Gas, heating oil, and mortgage costs are all climbing with no end in sight.
About this series: Maine families are paying more for nearly everything including gas, heating oil, groceries, health care, housing. Some of that is the cost of living in 2026. But a lot of it traces back to specific choices made in Washington: a war with no end in sight, tariffs that raise prices at checkout, a tax code that favors the wealthy, corporations consolidating their way out of competition, and a federal budget that doesn’t reflect what Maine households actually need. The Squeeze is a five-part series pulling apart each of those threads: what’s driving the cost, how it shows up in a Maine household budget, and what it says about who Washington is really working for.
Read part two on tariffs, part three on the tax code, part four on corporate power, and part five on how Washington is spending your tax dollars.
By Karin Leuthy and Garrett Martin
We’re now more than six months into a war with Iran, and tensions are rising again. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has global energy markets on edge, but the real story is what it means for the people paying the bills here at home. This isn’t a distant headline. It’s showing up in Maine’s gas tanks, oil tanks, mortgage statements, and grocery carts.
Hitting Mainers where they have the least flexibility
Gas is now running well over $4 a gallon, adding almost $1,200 in gas costs for a family of four by year’s end. For a state that depends on heating oil to get through the winter, the hit is even sharper: Maine heating oil has jumped from $3.90 to $5.15 a gallon, adding roughly $875 more for a household burning 700 gallons a year.
These aren’t optional expenses. Mainers drive long distances to work, and heating oil is a necessity in a cold-weather, rural state. Half of all Maine households use oil as their primary heat source. When energy prices spike, there’s no easy substitute to switch to, so the cost lands on the household budget.
The ripple effects reach everything else
The pain doesn’t stop at the pump or the furnace. Diesel prices just hit an all-time high, up 60% from a year ago, raising the cost of trucking food and goods, building homes, and operating farms. Jet fuel is up 56%, and fertilizer has jumped 52%. When it costs more to move things, grow things, and make things, those costs eventually show up in what families pay at the register.
The war is hitting shipping especially hard. Higher marine fuel, insurance, and storage costs are causing shipping costs to explode, rising over 100% on some routes to the US. One major shipping company says the war is costing it $40 to $50 million more every week, and those costs don’t just disappear. They get passed through the supply chain, all the way down to the shopping cart.
Farmers are caught in the same squeeze. With sky high fertilizer prices slicing into already narrow margins, about seven in ten farmers surveyed say they can’t afford all the fertilizer they need this season. Farmers are being forced to choose between paying more or using less, threatening yields and pushing up food prices.
Even the cost of borrowing is going up
War-driven inflation has also helped push mortgage rates to a 13-month high. For someone taking out a typical 30-year mortgage today, that can mean roughly $56,000 more in interest over the life of a $400,000 loan. A war half a world away is adding tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of owning a home or buying a car in Maine.
A war without a plan means no relief in sight
This isn’t just an expensive war, it’s an open-ended one. Current estimates put the cost to taxpayers somewhere between $37 billion and $113 billion so far, with the administration now asking for $73 billion more with no clear endpoint in sight. When a war’s costs are that unpredictable, so are its ripple effects on gas, oil, and grocery prices. Families budgeting for a Maine winter don’t get that luxury. They must plan for fixed costs that are due now.
That gap between an administration that can commit tens of billions of dollars to an open-ended war with no clear strategy, and Maine households that have to account for every dollar of a heating bill months in advance is itself a kind of poor planning. It reflects misplaced priorities that families in Aroostook County or Washington County feel every time they fill the gas tank or the oil tank, whether the war ever makes it onto their radar as the cause or not.
Mainers don’t need another lecture about tightening their belts. No financial cost compares with the human toll on service members and their families. Still, Mainers are paying more for gas, heating oil, groceries, and mortgages because of a war they neither chose nor control. And it’s a war Congress has let run largely unchecked, giving up its authority to rein in an executive branch that’s out of step with Mainers’ needs. When a war runs without a plan and without oversight, working families cover the cost alongside the sacrifices of those who serve.