What is Pakistan’s petroleum levy, and why is it Rs 80 a litre?
The petroleum levy started in 1961 to keep fuel prices steady. This article explains its history, its purpose and why it is Rs 80 today.
Read the noteNotes on the record
Longer pieces about how this archive is made: what the regulator publishes, how it is read, what is refused and why, and what changed on a day something moved. Each cites the archived source behind every figure.
0 notes
All notes
The levy didn’t raise the petrol price. The world price of fuel did.
Petrol went up Rs 73.48 a litre in two months. The Rs 80 levy did not move once. Cost and freight, the price of buying and shipping the fuel, rose the most.
Pakistan’s Rs 100 petrol relief, explained
A Rs 100-a-litre rebate for motorcycles, rickshaws and cars up to 800cc, capped monthly. It does not change OGRA’s notified price — Rs 375.82 for petrol on 12 September 2026 — and it leaves the petroleum levy whole. Who qualifies, how to register, and who pays.
The price here, and the price at the pump
OGRA’s notified price is the legal maximum, the dealer’s margin already inside the build-up, so a pump charging more than the petrol or diesel figure here is overcharging.
The plan to stop setting the petrol price
Pakistan set a tentative June 2027 target to deregulate petrol prices and let oil companies set the pump rate, with diesel to follow — what it would change for OGRA’s build-up.
The state’s share of a litre
About Rs 106 of a Rs 349 litre of petrol — near a third — is the state: petroleum levy, climate support levy, customs duty and sales tax, on petrol and diesel alike. Each line itemised from OGRA’s build-up, and how the 2026 IMF measures built it.
What makes up the price of a litre?
A worked reading of OGRA’s 1 September 2026 petrol and diesel build-up: the fuel, import and refining costs, distribution margins and state levies inside the pump price.
What OGRA serves, and what can be read of it
OGRA’s listing shows about twenty documents and turns over within weeks, but the documents themselves go on being served under ids nothing links to. A sweep of that id space on 21 August 2026, what it found in each family of document, and the two claims this project had to withdraw because of it.
Reading OGRA’s kerosene price scans
OGRA publishes kerosene’s build-up as photographs of paper. This is how a machine was made to read them, what checks a figure has to pass before it is published, what is deliberately left unread, and what this kind of reading cannot tell you.
The day OGRA restructured the diesel build-up
On 20 August 2026 OGRA replaced the price build-up for high-speed diesel and left petrol’s alone. What changed, which published figures moved, what became visible for the first time, and how this archive caught it on the day rather than publishing a diesel pump price of five rupees.
Reference
The historical price build-up in Pakistan, and the shape of the record around it
What OGRA published about the inside of a litre between 2006 and 2011, where the one surviving copy of it came from, what can be mapped onto today’s build-up and what cannot, and why the chart stops where it stops.
How Pakistan's fuel price record is read — method
The long form of every rule the ek litre record states in a line: what each published line of OGRA's fuel price build-up is, how its lines fall into three groups, why a date can have no price, what the marks on the chart mean, and how a day is cross-checked.