Gas Station Demand Per Capita: Why a Site's Gallons No Longer Set Its Value

A gas station is the rare commercial asset whose name has drifted away from its economics. The pumps out front still move most of the revenue and most of the traffic, but they no longer produce most of the profit, and the gallons they sell are flat-to-declining and structurally thin-margin. The margin has moved inside the store, and above all into foodservice. Per the NACS State of the Industry data, fuel accounted for 65.0 percent of industry sales dollars in 2025 but only 38.8 percent of gross-profit dollars; inside the store, foodservice was 28.5 percent of inside sales but 38.9 percent of inside gross profit. Underwrite a modern fueling site to its gallons and you are underwriting the wrong line.

There is a second reason gallons make a poor foundation: they are distributed across the map unevenly enough to defeat any national rule of thumb. Per-capita fuel demand varies by roughly threefold, from the rural Plains and Mountain West to the dense Northeast, and station density inversely mirrors it, so saturation is never a national question and always a local one. This note walks the two problems a lender faces when a gas-station or convenience-store deal crosses the desk, how much fuel a market actually demands and where the defensible revenue really sits, and how to underwrite both the way a skeptical credit committee will read them.

The number the name promises, and the number that pays

Start with the split that reorders everything downstream. In 2025, total U.S. convenience-industry sales reached $817.5 billion, of which fuel was $476.3 billion, 65.0 percent of the sales dollars. On profit, that ranking inverts. Fuel delivered only 38.8 percent of gross-profit dollars; the inside of the store delivered the majority. Fuel is a low-margin, high-volatility traffic driver: Casey's runs a fuel margin around 12 percent against roughly 59 percent for prepared food and dispensed beverages, and Murphy USA, a deliberately fuel-forward operator, earned 30.7 cents per gallon of total fuel contribution in fiscal 2025 on 4.85 billion retail gallons while holding merchandise unit margins of 20.2 percent. Gallons buy the traffic. The store earns its money after the customer is out of the car.

The national frame: one convenience store per 2,257 residents

The U.S. convenience-store universe totaled 151,975 stores as of December 31, 2025, down 0.2 percent year over year, of which 122,620 sold fuel, the most fuel-selling sites in eight years, per the NACS/NIQ TDLinx 2026 count. Against a Census-estimated population of roughly 343 million, that is one convenience store for every 2,257 residents. The channel is central to fuel retailing: the convenience format sells an estimated 80 percent of the fuel purchased in the United States, and 80.7 percent of all c-stores sell fuel. Counts differ by definition, however. A separate site-level map from Orbital, cross-referenced against NACS, EIA and Census County Business Patterns, puts the number of NAICS 447-type fueling sites lower, at roughly 145,158, so the first discipline in any saturation analysis is to fix the definition before benchmarking against it.

The revenue picture behind those counts is one of divergence. Fuel sales fell 5.4 percent in 2025, to $476.3 billion from $501.9 billion in 2024, but the decline was a price story rather than a volume story: the average pump price was $3.11 a gallon against $3.30 the prior year, while gallons sold actually rose 0.5 percent. Inside sales, foodservice plus merchandise, reached a record $341.2 billion, the twenty-third consecutive year inside sales have increased. IBISWorld, defining the narrower "gas stations with convenience stores" industry, pegs it at $553.2 billion in 2025, up 0.7 percent. The through-line is consistent: dollar sales are growing, fuel dollars are shrinking on price, and the growth is inside.

Per-capita fuel demand varies roughly threefold

How much fuel a market demands is a function of how far its residents drive, and that varies far more than most site models assume. EIA's State Energy Data System makes the spread plain. In the 2018 SEDS data, Wyoming and North Dakota each consumed about 552 gallons of motor gasoline per capita, against a U.S. average of 422, roughly 284 in New York and just 164 in the District of Columbia. The 2023 SEDS Table F10 data holds the same shape: Texas consumed 14.6 billion gallons of transportation gasoline, California about 12.5 billion and Florida about 8.9 billion, population-driven totals, but on a per-capita basis the sparsely populated Plains and Mountain states remain far above the coasts. EIA attributes the low-consumption states, the District of Columbia, New York, Rhode Island and Illinois, to density, transit access and walkability, and the high-consumption states, Wyoming, the Dakotas and Montana, to low density, long driving distances and the highest vehicle-miles per capita in the country.

