Stats › Currencies and commodities › Oil inventories
US oil inventories and the weekly number
Every Wednesday at 10:30 in the morning, New York time, the US Energy Information Administration publishes how much crude oil and product sat in American tanks as of the previous Friday. Oil moves on it. Not always by much, but reliably enough that a whole industry of pre-positioning has grown up around one spreadsheet.
The day before, at about half past four in the afternoon, the American Petroleum Institute puts out its own estimate to paying subscribers. Same survey forms, voluntary instead of mandatory, about eighteen hours earlier. So the market gets two goes at the same number, and they don't always say the same thing.
I put this page together because the interesting question isn't what the number is. It's how good the number is, and how much of the reaction is to information rather than noise. The EIA is a primary source and it publishes its own methodology, so a lot of that is checkable. The API's history is not, because you have to pay for it. That asymmetry is the whole story of this page.
For the week ending 24 Jul 2026, US commercial crude stocks excluding the reserve were 404.5 million barrels, down 7.2 million on the week and about 6% below the five year average. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve stood at 307.7 million barrels, against a peak of 726.6 million on 27 Dec 2009 and an authorised capacity of 714 million. DOE announced a 172 million barrel release on 11 Mar 2026, part of an IEA collective action of 400 million barrels across 32 countries, which is larger than the 180 million barrel drawdown of 2022. The API's Tuesday estimate covers about 90% of the industry by response rate and is paywalled. Across the 6 weeks I could match by hand, API and EIA agreed on direction 6 times out of 6 but the average gap was 2.13 million barrels, and the worst week was 5.79 million apart.
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