0.7% month over month, the biggest monthly gain since August 2022, and 2.9% year over year, the sharpest annual grocery inflation since August 2023. Beef and tomatoes were major drivers. May CPI isn't out yet (it lands around June 11), so April is the latest hard data point.
Utilities: up. Electricity is the persistent pressure here. Residential electricity prices are expected to rise about 5% in 2026, with the largest increases along the East Coast, and the year-over-year increase ran around 7.4% through February. Analysts have flagged electricity and natural gas as outpacing inflation and even surpassing groceries and gasoline as the fastest drivers of inflation, largely from data center demand and grid investment. One caveat: wholesale natural gas spot prices actually softened in early spring, so the heating portion of bills may have eased seasonally even as overall utility rates climbed.
Latest data compared with the end of 2023:
Gas: up the most, roughly +38%. At the end of 2023 the national average was sitting near its yearly low. It fell to a 2023 low of $3.06 on December 18, then rebounded to $3.12, and AAA expected it to slide back below $3 by year-end. Against today's AAA average of about $4.29, that is a gain of roughly $1.20 a gallon, close to 38 to 40 percent. Most of that jump is recent, driven by the Iran conflict spiking crude this spring rather than a steady climb over the full two and a half years.
Electricity: up moderately, roughly +11%. The 2023 full-year residential average was 15.98 cents per kilowatt-hour, up 6.2% from 15.04 cents in 2022. The latest readings put the national residential average around 18.05 cents per kWh in March 2026, up from 17.11 cents in March 2025. That is roughly an 11 to 13 percent increase over the period, and the pace has been accelerating lately on data center demand and grid investment rather than fuel costs. Piped natural gas service has also climbed.
Groceries: up the least, roughly mid-single digits. This is the gentlest mover. Food-at-home inflation was quite tame at the end of 2023, with food-at-home prices rising just 1.3% for the year ended December 2023, the lowest annual increase since June 2021. It stayed soft through 2024 and ran around 2.3% higher in 2025 than in 2024, then picked up in early 2026. Stacking those together, grocery prices are up somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 7 percent since the end of 2023. The notable shift is the recent acceleration: April's 2.9% year-over-year reading was the hottest grocery inflation since August 2023, so the trend is heating up even though the cumulative rise is still modest next to gas.
