EIA Report Schedule, Explained

1. The answer first: the weekly calendar

Almost every question that brings readers to this page is a timing question. When is the EIA report today? Why is it late? Is the API number out yet? Which week does Thursday's storage number cover? The whole rhythm fits in one table. Every time below is eastern, and every weekly report describes the same data week: the seven days ending the previous Friday.

Two facts in that table explain most of the confusion around oil data. First, the API and EIA releases are not two reports on two different weeks. They are two surveys of the same week, published about 18 hours apart, which is why our companion explainer on API vs EIA inventory reports exists. Second, none of these releases is same-day data. The freshest figure in Wednesday's report describes last Friday. The calendar is a rhythm of old news arriving on a strict schedule, and the market trades the schedule as much as the numbers.

2. Which week the data covers, and why there is a five day gap

Every weekly petroleum figure is stamped with a week-ending date, and that date is a Friday. Companies report their stocks, refinery runs, and movements for the seven days ending Friday. The EIA then needs the weekend and the first days of the following week to collect the survey forms, check them, and build the tables, which is why the report lands on Wednesday morning rather than Monday. The API follows the same collection schedule and deadline, by its own account, because it uses the same EIA weekly survey forms: respondents send API an exact copy of what they submit to the EIA. One collection rhythm, two publications, the private one a day earlier.

The practical consequences are worth stating plainly. A Wednesday headline about a crude draw is a statement about last week, not this one. A storm that shut Gulf Coast platforms on Monday does not appear in Wednesday's production estimate as a full week of lost output; it appears the following week. And when two weekly reports seem to contradict each other, the first check is whether they are even describing the same Friday. Dated search queries are a standing feature of this data: readers search for a specific week's report because the week-ending date, not the release date, is the identity of the data.

3. Wednesday, piece by piece: what lands at 10:30 and what lands at 1:00

The Weekly Petroleum Status Report is not one document dropped at once. The EIA posts the report's data tables to its website after 10:30 a.m. eastern on Wednesdays in spreadsheet and CSV form, and the PDF files follow after 1:00 p.m. The EIA's own analysis, This Week in Petroleum, is also generally available at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesdays. So the market-moving event at 10:30 is a set of tables: the US balance sheet first, then stocks by product and district, Cushing, refinery utilization, production, trade, and product supplied. Our guide to how to read the EIA weekly petroleum report walks those tables line by line, and our analysis page archives the numbers behind it.

The 10:30 timing matters because of where it sits in the trading day. US crude futures are in full morning trade, the numbers hit every terminal at the same second, and the first price move is a reaction to the gap between the printed figure and the analyst consensus, a mechanism section 7 takes apart. Nothing about the report is embargoed or staggered: the schedule is the level playing field, and it is published by the EIA in advance, including its exceptions.

4. The holiday rule: when Wednesday becomes Thursday at noon

The most common schedule surprise is also the most predictable. When a federal holiday falls early in the release week, the EIA moves the Weekly Petroleum Status Report, and it publishes the exceptions ahead of time on its release schedule page. The standard release is Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. eastern. The exceptions in the EIA's own table follow a pattern: the release moves to Thursday, and the time usually moves to 12:00 p.m. eastern. Every 2026 exception on the EIA schedule page (checked October 29, 2026) follows that pattern exactly:

The extreme case in the same EIA table shows how far the rule can stretch: the report for the week ending December 19, 2025 was released on Monday, December 29, 2025 at 5:00 p.m., because the Christmas holiday consumed the normal release week. The API bulletin shifts on its own version of the rule: it publishes on Wednesday at 4:30 p.m. instead of Tuesday when Monday is a federal holiday. Net effect in a Monday-holiday week: the preview and the official report both slide, roughly preserving the gap between them, and a reader who only checks on Wednesday morning finds nothing and concludes the data is missing. It is not missing. It is scheduled.

Read the 2026 table as a whole and a simple rule falls out of it. Five of the six shifts follow a Monday holiday, which costs the EIA a processing day between the Friday week-end and the Wednesday release; the sixth, Veterans Day, falls on Wednesday, November 11, 2026, the release day itself. Holidays that land elsewhere in the week do not appear. Independence Day 2026 fell on a Saturday and Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26, and neither has an entry in the petroleum exceptions table as checked, so those weeks keep the Wednesday 10:30 slot. The rule of thumb for planning: if the Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of the release week is a federal holiday, expect Thursday at noon; otherwise expect Wednesday at 10:30, and confirm on the EIA page before relying on it, because the agency adds and adjusts entries during the year.

