Gasoline made up half of 24.6B litres sold by resellers

Secondary distributors, the wholesalers and dealers that buy fuel from suppliers and resell it to end-users, sold 24.6 billion litres of refined petroleum products in Canada in 2025, up 5.2 per cent from 2024, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.

Motor gasoline made up 51.5 per cent of the volume, followed by diesel fuel oil at 43.2 per cent, light fuel oil at 3.0 per cent and heavy fuel oil at 2.3 per cent, the agency said in The Daily. The figures cover sales to end-users and exclude sales to other wholesalers and dealers.

Distributors sold 12.7 billion litres of motor gasoline, up 7.4 per cent, and 91.0 per cent of it went through gasoline stations. Canada News Media calculated from those figures that the gain works out to roughly 880 million more litres of gasoline than in 2024. Diesel sales reached 10.6 billion litres, up 4.4 per cent, or about 450 million litres more by the same method.

Ontario and Quebec accounted for 59.2 per cent of the country’s gasoline-fuelled road motor vehicle registrations in 2025, Statistics Canada said, but 67.1 per cent of motor gasoline sales. That is a gap of 7.9 percentage points between the two provinces’ share of sales and their share of vehicles. The remaining 32.9 per cent of sales was spread across the rest of the country. The agency did not say what explains the difference.

Diesel followed a different pattern. Ontario and Quebec took 45.8 per cent of diesel sales, below their share of gasoline, which points to heavier diesel use in the Prairies, British Columbia and the Atlantic region, where farming, trucking and resource industries are larger parts of the economy.

Gasoline stations were the largest diesel customers at 35.3 per cent of sales, which Canada News Media calculates at about 3.7 billion litres. Agriculture followed at 18.1 per cent (about 1.9 billion litres), then other commercial and institutional customers at 12.6 per cent, road transport and support activities at 9.4 per cent and construction at 7.7 per cent.

Light fuel oil, used mainly for home heating, was the only product to decline. Distributors sold 747.1 million litres, down 5.7 per cent, and residential customers bought 66.8 per cent of it, or roughly 499 million litres by our calculation. Atlantic Canada accounted for 42.4 per cent of the total, Quebec for 31.1 per cent and Ontario for 13.6 per cent.

Method: percentage shares and growth rates are Statistics Canada’s from The Daily of Oct. 27, 2026. Litre amounts and the year-over-year volume changes are Canada News Media’s own arithmetic from those published figures, rounded, and are not Statistics Canada estimates. The data are subject to revision.

The release came the same day as Statistics Canada’s separate report on end-use sales of refined petroleum products, which put total sales to end-users at 89.7 million cubic metres. Fuel costs have also been a pressure point for households, with September inflation at 3.1 per cent as gasoline prices jumped, and provinces offer help with home energy bills.

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