The mileage data tracks the fuel data. FHWA Highway Statistics for 2023 put Wyoming residents at just under 16,300 miles driven per capita, the most in the nation, followed by Alabama, Mississippi and New Mexico, with the lowest in New York, Rhode Island, Hawaii and Washington at roughly 6,100 to 7,600 miles. On companion figures the spread runs from about 16,849 miles in Wyoming to 5,133 in the District of Columbia, a 3.3-times gap, and vehicles per capita follow the same axis, Montana around 2.07 and Wyoming around 1.52 against dense coastal states well below 1.0. All of this sits on top of a national trend that is gently downward: U.S. motor-gasoline consumption averaged 8.9 million barrels a day in 2025, 1 percent below 2024 and 4 percent below pre-pandemic 2019, and the EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook of April 2026 forecasts continued declines through 2027 as fleet fuel economy improves.

Density inversely mirrors demand, so saturation is local

The states that burn the most fuel per resident also tend to have the most stations per resident, which is exactly why high per-capita gallons do not, by themselves, signal an open market. Orbital's per-100,000-resident figures, covering the highest-count states and cross-referenced to NACS, EIA and Census NAICS 447 as of April 2026, show the highest-density large states are Indiana at about 57 stations per 100,000 residents (roughly one per 1,754 people) and Tennessee at about 56, with Texas and Ohio near 52, while the lowest is California at about 30 per 100,000 (roughly one per 3,333), followed by New Jersey near 37 and New York near 40. Orbital's own summary is the point a site model has to absorb: "per capita, the picture flips: thinly populated states with long road networks have far more stations per resident than the coasts." Rural fuel penetration confirms the density, historically at least 95 percent of the c-stores in Kansas, Iowa, Wyoming, North Dakota and Nebraska also sell fuel, and at the far end Alaska carries the fewest total stores of any state, 185.

The feasibility read follows directly. Rural high-consumption states offer strong per-site gallons but thin, slow-growing populations and high existing station density per capita, so a new site competes for a fixed pool of trips. Dense coastal metros offer enormous traffic volumes but low per-capita fuel demand, high real-estate costs, and transit substitution. The most defensible fuel-volume markets are the fast-growing Sun Belt corridors that combine above-average driving, car-first culture and population inflows, Texas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee. In every case the saturation test should be run at the trade-area level, using EIA SEDS per-capita gallons, FHWA vehicle-miles per capita, and Census County Business Patterns NAICS 447 establishment counts divided by population, not national averages.

Where the money is made: inside sales and foodservice

If gallons are the wrong line to underwrite, foodservice is increasingly the right one. Foodservice reached 28.5 percent of inside sales and 38.9 percent of inside gross profit in 2025, up from just 11.9 percent of inside sales in 2005, a two-decade shift in where a store's profit originates. Within foodservice, prepared food is now 73.9 percent of sales, up from 66.4 percent in 2021, evidence that the category's growth is in made-to-order meals rather than commodity coffee and fountain drinks. Packaged beverages are the second-largest inside category at 18.7 percent of sales, and foodservice and packaged beverages together delivered about 60.8 percent of inside profit dollars in 2024. For a lender, the inside gross-profit mix is the single most informative page of a convenience-store pro forma.

Traffic under pressure even as dollars grow

The dollar growth masks a softening in visits that a careful underwriter should not. The average c-store recorded 45,160 transactions a month, about 1,484 a day, in 2025, down 2.7 percent year over year; traffic is under pressure even as sales dollars rise. Direct store operating expenses climbed 4.2 percent, the slowest increase since the pandemic, and the industry paid a record $21.3 billion in credit- and debit-card fees. The average store employs 19.9 people at a $15.04 average hourly wage. The merchandise mix is quietly reshaping: cigarettes are the only top-ten category in structural decline, while alternative snacks, jerky, seeds and nuts, grew 7.9 percent in 2025, a shift partly attributed to rising use of GLP-1 medications, alongside gains in packaged beverages and alternative nicotine.

The ownership structure explains why execution quality varies so widely from site to site. Sixty-three percent of stores, 95,672 of them, are owned by companies operating ten or fewer units, roughly 60 percent are single-store operators, and only 22 chains exceed 400 units; companies with 500 or more stores hold 22.2 percent of the total, or 33,810 stores. A fragmented field means a new, professionally run, foodservice-forward site often competes against under-capitalized independents, an opportunity, and where those independents are entrenched on price, a constraint.

