Early Friday evening, Jay Robinson, a Dallas insurance adjuster, pulled into his local QuikTrip gas station for a coffee break. As he filled his cup, drivers stopping at the pumps confronted prices that had spiked more than 30 percent since the outbreak of war in Iran.
Mr. Robinson, 42, has been hit by those price increases harder than most. With his wedding not too far off, he has been moonlighting as a ride-share driver to help cover the costs. But the war — and the subsequent throttling of global oil supplies — have cut into his margins.
“I’m already getting taxed by inflation, and this is not helping,” Mr. Robinson said. Even with the solid gas mileage on his car, a 2019 Toyota Corolla, he said the climbing prices had been impossible to ignore.
“I hope that it ends soon,” he said.
After a U.S. and Israeli missile barrage sparked the Iran war in late February, Iran retaliated by closing the Strait of Hormuz, a vital choke point at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. A quarter of the world’s oil supply passes through the strait. The passageway’s closure has sharply constricted that supply and, for U.S. drivers, led to rapid increases in gas prices.
Now, with the conflict dragging into its third week, those price spikes have become even more severe.
No part of the country has been spared. But many states across the American South and Southwest, which enjoyed some of the lowest gas prices before the outbreak of war, have seen the steepest increases, according to a New York Times analysis of data from GasBuddy.
As of March 14, gas prices had shot up by about a third in Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas since the start of the war. In Colorado, prices were up 35 percent. In New Mexico, which has been hit the hardest, they had gone up just shy of 40 percent.
Over the weekend, drivers stopping at gas stations said the scarcity had begun to sting, with higher prices forcing some to reconsider their driving habits. Others said they were carrying on as usual, enduring the higher prices while hoping for a swift end to the war.
In the sleepy ski town of Taos, N.M., Sancho Diaz, a mobile mechanic, was refueling his vintage Ford F-250 at a gas station on Saturday morning.
“It’s not affecting me much because I work out of my truck, so I just pass it to the customer,” he said. (So far, though, he added, he hasn’t raised his prices.)
Other drivers filling up in Taos expressed some consternation at the higher prices, though they said they weren’t ready to alter their plans to avoid them.
Fernando Gomez, who drives a semi truck for his family’s business in Taos, said his bottom line hadn’t yet been deeply affected. But he expected that consumers who rely on goods transported by road would soon absorb the downstream costs.
“Of course, the food prices are going to go up,” said Mr. Gomez, 43. “Everything that we consume or use comes by trucks.”
With price hikes casting a long shadow over the upcoming midterm elections, the Trump administration has taken some early steps to blunt them, including tapping the country’s strategic oil reserves. It has also eased sanctions on Russian oil exports, as well as on some Iranian oil already at sea, a move that may bolster Iran’s ailing economy, and which signals a stark reversal in U.S. policy.
But with no immediate resolution to the conflict in sight, it’s unclear how long the elevated prices will last, or just how high they might go.
At a Birdie’s gas station in the Seventh Ward neighborhood of New Orleans, Habibullah Saleem, 85, was one of several people trying to fill their tanks before prices rose even further. As he filled up his small S.U.V., he said he was spending his rent money on gas instead.
“I know there are people worse off than me,” Mr. Saleem said. “But we’ve got to find a way out of this.”
At Birdie’s, where a line of cars stretched out of the parking lot and into the street, the price of a gallon of gas had inched up to $3.22 on Saturday. A month before, the average cost of a gallon in Louisiana hovered around $2.50.
Charles McThomas, 54, said he had been driving around all morning, looking for the cheapest gas. He shied away from the long line at Birdie’s, he said, because he needed to go to work. But when he does get around to topping off his tank, he said he expects it will cost $200, up from his usual $150.
“Before, people used to just get enough gas to get them where they are going,” he said. “But now I see that people are filling up their tanks all the way because they don’t know what the price will be tomorrow.”
Shannon Sims, Deah Mitchell and Stephanie Gates contributed reporting.
Chris Hippensteel is a reporter covering breaking news and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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