5. Eleven years of release dates: how often Wednesday actually happens

One year's exceptions table shows the rule. The EIA's archive shows how it plays out. The archive page for the Weekly Petroleum Status Report lists every edition by its release date, and we counted all 572 releases dated from January 2015 through December 2025. 487 of them, 85 percent, came out on a Wednesday. Of the 85 that did not, 78 came out on a Thursday, 6 on a Friday and 1 on a Monday. None came out on a Tuesday, so the official report has not landed ahead of its usual day in that span. Every year had between 6 and 10 off-Wednesday releases, which is the practical number to plan around: roughly one week in seven.

The chart has two kinds of column. The straight ones are the Monday holidays. In every one of the eleven years, the report moved in the weeks of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Presidents' Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day and Columbus Day: 55 of the 85 shifts, all to Thursday except the week of January 22, 2021, which went to Friday. A Monday holiday takes a processing day out of the window between the Friday data week and the Wednesday release, and the archive shows the EIA has absorbed it almost the same way every time.

The scattered dots are the holidays whose weekday moves from year to year, and they follow the weekday. Independence Day moved the report in 2016, 2017 and 2018, when July 4 fell on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and in 2022 and 2023 (Monday and Tuesday); in 2021, when July 4 fell on a Sunday, the report also went to Thursday, July 8. In 2015, 2019, 2020, 2024 and 2025, when the holiday fell on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, the Wednesday release went ahead. Juneteenth shows the same pattern: a Thursday release in 2023 (June 19 was a Monday) and 2024 (a Wednesday), none in 2025 (a Thursday). Veterans Day moved the report in six of the eleven years, each time to the Thursday. Thanksgiving, always a Thursday, never moved it: the Thanksgiving-week report came out on the Wednesday every year from 2015 to 2025.

The year-end weeks are where the pattern stops being a rule. When Christmas fell on a Friday or Saturday (2015, 2020 and 2021), the report stayed on Wednesday. In the other years it moved, but not always to the same day: Thursday in 2016, 2017, 2022 and 2023, Friday in 2018, 2019 and 2024, and in 2025, with Christmas on a Thursday, the report for the week ending December 19 slipped to Monday, December 29 at 5:00 p.m., followed two days later by the next edition on Wednesday, December 31. Five of the six Friday releases in the span sit at the turn of the year. For those weeks, the only safe planning tool is the EIA's published table for that year.

Two gaps in the archive have nothing to do with holidays, and they are worth knowing because they look like missing data in any downloaded series. In June 2022 the EIA was restoring its systems; its statement of June 28, 2022 said the report for the week ending June 17, which would have been published June 23, would come out on June 29 together with the week ending June 24. In November 2023 a planned systems upgrade delayed the November 8 report, and the EIA said beforehand that it would publish two weeks of statistics on November 15. In both cases the data weeks exist; only the release dates bunched. A chart of weekly stock changes is unaffected, but a log of what the market knew each Wednesday has two holes.

Put together, the archive gives a planning rule that is more precise than a blanket rule that holiday weeks move. If a federal holiday falls on the Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of the release week, expect Thursday; in the EIA's 2025 and 2026 tables the Thursday time is 12:00 p.m., except an 11:00 a.m. release on January 2, 2025. If the holiday falls on a Thursday or Friday, expect the normal Wednesday 10:30. Around Christmas and New Year, check the table. The same rule explains why the weekly petroleum report guide tells readers not to expect a Thanksgiving delay, and why a holiday-week print, arriving a day later into a different trading session, deserves the extra care section 7 describes.

6. Thursday 10:30: the gas report runs on the same clock

The Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report follows the petroleum report by almost exactly 24 hours: Thursdays at 10:30 a.m. eastern, same week-ending Friday, with its own holiday exceptions. It is a smaller document with an outsized price effect, because natural gas has no global tanker market to smooth a regional surprise the way crude does. The report gives working gas in storage for the Lower 48 and five regions, the net change for the week, and the two comparisons that frame it: against last year and against the five year average.

The gas report keeps its own exceptions table, and it does not simply copy the petroleum one. As checked on October 29, 2026, the natural gas storage schedule lists two 2026 changes: the release for Veterans Day week moves to Friday, November 13 at 10:30 a.m., and the Thanksgiving week release moves earlier, to Wednesday, November 25 at 12:00 p.m. Put the two schedules side by side for those weeks and the usual order of the week changes:

The Thanksgiving row is the one that catches people. In that week both EIA reports land on the same Wednesday, ninety minutes apart, on a day when many US desks are already thin ahead of the holiday. A reader who keys the gas report to "Thursday" out of habit will look for it on Thanksgiving Day itself, a day after it was published.

