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# Your petrol price includes the cost of shipping it here, and shipping just got a lot dearer
- URL: https://www.businessbagel.com/tanker-rates-record-south-africa-fuel-price-shipping/
- Published: 2026-09-28T03:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-28T02:59:59.000Z
- Description: Hiring a giant crude tanker from the Gulf now costs more than $1 million a day, and South Africa's monthly fuel price is built to include the shipping.
- Author: Christian Maidman
- Tags: Economy, Business Bagel News

Petrol and diesel in South Africa are priced as if they had just come off a ship, because a good deal of it has. That makes the cost of the ship part of what you pay, and right now hiring one has never been dearer.

Every month the Department of Mineral and Petroleum Resources resets the fuel price, and one of its inputs is what it costs to import crude oil and finished fuel, shipping included. Its September adjustment listed higher shipping costs among the reasons crude got more expensive, alongside the US-Iran tensions and doubts about oil getting through the Strait of Hormuz. Petrol went up by R1.29 a litre that month.

## The day tanker rates hit seven figures

The benchmark is the daily cost of hiring a very large crude carrier from Saudi Arabia to China, which the Baltic Exchange tracks. At the start of September it was around $700,000 a day. In mid-September it went through $1 million for the first time ever, a rise of more than half in about two weeks.

The routes are why. Attacks and disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea and the Bab el-Mandeb have pushed ships off the paths they usually take, and an attack this month on Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline sent more of its crude out through the Gulf instead. The alternative is the long way round, past our own Cape, which adds 18 to 20 days to a trip to Rotterdam and $11 million to $14 million in extra hire.

Argus Media, which tracks oil markets, reckons freight is now about a fifth of the cost of getting crude to a refinery. Its figures on one Gulf-to-China grade show how quickly that happened: at the end of February freight came to about a tenth of the value of the oil, already a six-year high, and by 3 March it was just over a fifth.

## Why South Africa feels it more than it used to

The country did not always need this many ships. Imported refined fuel held at about a quarter of the mix from 2010 to 2019, until refineries holding almost half of South Africa's refining capacity closed in 2020 and imports filled the gap. The Reserve Bank reckons the oil import bill could have been R76 billion lower between 2021 and 2024 had that quarter held. And every imported litre carries its freight bill, which can climb in a month when the oil price stands still.

The Reserve Bank raised the repo rate by a quarter of a percentage point last week, to 7.25%, mostly because fuel had pushed up its inflation forecasts. It expects inflation above 5% later this year and early next, before slowing as the fuel shock recedes.