Shop Smarter With the Consumer Reports Price Tracker 2026

Gas prices have placed a new strain on household budgets in the past 13 weeks, with the national average for regular unleaded climbing from $2.98 to $4.32 a gallon, according to AAA. For the record, gas prices—adjusted for inflation—reached an average of $4.88 back in 2012 due to high demand and rising costs for oil extraction, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Spikes like that can really put pressure on your monthly expenses, but CR’s auto experts have tips on how to save money at the gas pump. Here’s a summary:

Shop around. Using a smartphone app like AAA, GasBuddy, or Gas Guru can help you find the best price in your area. We’ve seen rates vary by as much as 80 cents per gallon in the same town.

Look for the best way to pay. Stations often cut you a break for paying in cash, but rewards cards and programs come in handy, too. Don’t assume you’re getting the cash price by using your debit card. Check the prices posted at the pump.

Keep your foot off the accelerator. When we measured fuel economy at different highway speeds, we found the miles-per-gallon difference between 55 and 75 mph was equivalent to trading a compact car for a large SUV. On the flip side, slowing down by just 10 mph at highway speeds reduced fuel consumption by as much as 8 mpg. In a car that gets 35 mpg, that’s a savings of about $400 a year at $4 per gallon.

Check your tire pressure. Keeping car tires inflated to the pressure indicated on the sticker inside the driver’s door will improve safety and make the vehicle run more efficiently. When shopping for replacement tires, look for the models in our ratings with low rolling resistance. They use less energy (and fuel) to move a car.

Skip the premium. Many automakers recommend premium gas, which has chemical benefits that help a car achieve its advertised performance under extreme conditions—climbing steep grades, carrying lots of weight, or driving on hot days. But unless your owner’s manual specifically requires premium, the results usually aren’t worth the extra cost. In average driving conditions, Consumer Reports tests show a negligible performance difference when using regular fuel.

Clear the roof. Racks and storage boxes increase aerodynamic drag, making your car work harder. So remove them when you’re done using them. CR testers have found that a vehicle with a roof rack and two mountain bikes gets 7 to 13 fewer mpg. A rooftop cargo box alone costs 5 to 9 mpg. And even an empty roof rack increased fuel consumption, reducing efficiency by 2 to 5 mpg. All totaled, an empty rack or roof box could cost you an extra $120 to $220 in fuel per year.

CR senior autos reporter Keith Barry recently set out to answer that question, putting three popular AI tools to the test. And, as he soon discovered, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can be helpful assistants, but they’re no replacement for critical thinking.

“Model years get mixed up, sources get muddled, and recommendations can contradict each other,” he reports. “Sometimes, the results use information from cryptocurrency exchanges or pawn shops as ’trusted sources.”

Tracy Anderman, who heads CR’s fact-checking team and developed our in-house guidelines for AI usage, helped Barry put his findings into context. “Generative AI tools are impressive,” she says. “But I would continue to think of them as the friend-of-a-friend that you had an interesting but somewhat unhinged conversation with at a party. You’re not going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car just because an acquaintance says so.”

To get the most out of AI tools, Barry says, don’t use them like a search engine. Provide them with specific prompts, and then validate the results against trusted news sites, manufacturer websites, and other primary sources. For this exercise, for example, he started with “What’s the most reliable 3-row SUV?” and followed up with more detailed queries.

And, as one expert told Barry, if you don’t know much about cars, you can use AI tools to sort out your wants and needs and help you figure out what sort of vehicle you’re looking for.

Better yet, once you know the make, model, and trim of the car, AI can write scripts that help counter high-pressure sales techniques and make you sound like a master negotiator. There are even paid services, such as CarEdge, that use generative AI to negotiate with salespeople over email on your behalf.

For many people in the U.S., electric bills keep going up and up, with no clear limit in sight. Residential rates rose, on average, 10.2 percent between March 2025 and March 2026, according to federal data, putting many people in the difficult situation of deciding whether to keep the lights on or pay for essentials like food, medicine, and transportation. And yet many utility companies are posting significant profits.

In 2025, the companies requested a record $31 billion in increases, double the amount from 2024, according to an analysis by PowerLines, a nonprofit organization—and still more requests are in the pipeline. Much of the funding is earmarked for updating aging electrical grids, increasing resiliency to weather events, and keeping up with rising fuel prices. But a good portion of it is tied to the increased energy demand created by AI data centers.

While regulators in some states have introduced measures to help shield ratepayers from data center costs, commissioners in other states are pushing through approvals for rate increases and expensive new fossil-fueled power plants. For instance, public utility commission cases in North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Louisiana will have big implications for residents of those states.

If you’re troubled by the rising cost of electricity, see our article on the issue and sign a CR petition calling on government leaders to hold utility companies accountable, reject excessive rate increases, make big new energy users (like data centers) pay their fair share, and prioritize solutions that cut waste and reduce bills.

Last updated May 4, 2026—Back in December, after a months-long investigation, Consumer Reports revealed that many U.S. shoppers ordering groceries for delivery through Instacart were unknowingly paying different prices for the very same products.

The shifts in pricing were discovered on items such as Oscar Mayer turkey and Skippy peanut butter at retailers including Albertsons, Costco, Kroger, Safeway, Sprouts Farmers Market, and Target.

It was all part of widespread AI-enabled experiments conducted by Instacart, a company that calls itself “the largest online grocery marketplace in North America.”

In response to the article, Instacart halted the practice. And late last month, Maryland became the first state in the U.S. to ban personalized pricing at grocery stores. There are now similar bills in the works in California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.

