Natural Gas Price

This chart plots the front-month NYMEX Henry Hub natural gas futures settlement as a daily close over the last three years, from the source named under the chart. Henry Hub is the US benchmark — the price that flows through to heating bills, electricity generation and the feedstock cost of much of the chemical industry. The page refreshes hourly and shows only values computed from the live data.

A rising gas price reaches the economy through utility bills and power costs rather than the pump: it feeds electricity inflation, squeezes households through winter heating, and raises costs for gas-intensive manufacturers. A falling price relieves all three and is quietly one of the more effective disinflationary forces when it happens.

For US markets, gas matters differently from oil. Crude is a global market where the US is one price-taker among many; natural gas is still largely a regional market, so the Henry Hub price reflects American supply, American weather and American storage levels more than any global shock. A spike here is usually a domestic story — a cold snap, a hurricane, a production outage — rather than a geopolitical one.

The caveats: this is the most seasonal chart on the site — winter demand can multiply the price within weeks and spring can halve it, so read any move against the calendar. It is a futures settlement and a daily close, and front-month gas is prone to violent contract-roll effects. A single season of prices says little about the structural trend.