Arkansas propane prices: $2.37 a gallon

The directory is the Arkansas Propane Gas Association (APGA) associate-members roll, captured on 23 August 2026. Read it for what it is: the supply-and-service backbone of the state's propane trade, transporters, tank fabricators, equipment and wholesale-NGL suppliers, insurers, and a handful of in-state fuel distributors. It is not a list of retail companies that fill household tanks, and most members are headquartered outside Arkansas. To find a company that will deliver to your home, verify an active Arkansas LP-Gas Board Class 1 permit (retail) for the operator quoting you, and cross-check the APGA marketer directory. We do not publish retail dealer names from memory; on a regulated-industry page that is a hallucination risk we take seriously.

Arkansas regulates LP-gas under the Arkansas Liquefied Petroleum Gas Board, authorised by Ark. Code Ann. Title 15, Chapter 75 (Sec. 15-75-101 et seq.). The Board sits within the Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment at 3800 Richards Road, North Little Rock, AR 72117-2944, phone (501) 683-4100. It issues numbered permit classes, not letter grades: Class 1 covers full retail LP-gas (domestic, commercial, industrial, and agricultural), which is the permit a home-delivery dealer must hold; Class 2 covers bulk container and appliance sales and installation; Class 3 covers cylinder filling, sale, and delivery; Class 5 covers bulk transportation; Class 8 covers pipeline, rail-terminal, and refinery distribution; Class 9 covers manufacturing and selling LP-gas containers; Class 10 covers piping and appliance installation. The Board's site at arkansaslpgasboard.com publishes the permit rules and forms. It does not appear to host a public searchable licensee database, so if you cannot confirm a company's status online, call the Board with the company name and ask whether it holds an active Class 1 permit. Do not accept a bulk fill from anyone who cannot produce a current permit number.

Arkansas LIHEAP is administered by the Arkansas Energy Office within the Department of Energy and Environment, with applications taken by the local Community Action Agencies (also called Community-Based Organizations) that together cover all 75 counties. Income eligibility is set at 60 percent of Arkansas State Median Income (households of eight or more use 150 percent of the Federal Poverty Level). For the FY2026 program, heating benefits ran from a $60 minimum to a $570 maximum, with a separate summer cooling benefit and crisis assistance of up to $600 for an emergency such as an empty tank or a shutoff notice. The winter application window opens in the new year and runs first-come, first-served until funds are exhausted; the cooling window runs across the summer. Applications go to your county's Community Action Agency, not to the Energy Office directly. Bring photo ID, Social Security cards for the household, a recent propane or utility bill, proof of income, and proof of residency. At $2.37/gal, below the $2.67 national average, a fixed benefit buys more gallons in Arkansas than in most states.

Arkansas pays $2.37/gal versus the $2.67 national average, roughly 11% below. Three structural reasons. First, supply geography: Arkansas sits inside PADD 3 (Gulf Coast), on top of the Smackover NGL field across south Arkansas, with direct truck and short-pipeline reach to Mont Belvieu (Texas) hub propane, and it hosts the Lion Oil refinery at El Dorado. Second, supplier density: agricultural demand for rice and soybean drying and poultry brooding built out a large dealer network across the Delta and the Arkansas River Valley, and that density disciplines retail margin. Third, climate: Arkansas winters are short and mild next to the Northeast, so peak space-heating demand is moderate and storage does not have to absorb the same January spikes. Net effect: the South regional average is $3.26/gal and Arkansas runs $0.89 below that.

Arkansas is the number-one rice-producing state in the US, growing roughly half the national crop, and a top-tier soybean producer. Both crops come off the field wet and must be dried to about 13 percent moisture before storage, and the dominant drying fuel across the Delta is propane, fired through fan-and-burner units at on-farm bins and commercial elevators. Drying season runs August through October and concentrates millions of gallons of demand into a 60-to-90-day window, the same period residential pre-buy contracts are being signed. The result is a market that runs efficiently on volume: large bulk deliveries to grain operations keep terminal throughput high and per-gallon overhead low, which feeds back into the residential rate of $2.37/gal. The flip side is that a wet harvest year can briefly tighten supply and push autumn residential quotes $0.15 to $0.30/gal above the statewide average.