The convergence with quick-service is now a two-way war

The competitive frame for a modern site is no longer other gas stations; it is the entire quick-service restaurant sector. Technomic forecasts that c-store prepared-food-and-beverage spending will reach $27 billion, up 42 percent from 2015, and c-store foodservice grew about 5 percent in 2024, a projected 5.7 percent in 2025, against roughly 4.1 percent for QSRs, so the channel is taking share. A Technomic analysis in the third quarter of 2025 found that 15 percent of c-store visits are "lost QSR occasions," visits that a decade ago would have gone to a restaurant. Consumer perception has flipped with the numbers: InTouch Insight's 2025 Convenience Store Trends Report found that 72 percent of consumers now regard c-stores as a viable alternative to quick-service restaurants, up from 56 percent in 2024 and 45 percent in 2023. And dunnhumby's Retailer Preference Index, QSR Edition, ranked Buc-ee's the number-one QSR in the country, with Kwik Trip also in the top five alongside In-N-Out, Raising Cane's and Chick-fil-A.

Why the foodservice leaders win

The best-in-class operators demonstrate what a foodservice-forward format is worth. Casey's General Stores is the fifth-largest pizza chain in the United States and reported $15.94 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025, the year ended April 30, 2025, with net income of $546.5 million across 2,904 stores in 20 states, having built or acquired a record 270 stores during the year, per its SEC annual report. Sheetz generates estimated foodservice average-unit volumes above $1 million per store, with foodservice estimated at roughly 58 percent of revenue; Wawa derives more than 65 percent of its revenue from foodservice. QuikTrip, at about $19.6 billion in revenue, and Wawa, at about $18.8 billion, rank among the largest private companies in the country. Their structural advantage is repeatable: they convert existing fuel and convenience traffic into meal occasions, spread fixed costs, rent, utilities and labor, across a whole store rather than a standalone restaurant, offer format variety across dayparts, and let a customer bundle fuel, food and grocery in a single stop.

That advantage is why the competitive set has to be read carefully. Fifty-seven percent of c-store operators name QSRs as primary competitors, and an equal 57 percent name other c-stores, so surrounding standalone QSR density is both a threat and a demand signal, it validates a foodservice-viable trade area while raising the executional bar. Independents, two-thirds of the field, increasingly plug in turnkey brands such as Krispy Krunchy Chicken and Hunt Brothers Pizza to compete with the chains' proprietary programs, and the chains are buying their way in from the other direction: RaceTrac's $556 million acquisition of Potbelly, with its 445 sites across 32 states, in 2025 is a c-store operator acquiring restaurant-grade food outright. The lending implication is blunt. A foodservice-forward format is now the primary determinant of revenue defensibility and the deepest competitive moat, and a fuel-only "cokes-and-smokes" site faces declining fuel volume and rising food competition at the same time, a structurally weak underwriting profile. The foodservice program itself, kitchen, commissary support, daypart coverage and brand, deserves the scrutiny once reserved for the fuel contract.

Where development capital is concentrating

New development is following population into the Sun Belt. Texas leads the nation with 16,504 c-stores, up 88 in 2025 and more than 4,000 ahead of second-place California, and Dallas–Fort Worth leads the country in retail construction, with roughly 7.2 million square feet under way in the second half of 2025, per Colliers. Buc-ee's is expanding from its Texas base into Arizona, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin between 2026 and 2028, with travel centers of roughly 70,000 to 76,000 square feet and 100 to 120-plus fueling positions; Casey's is pushing into Texas, Alabama and Florida; Sheetz has crossed 800 stores toward a 1,000-store goal, entering Michigan and Wawa's home Philadelphia market; and Wawa plans more than 80 North Carolina stores over a decade. New builds skew larger-format and foodservice-heavy, with kitchens driving per-store capital cost; Casey's cites acquisition and upgrade costs upward of $1 million per store.

