Exxon Mobil earned roughly $160 million a day between April and June. Chevron nearly quadrupled its profit. Together the two largest American oil companies booked $26.6 billion in a single quarter while drivers paid $4.11 for a gallon of regular gasoline, up about a dollar from a year ago.
That combined Exxon Chevron profits figure is the largest for the pair since 2022, and it arrives with a political price tag attached. Two bills sitting in Congress would tax exactly this kind of quarter, and the numbers released Friday just handed their sponsors a talking point.
Exxon reported second-quarter profit of $14.53 billion, up 105 percent from a year earlier, on revenue of $116.02 billion, itself up 42 percent. Chevron posted $12.07 billion, a 385 percent increase, on $70.06 billion in revenue, up 56 percent. Neither company sets the price of crude. Both were positioned perfectly for what happened to it.
Here is how the Q2 2026 earnings broke down side by side:
| Metric | Exxon Mobil | Chevron |
|---|---|---|
| Q2 2026 profit | $14.53 billion | $12.07 billion |
| Change from a year earlier | Up 105 percent | Up 385 percent |
| Q2 2026 revenue | $116.02 billion | $70.06 billion |
| Revenue change | Up 42 percent | Up 56 percent |
| Headquarters | Spring, Texas | Houston, Texas |
What Drove Exxon Chevron Profits This High
One waterway. The conflict between the United States and Iran, now in its sixth month, halted most shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that previously carried about a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas.
Supply tightened. Prices did what prices do. Oil company earnings followed the barrel. Brent crude climbed from roughly $70 to above $100 for most of March, April and May, touching $126 at the peak. The quarterly average landed at $104, a 53 percent jump from $68 the year before. American crude swung between $68 and $115 inside the same three months.
Timing favored Exxon and Chevron in a way the first quarter did not. Because of how oil contracts price and settle, the two companies could not fully capture March’s spike. April was their first clean shot at the elevated market. European majors holding oil on floating storage and selling into the spot market got there earlier, which is why six of Europe’s largest oil companies posted $22 billion in combined first-quarter profit, up 43 percent, according to Global Witness. Finance ministers watched the same math: the G7 meeting in Paris over the Hormuz closure put energy costs at the top of the agenda weeks before these results landed.
Pain from the same price move landed unevenly. Australia rationed fuel. Nepal and Sri Lanka closed government offices to conserve it. Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab estimates the war has cost consumers more than $76 billion in higher gasoline and diesel prices alone, close to three times what Exxon and Chevron cleared together in the quarter. Our earlier reporting examined why Hormuz oil exports may never fully recover to pre-war levels.
The Refining Math Almost Nobody Talks About
Here is where the real money was made.
Exxon and Chevron do not just pump oil. They refine it. And refining margins right now are the widest they have been in living memory. Downstream is where Exxon Chevron profits pulled away from producers that only drill.
“The return on refining, on a percentage basis, has skyrocketed,” said Tom Seng, assistant professor of energy finance at Texas Christian University. “Oil right now is priced what it is priced because of the Iran war. But in the meantime, the refineries are making money hand over fist.”
Refiners call it the crack spread, the difference between what a refiner pays for crude and what it gets for the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel it produces. Normal range: $20 to $25 a barrel. In late July, refiners buying crude around $80 were looking at $50 to $60. That is roughly double a good market.
Three things stacked up to produce it:
- Some refineries in the Middle East and Russia were damaged in the fighting and cannot run.
- Asian refiners lost their normal Middle Eastern crude supply and cannot fill the gap.
- American refineries have crude, and are running at near-full capacity.
Diesel now prices about 41 percent higher in the United States than it did before Hormuz closed, according to federal fuel price data. Jet fuel followed. Both feed straight into freight costs, airline tickets and grocery bills.
“If you’re a company that owns a bunch of refinery capacity, things look pretty good,” said Timothy Fitzgerald, a University of Tennessee professor of business economics who studies the petroleum industry.
Who Is Actually Losing Money in This Market
Not every oil company is winning, and Fitzgerald is the one who keeps pointing it out.
“If you’re a company like a U.S. producer, even a U.S.-based international company like an Exxon or Chevron who’s got lots of production outside the Gulf, things are good. You’re selling your product at a higher price,” he said. Companies stuck inside the Persian Gulf are a different story entirely: unable to move liquefied natural gas, sitting on damaged fields and processing facilities, watching revenue collapse.
“Your ability to sell anything and the volume that you may be getting out is so curtailed that your revenues are way down and you’re incurring higher transportation costs and security costs,” Fitzgerald said.
Geography decided the winners. A barrel produced in the Permian Basin or offshore Guyana is worth what the global market says it is worth. A barrel stranded behind a closed strait is worth nothing at all.
The Windfall Profits Tax Bills in Congress
Democrats introduced legislation in March to tax oil producer profits from 2026 forward and redistribute the proceeds to consumers. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island carries the Senate version. Representative Ro Khanna of California introduced the House companion.
Their mechanism is a per-barrel excise tax on any company that produced or imported at least 300,000 barrels a day in 2025. The rate would be 50 percent of the difference between the current price and last year’s average price per barrel.