Yes, substantially. Arkansas is consistently a top-three US broiler state, with production concentrated in the northwest (Benton, Washington, Madison, and Carroll counties) and along the I-40 corridor. Commercial broiler houses run propane brooders to hold day-old chicks above 90 degrees for the first week or two after placement, plus radiant tube heaters through winter grow-outs. A single house can burn 8,000 to 15,000 gallons a year, and a four-house complex often runs a 30,000-gallon bulk tank on contract. That commercial demand supports the dense network of agricultural LP dealers across northwest and central Arkansas, the same dealers who serve rural homes. For a homeowner it means more competition on the route, less seasonal scarcity, and a narrower gap between summer pre-buy and January spot pricing than you would see in a market with no commercial backbone.

Late spring through midsummer (May through August) is the consistent low-price window. Two forces line up: residential heating demand is essentially zero by April, and the agricultural drying surge has not started. Most Arkansas suppliers run pre-buy enrollment (lock a per-gallon rate for next winter) and cap-price contracts (set a ceiling but keep the upside if the market falls) between May 1 and August 31. Lock-in pricing in that window has historically run $0.15 to $0.30/gal below the December-to-February spot, which on 1,000 gallons of annual use is $150 to $300 saved. Read the contract: a flat pre-buy holds you in either direction, while a cap-price lets you benefit if wholesale drops. If your tank is below 30 percent in September, fill it then at shoulder-season pricing rather than waiting for January. Statewide pricing today is $2.37/gal, $0.31 below the $2.67 national average, and that gap usually widens in summer.

Arkansas faces two propane-relevant hazards. Tornado season peaks in April and May with a secondary fall peak, and a single supercell can pull grid power for days across several counties, which is why whole-house propane standby generators have surged across central Arkansas. Sizing rule of thumb: a 22-to-24kW residential standby unit burns roughly 2 to 3 gallons per hour at half load, so a 500-gallon tank (400 usable) supports about six to seven days of continuous backup before a refill. Ice-storm risk is highest in the Ozarks and the northern counties. Three practical steps: keep the tank above 30 percent from October through March rather than the 20 percent suppliers default to; ask your supplier to flag you as a generator household so you land on the priority callout list in a major outage; and if you live in a steep Ozark county such as Newton, Searcy, Stone, or Boone, confirm the supplier has a cold-weather route plan, because rural grades turn impassable for bobtails after freezing rain. At $2.37/gal, a full 500-gallon refill runs about $947, cheap insurance for a week of runtime.

The member roll is the supply chain, not a vetted retail shortlist, and we will not publish named dealers with review scores we cannot verify. What we can do is point you at the right search for each part of the state. Central Arkansas (Little Rock, Conway, Benton, Hot Springs) is the densest supplier market and the seat of the LP-Gas Board itself in North Little Rock, so expect the most competitive residential quotes. Northwest Arkansas (Fayetteville, Bentonville, Rogers, Springdale) is served by both national carriers and poultry-country agricultural dealers who also run residential routes, and broiler-house demand keeps routes dense. Fort Smith and the River Valley sit close to Oklahoma wholesale supply, with a mix of regional independents and national branches; owned-tank customers have the most leverage. The Delta and east Arkansas (Jonesboro, West Memphis, Stuttgart, Pine Bluff) is rice and soybean drying country, where grain-elevator volume runs through the same terminals that serve homes, though autumn drying season can briefly tighten supply. South Arkansas (El Dorado, Camden, Magnolia, Texarkana) is closest to the Smackover NGL field and the Lion Oil refinery. In every region, confirm a Class 1 permit and pull three written quotes. The Arkansas Propane Gas Association publishes a marketer directory at arkansaspropane.com, and the National Propane Gas Association directory at npga.org is a useful cross-check for any multi-state operator quoting Arkansas service.