EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report: How to Read It

When the EIA report comes out

• Normal schedule: Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. ET (15:30 in London for most of the year), with data for the week ending the previous Friday.
• Holiday weeks: when a federal holiday falls on Monday, the report usually moves to Thursday. In October 2026 the EIA set the release for Thursday 15 October.
• The day before: the American Petroleum Institute publishes its own survey on Tuesday at about 4:30 p.m. ET. See the API crude inventory report for how the two compare.

The report is published as a summary text, a set of tables (Table 1 is the balance sheet) and an interactive data browser. The EIA stopped publishing the separate "Highlights" PDF on 23 September 2026, so the summary text and tables are now the main formats.

What is in the report

How to read the numbers, step by step

1. Compare with expectations, not with zero. Markets price in analysts' consensus forecasts (surveyed by Reuters, Bloomberg and others) and the API figure from Tuesday evening. A 2 million barrel draw is bearish if traders expected 5 million.
2. Look at total stocks, not just crude. A crude draw can be offset by product builds. Add crude, gasoline and distillate together, or use the EIA's "total commercial petroleum inventories" line (down 6.9 mb in the week to 2 October 2026).
3. Check the drivers. If crude stocks fell because exports jumped or imports dropped, the signal is weaker than a draw caused by high refinery runs. Weekly trade data is noisy, because a few tanker arrivals can move imports by 1 million b/d.
4. Use the five-year average. Stocks follow a seasonal pattern. Builds are normal in the first quarter and draws normal in summer. The EIA reports each category against its five-year range.
5. Watch Cushing separately. Stocks at the delivery point for NYMEX WTI matter most for the WTI futures spread between the first two months. More on this on the Cushing, Oklahoma page.
6. Treat production as an estimate. The weekly production figure is modelled and rounded, and the EIA periodically re-benchmarks it to monthly survey data. In the week to 2 October 2026 a re-benchmarking added less than 50,000 b/d. The monthly Petroleum Supply Monthly is the authoritative source for US oil production.

Why oil prices move on the EIA report

The United States is the world's largest oil producer and consumer, and it is the only major market that publishes complete inventory data every week. The IEA's monthly figures for other OECD countries come with a lag of about two months. That makes the EIA report the most timely hard data on the global balance, and algorithmic traders react to the headline number within seconds. Moves of $1 or more in WTI in the minutes after release are common when the figure surprises.

The reaction often fades during the day. One week's data contains a lot of noise from tanker timing, refinery outages and export schedules, so experienced traders look at four-week trends. In 2026 the report also became a guide to how fast US crude and diesel were being drawn to replace lost Gulf supply: distillate stocks were 12% below their five-year average in early October 2026, and the EIA expects East Coast distillate stocks to stay 20%–30% below normal through the winter.

Weekly data versus monthly data

The weekly survey covers a sample of companies and includes estimates. The Petroleum Supply Monthly, published about two months later, uses fuller survey data and replaces the weekly numbers in the EIA's historical series. Differences can be large for production and exports. For example, the monthly data put U.S. crude output at a record 13.995 million b/d in October 2025.