kitegraph

WTI crude oil price, daily, 1986 to 2026

The spot price of West Texas Intermediate crude, every trading day since 2021, drawn as a calendar so the year's rhythm is visible at a glance. · updated Jul 2026

About this statistic

WTI crude oil price, daily stood at $70 in 2026, down 0.2% on the previous period.

West Texas Intermediate is the benchmark grade for US crude oil, and its spot price at Cushing, Oklahoma is the number quoted when Americans say the price of oil. This page tracks it at daily resolution: 1,374 trading days from January 2021 through July 6, 2026, when a barrel settled at $69.60. Each cell in the calendar is one trading day, colored by that day's price on a single scale that spans the whole window, so a hot streak in one year is directly comparable to a hot streak in another.

How it is measured

The price is the daily spot quote for WTI delivered at Cushing, compiled by the US Energy Information Administration and republished by the St. Louis Fed as FRED series DCOILWTICO. It is a cash market price, not a futures settlement, and there is one observation per trading day: weekends and market holidays are the empty cells.

What the calendar shows

The window opens at its low, $47.47 on January 4, 2021, climbs through the post-pandemic demand recovery, and peaks at $123.64 on March 8, 2022, in the two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine. The deep-colored band across spring 2022 is that shock. Prices then bleed back through 2023 and 2024 as supply reroutes, and the recent years sit in the 60s and 70s, closer to the decade's norm than to either extreme. Use the year control to step between years; the color scale stays fixed so the comparison is honest.

Frequently asked questions
Why show oil prices on a calendar instead of a line?
A line answers where the price went. The calendar answers when: it makes streaks, shocks, and quiet stretches visible as blocks of color, and it keeps every one of a year's roughly 250 trading days legible instead of compressing them into pixels.
What is WTI and how does it differ from Brent?
West Texas Intermediate is light, sweet crude priced at Cushing, Oklahoma, and it is the US benchmark. Brent is the North Sea benchmark used for most international cargoes. The two track each other closely, usually within a few dollars, with the spread reflecting shipping and regional supply.
Why are some days blank?
The spot market only prints on trading days. Weekends and US market holidays have no observation, so those cells stay empty rather than repeating the previous quote.
Did WTI really trade below zero in 2020?
Yes. On April 20, 2020 the expiring futures contract settled at negative $37 a barrel because storage at Cushing was effectively full and holders paid to be rid of delivery obligations. That day sits just outside this page's 2021 window, which is scoped to keep the color scale readable for the years since.
Other statistics on this topicAll Finance & markets statistics →

Make this chart yours.

Open it in the editor with the data already loaded. Brand it, animate it, embed it.

WTI crude oil price, daily — Kitegraph