Who gets the dealer and oil company margins in a litre of petrol?

The pump dealer gets Rs 9.98 of every litre of petrol, and the oil company that supplies the pump gets Rs 7.87.

Those were the 2 margins on 13 October 2026, when petrol cost Rs 395.37. The Government fixes both, in rupees, not as a percentage.

In August, dealers threatened a nationwide strike over their margin. So it can look as if they take a large cut of the price.

The record shows a small share. That day the dealer margin was 2.52% of the petrol price, and the oil company’s 1.99%.

Who gets the dealer margin and the OMC margin?

The Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) publishes a daily sheet, the build-up. It lists every part of a litre’s price.

2 of those lines are margins. A margin is a fixed amount per litre that a business may keep from the price.

The dealer margin goes to the petrol pump dealer. OGRA’s sheet describes it as the “Margin of Petrol Pump dealers fixed by the Government.”

The OMC margin goes to the oil marketing company (OMC), the company that supplies fuel to the pumps.

The sheet names Pakistan State Oil (PSO), Attock Petroleum, Wafi (Shell) and Hascol as examples. Their margin is also “fixed by the Government”.

A third line sits beside them: the Inland Freight Equalisation Margin (IFEM). It is not profit for anyone.

IFEM shares out the cost of moving fuel across the country, so every region pays the same price.

How much of a litre are the margins?

On the site, these 3 lines form the group “Getting it to the pump”. On 13 October 2026, OGRA printed:

Each share is that line divided by the same day’s printed pump price. The 2 margins are the same on both fuels; only IFEM differs.

So of a Rs 395.37 litre of petrol, Rs 9.98 is the dealer’s. Most of the rest pays for the fuel and the Government’s charges.

The other 2 groups are shown on the live petrol build-up and diesel build-up.

Did the dealer margin go up in 2026?

Yes. On both fuels it rose by Rs 1.34, from Rs 8.64 to Rs 9.98 a litre.

OGRA’s sheet printed Rs 8.64 on every day from 21 July to 21 August 2026.

The new figure first appears on the sheet effective 22 August 2026. Every sheet since then prints Rs 9.98.

Dawn reported that the new margin would take effect from 1 September. The record shows what OGRA printed, and that is 22 August.

I cannot say why the 2 dates differ. Both are in the sources below.

Petrol rose by Rs 3.81 on 22 August, and diesel by Rs 3.59. The dealer margin’s Rs 1.34 was part of each net change.

Why did the Government raise it?

Dealers had called a nationwide strike from 15 August 2026. They wanted a higher margin.

On 14 August, the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) of the federal cabinet approved the Rs 1.34 rise, Dawn reported.

The dealers then called off the strike, The News reported.

The dealers had asked for something different: a margin of 8% of the retail price, not a fixed amount.

Official sources told Dawn that 8% would have meant about Rs 26 a litre on petrol and Rs 30 on diesel.

Those 2 figures are the press’s, not the record’s.

Why does the margin’s share fall when prices rise?

This is what the dealers’ demand was about. A fixed margin is a smaller part of each litre as the price climbs.

On 22 August, Rs 9.98 was 2.92% of petrol’s Rs 341.59. On 13 October, the same Rs 9.98 was 2.52% of Rs 395.37.

The rupees did not change, but the price did. A percentage margin would rise with the price; a fixed one does not.

Did the oil company margin change?

No. OGRA printed Rs 7.87 for the OMC margin on every sheet from 21 July to 13 October 2026, on both fuels.

Dawn reported a proposal to raise it by Rs 1.22. It said the rise was still linked to digitisation measures.

The record will show any change on the day OGRA prints it. The history lists every day.

Does kerosene have a dealer margin?

The record holds no dealer margin figure for kerosene. It holds a different line from OGRA’s kerosene page: the distributor margin.

It was Rs 1.58 a litre on all 63 kerosene days the scanned record shows, from 1 March 2020 to 19 August 2026.

These figures come from scanned documents. A machine read 47 of the 63 days from photos of OGRA’s pages.

A second OGRA document confirms the figures on 42 days. For the other 21, no second document exists.

The scanned record shows each day and its checks. It has no kerosene day after 19 August, so it cannot show any change since.

What can this record not tell you?

The record holds OGRA’s printed lines. It cannot show a dealer’s costs, like rent, wages and electricity, or what a pump earns.

So Rs 9.98 is the dealer’s share of the price, not the dealer’s profit. The record also cannot show how many litres a pump sells.

It cannot show what a pump actually charges either. Some pumps charge more than OGRA’s price, which already includes the margin.