A recent release shows the shape. The report published Thursday, October 15, 2026, for the week ending October 9, recorded a 67 Bcf injection that took working gas to 3,567 Bcf, against analyst survey expectations of roughly 74 to 75 Bcf reported in market coverage of the release. A build smaller than expected, in the weeks when the market is counting injections before winter, is a tightening signal, and gas prices moved within seconds of the 10:30 timestamp. Our guide to how to read the EIA weekly natural gas storage report covers the regional rows and the five year range in the same detail as the petroleum guide, and the natural gas price page tracks the price the report moves.

7. Consensus: the number the market actually trades at 10:30

A release time on its own does not move prices. What moves prices is the distance between the printed figure and the consensus, the median expectation from surveys of analysts that news agencies run before each report. By 10:29 on a Wednesday, the market has a settled view: crude expected to draw by so much, gasoline to build by so much. The 10:30 print is then read as a surprise, not a level. A draw of 3 million barrels is bearish if consensus expected 8, and bullish if consensus expected a build.

The holiday-shifted report of October 2026 is the cleanest recent arithmetic. For the week ending October 9, 2026, the EIA reported a crude stock draw of 8.557 million barrels. Market coverage of the release put the consensus expectation at a draw of about 0.288 million barrels. The surprise is the difference: 8.557 minus 0.288 is 8.269 million barrels, a draw roughly 8.3 million barrels larger than the market had priced. Nothing about the release time changed that arithmetic, but the schedule shaped its reception: the figure arrived at noon on a Thursday instead of 10:30 on a Wednesday, into a different trading session, after an extra day of waiting in a holiday week. When you read that a report "moved the market," this subtraction, actual minus consensus, is the move. The calendar tells you when the subtraction happens.

8. Friday 1:00 p.m.: the rig count closes the week

The last appointment of the week is the slowest signal. Baker Hughes schedules its North American rig count for noon central time on the last working day of each week, 1:00 p.m. eastern, and the company has issued weekly US and Canadian counts since 1944. The count splits rigs by target (oil, gas, miscellaneous), by state, and by basin, and the international count follows monthly, on the fifth working day of the month.

A Friday afternoon release, for a series that leads production by months, rarely whips prices the way a Wednesday surprise does, and that is the point of including it in the calendar: the week's data has a tempo. Tuesday previews, Wednesday decides, Thursday answers for gas, and Friday takes the drilling industry's temperature for the quarter ahead. Our Baker Hughes rig count explainer covers what the count does and does not measure, and the rig counts page carries the current series.

9. The monthly layer underneath the weekly rhythm

Two EIA monthly publications sit under the weekly cycle and quietly correct it, and a third used to. The Short-Term Energy Outlook is the EIA's monthly forecast, the numbers our forecasts page tracks; our guide on how to read the STEO walks through its tables. The Petroleum Supply Monthly restates the weekly petroleum data on a fuller survey basis, which is where weekly estimates are superseded by the monthly record. The Drilling Productivity Report no longer appears as a standalone release: its last issue was dated May 13, 2024, and from June 11, 2024 the EIA moved its shale-region production data into the STEO data tables, according to the notice on the report's page (checked October 22, 2026). Our guide to the drilling productivity data still explains the measures, which now arrive on the STEO calendar. Weekly production figures in particular are model estimates between monthly benchmarks: a reader who treats a Wednesday production print as a final measurement will be confused when the monthly data moves it. The weekly calendar is for trading and for watching. The monthly layer is for the record.

The monthly layer has fixed dates too, and they are less familiar than the Wednesday slot. The EIA says the STEO is normally released between 12:00 and 12:15 p.m. eastern; eleven of the twelve 2026 editions are dated on a Tuesday. The dates for the rest of 2026 and the start of 2027, from the EIA release schedule pages (checked October 29, 2026):

Two details in that table are easy to miss. The STEO date is not a fixed weekday rule: the September 2026 edition came out on a Wednesday, September 9, in the week of Labor Day, so check the EIA list rather than assuming the second Tuesday. And the Petroleum Supply Monthly runs about two months behind the data it describes: the release of September 30, 2026 carried July 2026. The two figures to compare are therefore not this Wednesday's weekly print and this month's PSM, but the average of the weekly prints for a given month and the PSM figure for that same month when it arrives roughly eight weeks later. The size of that gap is the weekly estimate's error, and watching it over several months tells a reader how much weight a single Wednesday production number can carry.