The Maryland law, which goes into effect Oct. 1, will prohibit grocery stores from using customers’ personal data to increase individual prices. It will be enforced by the state’s attorney general, with fines of up to $10,000 for a first offense and as much as $25,000 for repeat violations.

But consumer advocates say that the final legislation includes provisions that will limit its effectiveness. For instance, retailers can still engage in personalized pricing if a customer consents to it by agreeing to the kinds of lengthy, online terms of service that few people read. In addition, consumers can’t sue companies for infractions. Only Maryland’s attorney general can take action under the law—and only after serving notice and giving those companies 45 days to fix violations without further legal ramifications. 

In the end, Consumer Reports declined to endorse the legislation. 

“Retailers have a lot of data about individual shoppers: how often we search for or hover over particular items, whether we live near competitor stores, inferences about our likes and dislikes, our dietary needs, our income, our family size, and more,” Grace Gedye, senior policy analyst at Consumer Reports, said in a statement. And they can use such information for “surveillance pricing,” charging people the maximum that they’re individually likely to pay.

“This bill has loopholes that will limit its real-world impact,” Gedye’s statement continued. “We urge other state legislatures considering personalized pricing legislation to build in stronger consumer protections and avoid loopholes that weakened this bill.”

Last updated May 4, 2026—Despite considerable tariff pricing pressures, the Ford F-150 we tracked in 2025 held steady at a $37,450 MSRP from mid-May of last year through late November, when the 2026 model was introduced. If you look closely, though, you’ll see that Ford quietly bumped up its nonnegotiable destination fee for the popular pickup truck by $200. It now stands at a whopping $2,795.

Manufacturers technically use this money to cover the cost of shipping the vehicle from the factory to the dealership. But over the past decade, destination fees have skyrocketed.

According to Kelley Blue Book, the average destination fee increased from $961 to $1,551 between 2015 and 2025, providing manufacturers with a stealthy way to offset inflation and tariffs. The CR-calculated average for 2026 is $1,670.

For most Toyotas, the current fee is $1,160. For an Alfa Romeo, it’s $3,250.

By law, the destination fee must be included on the window stickers at your local dealership. But Consumer Reports is calling for rules requiring automakers to include destination charges in their advertised and online prices, too.

To help CR members, we list the destination price prominently on the model page for each new car in our ratings. For more information, you can also consult our article on the most and least expensive car destination charges.

Last updated April 13, 2026—Experts at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research said that gas prices would peak at more than $4.25 per gallon in May, adding $857 in new transportation expenses to the average household this year—enough to effectively wipe out the higher tax refunds many American families are counting on. [Editor’s Note: As of mid-May, the average price per gallon had exceeded $4.50.]

“Even if the war ends tomorrow, gasoline prices are not going down to where they were before the war, at least not in the short term,” says Ryan Cummings, the institute’s chief of staff. “And that’s happening at an inopportune time, because we’re heading into peak driving season. In the United States, the Fourth of July is typically the busiest weekend of any in the year. And so there’s going to be demand pressure on price, because people are buying more gasoline.”

“That’s going to prevent the prices from falling back to where they were—even if all the components of oil costs go down,” he says.

And the downstream impact of higher fuel prices stretches well beyond costlier car trips. “There are all kinds of second-order things that are also going to increase costs for consumers,” Cummings says.

Pricier fuel pushes up airline, trucking, and food prices, too.

Food processing “is incredibly energy intensive and deeply dependent on fossil fuels,” according to a December 2025 report released by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute.

As you might expect, higher fuel prices make it more expensive to run farm equipment and transport crops. But there are other, less noticeable effects. For instance, farming relies heavily on nitrogen fertilizers, which are produced using natural gas, and when supplies of natural gas are restricted, food prices tend to rise.

And that means we could be looking at yet more inflation in the grocery aisle. For help offsetting those costs, see our report on the most and least expensive supermarkets.

Here are a few more things to keep in mind:

Don’t panic-shop. It’s easy to get caught up in the fear of rising prices, but don’t lose your cool and buy things you’ll regret owning.

Choose reliable products. Higher prices could persist, so opt for products that are likely to serve you well in the long term. CR members can use our ratings to review the most and least reliable brands in many categories, including dishwashers, dryers, heat pumps, refrigerators, vacuums, and washing machines.

Shop for older models. TVs, laptops, and smartphones that are a year or two old often remain available at stores even after newer models arrive. Sony’s WF-1000XM5 earbuds receive the same Overall Score of 85 from our testers (see product cards below) as the recently released WF-1000XM6 buds but cost just $248 compared with $300.

Consider a used or refurbished product. While this advice doesn’t work equally well for all categories, you might find that purchasing a factory-refreshed or gently used appliance, laptop, or phone can save you money. Apple, Best Buy, LG, Samsung, and others certify the items they resell and even offer new warranties.

Use CR for Smart Buys and up-to-the-minute deals. Check out our ratings for help finding products with a good price and admirable performance. Apple and Samsung sell well-made, budget-friendly phones, for example. (See the iPhone 17e and Galaxy A25 5G.) They’re much less expensive than flagship models but still do almost everything you want a modern smartphone to do. And Apple’s new MacBook Neo is a bargain at $590 for those who need a general-purpose laptop.

Consumer Reports also has a devoted team of deal seekers who continually round up the best bargains on highly rated products. (They’re already prepping for Amazon’s first Prime Day sale of 2026.) You can find their picks at the CR Deals hub.