What makes up the kerosene oil price in Pakistan, and why is its levy only Rs 20?

Kerosene oil’s price adds 4 lines: refinery price, inland freight, distributor margin and a Rs 20.36 levy. I found no source giving the reason.

The lines come from the Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority (OGRA) page for 19 August 2026. A machine read them from a photograph of paper.

Petrol’s levy was Rs 80.00 that day. The law lets the Government set each rate by notice, and it states no reasons.

Today’s price is on the kerosene oil price page. Here I read 1 day’s lines, then the levy since 2020.

What makes up a litre of kerosene oil?

OGRA’s kerosene page builds the maximum ex-depot sale price line by line. Its Direct column for 19 August 2026, as scanned, reads:

The 4 lines add up exactly to the printed total. The levy was 6.77% of it.

The record holds no dealer margin figure for kerosene oil. Its page ends at the depot price.

An ex-depot price is the price at the oil company’s depot, not at the pump. What a shop charges after that is not on record.

Pakistan State Oil (PSO) notified kerosene oil at Rs 300.85 for 19 August 2026. It is the same figure, from a separate document.

The day record holds PSO’s figure only. The scanned lines stay in the scanned record and are never mixed into it.

Why is the kerosene oil levy Rs 20, not Rs 80?

The levy’s law is the Petroleum Levy and Climate Support Levy Ordinance, 1961. Section 3 says companies pay the levy:

“at such rates as may respectively be notified by the Federal Government in the official Gazette, from time to time”

Its list of products includes “Superior Kerosine”. But the law sets no rate for it and gives no reason for any rate.

So the rate is a Government choice, made by notice. Here are the 2 printed figures for 19 August 2026:

The missing Climate Support Levy does have a written cause. Section 3(4) names petrol, diesel and furnace oil, but not kerosene oil.

For the petroleum levy itself, no document I have read explains kerosene oil’s rate. So this note does not offer a reason.

The levy has never reached Rs 80 on any scanned kerosene oil page. Its highest scanned figure is Rs 20.36.

How has the kerosene oil levy changed since 2020?

Every figure in this table is scanned, from the scanned record. Each row matched a second OGRA document for the same date.

The record has no scanned day between 1 November 2020 and 1 September 2024. So it cannot show when the levy fell to 5 paisa.

The rise to Rs 10.96 came between 16 February and 29 March 2025.

The page for 16 March 2025 failed a check and was withheld. So the exact date of that rise is not on record.

On 29 March and 16 April 2025, the maximum price was the same, Rs 169.38. Between them, the levy rose by Rs 7.99.

The refinery price fell by the same Rs 7.99, from Rs 148.96 to Rs 140.97. So the total did not move.

The last rise, to Rs 20.36, came between 16 December 2025 and 16 January 2026. The 1 January page was withheld too.

Every scanned day since 16 January 2026 shows Rs 20.36. The last scanned day is 19 August 2026.

The petroleum levy’s history covers petrol and diesel over the same years.

Is there sales tax on kerosene oil?

There was in 2020. On 1 March 2020, the scanned page shows sales tax of Rs 13.43 in a total of Rs 92.45.

That was 14.53% of that day’s printed total.

From 1 September 2024, the readings hold no sales tax figure. On every scanned day since, the price before sales tax equals the maximum price.

So on those pages, the petroleum levy is the only Government line in the price.

How often does the kerosene oil price change?

PSO’s notices show 3 patterns in 2026. From 9 May to 18 July, a notice came every 7 days, each on a Saturday.

From 22 July to 19 August, the price changed on 18 of 19 notice dates. That is almost daily.

From 22 August, it changed only every 7 days, again on Saturdays. The 2 exceptions are in the next section.

No document I hold calls this a rule. It is a pattern in the notices, not a stated policy.

The full series, back to 2006, is in the kerosene oil history.

Why does late September 2026 have 2 kerosene oil prices?

PSO’s notices for that week disagree with each other. I show every one and choose none.

The 2 figures are exactly Rs 30.00 apart. On 25 September, 2 notices give one each.

Nothing on PSO’s page says which notice replaced which. So the 25 September record shows no single kerosene oil price, only both as contested.

The same happened on 9 October, with Rs 329.29 and Rs 329.54. Both dates are on the data checks page.

How far can you trust the scanned figures?

Less than the petrol and diesel figures. A machine read most of them from photographs, so each is its reading, not a typed figure.

The scanned record holds 63 kerosene days: 47 read from photographs and 16 from typed PDFs. Another 6 days were withheld.

42 of the 63 matched a second document. The other 21 had no second document, so nothing has confirmed them.

A person checked 132 cells against the photographs, from 11 dates. The machine had read none of them wrong.

That is not a measured zero. The record’s own statement is that the true error rate could be as high as 2.27%.

The sample is every 4th photographed day, not a random one. It also cannot catch the same misreading made on both documents.

Across documents, 2 of 173 compared cells disagreed. How the scans are read explains every check.