Ordinary Ledger: heating oil is the one bill with a delivery date

If your home is heated with oil, your heating bill works differently from your neighbour’s. Gas and electricity arrive by the month, smoothed and averaged. Heating oil arrives by lorry, once or twice a year, and the price on the day of the order is the price of the winter.

That price, by the national average the comparison portal tanke-günstig publishes for a 2,000-litre order, was €177.59 per 100 litres late on Sunday¹. The spread between the Länder is wide: €171.90 in Saxony-Anhalt, €183.91 in Hesse, €174.90 in Berlin¹. On Friday the portal noted that heating oil had fallen by almost ten cents a litre since the start of October, unlike motor fuels¹. ADAC’s last weekly reading still had diesel at €2.247 a litre².

Part of the bill is not set by the market at all. The portal estimates that taxes made up about 40% of the end price in 2025, with the CO₂ levy alone at about 17.7%, more than the energy tax itself¹. That part is known in advance and changes by law, on a date, which makes it the most predictable line on the invoice.

The ordinary lesson is not “order now”. This desk does not give that advice, and nobody can time a war. It is that a once-a-year bill rewards knowing your own numbers: tank size, last winter’s litres, what you paid per 100 litres. The household arithmetic for a typical order is in “In euros at home” at the end of this edition.

And a word for the dull machinery. The depot schedulers, drivers and invoicing clerks who get a full tank into a cellar in Hesse in a month like this one are among the least celebrated parts of Europe’s energy system. They are also a part that works.