Ordinary Ledger: €1.968 at the pump, €1.69 for heating oil, and a week that runs on paperwork

The ledger, before breakfast. - Super E10, national average of open stations reporting to the federal price register at 05:11 this morning: €1.968 a litre¹. - Diesel: €2.216 a litre. Super E5: €2.024¹. - Heating oil, national average per litre on Sunday: €1.69 at esyoil, €1.75 at Tecson². - Brent crude in Asian trading: $98.06 a barrel, down 0.1%³. - Desk arithmetic: a 50-litre tank of E10 at this morning’s average costs about €98.40; the same tank of diesel about €110.80.

Start with the pump, because it is where most households meet the oil market. The national average is one number; the spread around it is the more useful one. In Saarland and Thuringia the average E10 litre costs €1.920; in Schleswig-Holstein it costs €2.035¹. By brand, the averages run from €1.929 at HEM to €2.028 at Agip Eni¹. Desk arithmetic: on a 50-litre tank, the gap between those two regional averages is about €5.75. That is not a market signal. It is a reason to look at a price app before you look at the fuel gauge.

Heating oil tells a slower story. The comparison portals have it almost flat across the past week, between €1.69 and €1.75 a litre, and Berliner Morgenpost notes that at the end of October last year the litre cost around 80 cents less². The oil analyst Steffen Bukold, writing for esyoil, says traders consider last week’s sell-off overdone and that the situation in the Strait of Hormuz has not changed². You do not need a view on that. You need to know how full your tank is and how long a cold month takes to empty it.

Then the general price level. Germany’s inflation rate fell to 2.8% in October on the statistics office’s first estimate, from 3.3% in September, helped by the cut in fuel tax that took effect at the start of the month⁴. Energy was still 12.2% dearer than a year earlier; food rose only 0.4%; services 2.5%⁴. The fuel-tax cut is due to run until the end of the year, and the Bundesbank expects inflation to pick up noticeably when it expires⁴. That is not this desk’s forecast; it is the central bank’s, and it is the sort of thing worth writing in the margin of January.

The week’s dates.

Tuesday. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the consumer price index for October at 08:30 Eastern time, 14:30 in Berlin⁶. It is an American number, but it moves the dollar, and the dollar moves what you pay for oil. Bloomberg reports traders assigning an almost 80% probability to a US rate rise by year-end³.

Thursday. The Bundestag’s budget committee begins its final session on the 2027 budget⁵. This is where the household details sit. ZDF lists them: a proposed plastic tax worth about €670 million in 2027, which Union parliamentary leader Thorsten Frei says the coalition “will not do” (desk translation); a sugar tax worth €690 million, whose proceeds Frei says would go to the health fund to relieve statutory health insurance; and SPD wishes to stop planned savings on housing benefit and the abolition of the immediate children’s supplement, together about €770 million⁵. A cut in electricity tax for everyone, which the Union has asked for at about €5 billion a year, is, according to coalition assessments quoted by ZDF, not expected to be added⁵. If you were waiting for a cheaper electricity bill from Berlin this winter, that is the sentence to read.

From today to 20 November. COP31 runs in Antalya, Türkiye⁷. Climate conferences do not change your tariff. Over years, the rules they agree change what power stations, insulation and boilers cost. Watch the texts, not the speeches.

What to do with all this. Very little, and that is the good news. Heating oil is a couple of cents a litre below where it started last week². The big decisions of the week happen in committee rooms, on statistical release schedules and in negotiating halls, which is exactly where they should happen: in public, on paper, with dates attached. Nothing here is investment advice. It is a calendar, and a calendar is the most underrated financial tool in the house.