“It’s fair to put a windfall profits tax on inordinate windfall profits rather than cut off children’s food programs,” Whitehouse said.
He framed it around the pump price. “We cracked $4 again per gallon last weekend in gas stations that I drove by, and that’s a big expense, particularly for families that get their income from driving around from job to job in the work van or the work truck,” he said. “It makes a real difference.”
Similar proposals have failed repeatedly, including during the 2022 price spike that produced comparable earnings. Industry’s standard response is that windfall taxes reduce the incentive to invest in new supply, which makes the next shortage worse. That argument has generally won.
The Case Against Blaming the Oil Companies
Neither Exxon nor Chevron controls the price of crude. Supply, demand, and what traders and refiners are willing to pay set it. When a fifth of global seaborne oil stops moving, prices rise whether or not anyone in Houston or Spring, Texas wants them to.
Producers also absorbed real losses in 2020, when crude briefly traded below zero and the same companies posted historic write-downs. A tax that captures upside without offsetting downside changes the arithmetic of drilling a well that will not produce for five years.
Advocacy groups counter on proportion rather than mechanism.
“There are constituencies around the world who are having a very good crisis, and the oil producers are one of them,” said Patrick Galey, fossil fuels lead at Global Witness. He set that against the people living with rolling blackouts, electricity curbs, rationing and food lines. “We don’t think that it’s a justifiable price for the rest of the world to be paying.”
Both things are true at once. The companies did not cause the war, and they are unambiguously benefiting from it.
Diesel Is the Inflation Number to Watch Next
Energy is an input to nearly everything. Fitzgerald made the point plainly: consumers pay directly at the pump and for airline tickets, “but it also means that almost everything else we buy has an embedded energy content to it, and this is where you start to worry about it driving increases in costs.”
Diesel at 41 percent above pre-war levels moves every truckload of goods in the country, and that pass-through is the channel that concerns central bankers more than the headline gasoline number. Manufacturers have already flagged it. Whirlpool cited the Iran war as a recession risk in its own guidance, pointing to appliance demand softening as household budgets absorb fuel costs. Rate setters face the same squeeze, and we covered why central banks may trigger a recession fighting the oil shock rather than let gas prices feed a wage spiral.
Refining Margins Narrow the Day the Strait Reopens
For investors, the question is durability. Exxon Chevron profits of this size rest on two temporary conditions, not on demand growth. Margins this wide are a function of damaged capacity and blocked supply routes. Both conditions reverse when the strait reopens. The energy trade of the past two quarters has been a geopolitical position wearing an equity ticker, and the exit is whatever day the shipping lanes clear.
What Happens to Gas Prices if the Strait Reopens?
Prices unwind faster than they build. Brent already showed it once this year: crude slipped below $80 during the brief US-Iran peace framework before the talks stalled and shipping stayed bottled up. A durable reopening would restore roughly a fifth of seaborne supply, hand Asian refiners their crude back, and compress the crack spread toward its $20 to $25 norm.
Retail pump prices track the barrel with a lag, so drivers would not see $3 gasoline the week the tankers start moving again. Israeli and American pressure on Iranian naval capacity is the variable that decides the timing, and every week the lanes stay closed is another week refiners bank abnormal margins.
How much did Exxon and Chevron make in Q2 2026?
Exxon Mobil reported $14.53 billion in second-quarter profit, up 105 percent year over year, on $116.02 billion of revenue. Chevron reported $12.07 billion, up 385 percent, on $70.06 billion of revenue. Combined, the two companies earned $26.6 billion in three months, with Exxon averaging roughly $160 million per day.
Why are gas prices above $4 a gallon?
The average price of regular gasoline in the United States hit $4.11 in late July, up from below $3 before the conflict with Iran began. The Strait of Hormuz, which carried about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas, has been largely closed, pushing Brent crude from roughly $70 to a peak of $126 a barrel and lifting refined product prices with it.
What is a crack spread?
The crack spread is the difference between what a refinery pays for a barrel of crude oil and what it earns selling the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel refined from it. The historical average runs $20 to $25 a barrel. In late July 2026 refiners were seeing $50 to $60, roughly double normal, because damaged foreign refining capacity left American plants with unusual pricing power.
Will Congress pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies?
Two bills are pending, from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Ro Khanna, that would impose a per-barrel excise tax on large producers equal to 50 percent of the price increase over 2025 averages. Similar measures failed in previous price spikes, including 2022, and the current bills face the same industry argument that windfall taxes discourage new supply investment.
How much has the Iran war cost consumers?
Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab estimates the conflict has cost consumers more than $76 billion in higher gasoline and diesel prices. Effects reached beyond the United States, with fuel rationing in Australia and government office closures in Nepal and Sri Lanka as supplies ran short.
Are all oil companies profiting from the conflict?
No. Producers with output outside the Persian Gulf, including Exxon and Chevron, are selling into a higher global price. Companies operating inside the Gulf face the opposite situation: they cannot move liquefied natural gas out, some fields and processing facilities were damaged, and they are absorbing higher transportation and security costs against sharply lower volumes.
