The fuel excise rate on petrol and diesel in Australia is 53.7 cents per litre, and has been since 3 August 2026. It is set by the Australian Taxation Office, quoted before GST, and indexed to the consumer price index every February and August.
The ATO excise duty rates table, tariff items 10.5 for gasoline and 10.10 for diesel. Both carry the same rate.
The August 2026 indexation and the end of the temporary relief landed on the same day, which is why the 3 August 2026 step was 17.1 c/L of excise rather than the 36.6 to 53.7 arithmetic most coverage expected. The step itself is explained on our fuel excise page.
If you are checking a figure published earlier this year, this table is where it fits. All three rates below were correct on their own dates.
| Rate | From | To | What it was |
|---|---|---|---|
| 53.7 c/L | 3 August 2026 | current | Full rate, indexed to the consumer price index. Current. |
| 36.6 c/L | 1 July 2026 | 2 August 2026 | Temporary relief, reduced. The extension announced 20 June 2026 halved the original discount. |
| 20.6 c/L | 1 April 2026 | 30 June 2026 | Temporary relief, the deep cut. This is the rate most superseded pages still show. |
Excise is quoted before GST, and GST applies to the pump price with the excise already in it. So 53.7 c/L of excise carries 5.37 c/L of GST with it.
The excise itself. This is the gazetted figure and the one to quote when the question is what the rate is.
The GST that rides on the excise. GST is charged on the pump price, and the excise is inside that price, so the tax is charged on the tax.
Excise plus the GST on it. This is not the total tax in a litre of fuel: GST applies to the rest of the pump price as well, so the total moves with the price while this component does not.
The same arithmetic is why the 3 August 2026 increase was reported as 17.1 c/L but costs about 18.8 c/L at the bowser.
Open the ATO table and read the column for the current date against items 10.5 and 10.10. It takes about a minute.
The ATO publishes the rates in a table with one column per effective date. Find the column headed with the current effective date and read the rows for items 10.5 and 10.10; the value is given in dollars per litre, so 0.537 is the 53.7c/L on this page. One practical note: that table is rendered by the page's own scripts, so a plain fetch of the URL returns the page shell without the numbers in it. It has to be read in a browser.
A rate that changed three times in five months is a rate that gets quoted out of date. This page is the dated answer, and it says when it was last touched.
Fuel excise moved three times between April and August 2026, and several fuel-price sites still display superseded relief-era rates. We are not going to name them, because a reader checking a figure needs a correct one rather than an argument. What we will do is show ours with its source, its effective date and its history, so that a wrong figure found elsewhere can be resolved in under a minute.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 7 August 2026 | Page published, stating 53.7 c/L effective 3 August 2026. |
The next entry here will be the February 2027 indexation. If you find an error on this page before then, our corrections policy sets out how it gets fixed and recorded.
Source: ATO excise duty ratesUpdated 7 August 2026Excise duty rates for fuel and petroleum productsHow we measure this