10. Schedule mistakes that produce bad reads

• Assuming Wednesday in a Monday-holiday week. The report is not late and not missing; it is on the EIA's published exceptions table, usually Thursday at noon eastern. The Christmas 2025 case slid to the following Monday at 5:00 p.m.
• Reading the release date as the data date. A report released October 21 describes the week ending October 16. Analysis that treats the figures as current-week conditions is five to twelve days behind the physical market it describes.
• Treating the API bulletin as the official number, or as a leak of it. The API publishes its own survey on Tuesday at 4:30 p.m., built from copies of the same company submissions the EIA receives. It is a preview with its own tally, and the two tallies differ, sometimes in sign on individual products.
• Trading the level instead of the surprise. Prices react to actual minus consensus. A large draw can coincide with falling prices when a larger draw was expected.
• Forgetting the gas report is Thursday. The storage report lands 24 hours after the petroleum report, at the same 10:30 a.m. eastern, and it moves a different market on the same week-ending data.
• Expecting a Thanksgiving delay, or no year-end delay. The petroleum report kept its Wednesday slot in Thanksgiving week every year from 2015 to 2025, while year-end weeks moved in eight of those eleven years, to Thursday, Friday or, in 2025, the following Monday. Both mistakes come from treating every holiday alike; the weekday of the holiday is what matters.
• Reading a bunched release as missing data. In June 2022 and November 2023 the EIA published two weeks of data in one release. A table of release dates shows a gap; the weekly data series does not. Build histories by week-ending date, never by release date.
• Mixing time zones. The EIA publishes in eastern time. The Baker Hughes count is scheduled at noon central. A calendar kept in the wrong zone puts a reader an hour early or late for one of the two.

11. Frequently asked questions

Data and sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) - Weekly Petroleum Status Report release schedule page, read October 21, 2026 (standard release Wednesday 10:30 a.m. eastern; exceptions table including the report for the week ending October 9, 2026 released Thursday, October 15, 2026 at 12:00 p.m. for Columbus Day, the report for the week ending November 6, 2026 scheduled Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 12:00 p.m. for Veterans Day, and the report for the week ending December 19, 2025 released Monday, December 29, 2025 at 5:00 p.m. for Christmas); Weekly Petroleum Status Report front matter (data tables posted after 10:30 a.m. eastern on Wednesdays, PDF files after 1:00 p.m., This Week in Petroleum generally available at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesdays). American Petroleum Institute, Weekly Statistical Bulletin frequently asked questions, read October 21, 2026 (publication Tuesdays at about 4:30 p.m., Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. if Monday is a federal holiday; same EIA weekly survey forms and collection schedule). Baker Hughes rig count release notes (North American count scheduled for noon central time on the last working day of each week; weekly counts published since 1944; international count on the fifth working day of the month). Market coverage of the October 15, 2026 EIA release (crude draw of 8.557 million barrels against a consensus expectation of about 0.288 million) and of the October 15, 2026 natural gas storage release (67 Bcf injection to 3,567 Bcf, against survey expectations of roughly 74 to 75 Bcf), read October 21, 2026. Checked October 22, 2026: the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report schedule (all 2026 exceptions in the holiday table); the EIA Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report schedule (Friday, November 13 and Wednesday, November 25, 2026 exceptions); the EIA STEO release schedule (2026 and January 2027 dates, normal release between 12:00 and 12:15 p.m.); the Petroleum Supply Monthly page (July 2026 data released September 30, 2026, next release October 30, 2026); and the Drilling Productivity Report page (last issue May 13, 2024; data moved into the STEO from June 11, 2024). For section 5, checked October 29, 2026: the EIA Weekly Petroleum Status Report archive (release date of every edition, 572 dated 2015 to 2025, weekday counts by PetroEyes); the EIA statement of June 28, 2022 (system restoration; week ending June 17 data published June 29 with the week ending June 24); the EIA release of October 19, 2023 (releases of November 8 to 10, 2023 delayed for a planned systems upgrade; two weeks of WPSR statistics on November 15); and the WPSR schedule page for the 2025 exceptions (including the 11:00 a.m. release on January 2, 2025). Holiday weekdays are calendar dates. All other figures are as published by the sources named, for the periods stated.