Consolidation is the other half of the capital story, though 2025 was a measured year. M&A activity fell 23 to 36 percent year over year by various Capstone Partners measures, strategic buyers accounted for roughly 89 to 93 percent of deal volume, and most deals involved chains of 50 or fewer stores (74.1 percent of 2024 deals). The headline moves were still large: Sunoco's $9.1 billion acquisition of Parkland; Couche-Tard's $1.57 billion purchase of GetGo, with FTC-mandated divestitures such as 35 stores to Majors Management; FEMSA's U.S. entry with OXXO; and Casey's $1.15 billion CEFCO/Fikes deal. Couche-Tard withdrew its bid for 7-Eleven parent Seven & i in July 2025, after which Seven & i reaffirmed a North American 7-Eleven IPO and plans for 1,300 new stores by 2030. The drivers are structural: an aging base of baby-boomer owners without successors, rising labor and technology costs squeezing small operators, private-equity interest in a fragmented field, and, new in 2025, 100 percent first-year bonus depreciation for qualified convenience-store property placed in service after January 19, 2025, under the One Big Beautiful Bill, a material tailwind for both acquisitions and new builds.

The EV question and the shape of long-term fuel demand

The one genuinely long-dated risk in a fuel-site underwriting is electrification, and here the recent evidence argues for future-proofing rather than deterrence. National gasoline consumption is already declining on a volume basis, 8.9 million barrels a day in 2025, down 1 percent year over year and 4 percent below 2019, and the EIA forecasts continued declines through 2027, but driven primarily by fuel-economy gains, not by EVs. EV-adoption forecasts, meanwhile, have been cut sharply: Enverus revised its estimate of U.S. EV fleet penetration in 2035 to 8.1 percent, down from 20 percent, and in 2030 to 4.5 percent, down from 12 percent, after the September 2025 expiration of the federal $7,500 new- and $4,000 used-EV tax credits pushed the internal-combustion-displacement inflection out to 2028 through 2033. The IEA still projects EVs displacing about 5 million barrels a day of global oil demand by 2030. The practical read: fuel volume is a slow-declining, not collapsing, revenue line for the next decade.

Charging behavior reinforces the prepare-do-not-panic posture. Chargers sited near c-stores averaged 182 charging sessions a month in the fourth quarter of 2025, lagging grocery and restaurants, though c-store charging usage grew faster than those channels, up 8.7 percent over fifteen months, and about 95 percent of fuel retailers already offer or plan to offer EV charging. The bull case is dwell time: an EV driver lingers 15 to 45 minutes, a high-value window for in-store conversion precisely where the margin now lives. The underwriting conclusion is to model declining per-gallon volume, prioritize inside and foodservice revenue, and preserve optionality for EV charging and multi-fuel formats, reserving electrical capacity and site layout for DC fast charging even where it will not be built on day one.

Underwriting a modern site

Pulling the threads together yields a short, testable underwriting posture. Underwrite to inside sales and foodservice, not gallons: treat fuel as a traffic-generation and thin-margin line, about 12 percent margin and near 30 cents a gallon, and require a credible foodservice program, kitchen, daypart coverage, and a proprietary or turnkey brand, as the core of revenue defensibility, benchmarking inside gross profit against the NACS split, foodservice at 38.9 percent of inside gross profit and foodservice and packaged beverages together near 61 percent. Localize the saturation test, because per-capita fuel demand varies roughly threefold and density inversely mirrors it, by evaluating at the trade-area level rather than against national norms. Prioritize the Sun Belt growth corridors, Texas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee, while stress-testing for the competitive new supply that Buc-ee's, Casey's, Wawa and Sheetz are adding, which can cannibalize a trade area. Model fuel volume declining on the order of 1 to 2 percent a year and require inside-sales growth to more than offset it. And factor in the 2025 bonus-depreciation tailwind, which materially improves after-tax returns on both new builds and acquisitions.

Three signals would change that posture. A reacceleration of EV penetration back toward the earlier 12-to-20-percent-by-2030 forecasts, for instance on reinstated federal incentives, would materially worsen the long-term fuel-volume case. Sustained inside-transaction declines beyond the 2.7 percent recorded in 2025 would signal demand erosion outrunning dollar growth. And a trade area where NAICS 447 density per capita materially exceeds state and national norms should trigger a saturation flag on its own. Absent those, the shape of a defensible gas-station underwriting in 2026 is clear: the pumps bring the cars, the store keeps the margin, and the study that gets it right reads the trade area one corridor at a time.