Is there a "Best Time" to go to the Gas Station?

Did you ever notice that whenever you want to fill your car up with gas, so does everyone else? It seems that way anyway. There is a gas station right near my house. I can practically throw a rock and hit it from my front door. Well, that might be an exaggeration as if you've ever witnessed me throwing anything, you would see that sadly I'm a bit lacking in that area, but I digress. My point is, whenever I go there for gas, every pump is being used and I end up going someplace else. It's a little frustrating.

GasBuddy just recently conducted a study on the time of day that people in all 50 U.S. states go to the gas station to fill up. According to a news release from the fuel savings platform, the most popular time for drivers in the U.S. to fill up their car is between 4 and 5 pm. In fact, the study found that only three states vary from that timeframe.

Here's a chart provided by GasBuddy showing the most popular fill-up times in each state:

Provided by GasBuddy

The most popular fill-up time in Massachusetts is 5 pm, according to GasBuddy's collected data. The most popular day to fill-up is Friday. This makes a lot of sense since this is the time that most day laborers get out of work and drive into the weekend.

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Apparently, people from West Virginia like to make a morning trip to get their gas. The study found that most West Virginians fill up between 10 and 11 am. Folks in Virginia seem to like to go for gas in the 3 pm hour, and the people of Montana apparently like to frequent the noon hour.

What is the takeaway here? I'm thinking that if most people in Massachusetts like to fill up their gas tanks on Fridays at 5 pm, then maybe that isn't the best time to go. Maybe Saturday at 10 am might work out better.

For the heck of it, I may pass by two or three gas stations in the 5 pm hour on a few Fridays and see if there is any truth to these findings.

What time do you like to fill up your gas tank? Would you change your usual time to avoid waiting in line? Me... there is nothing I hate more than jostling for position at the gas station, so I am certainly willing to make the move to Saturday. How about you?

LOOK: See how much gasoline cost the year you started driving

To find out more about how has the price of gas changed throughout the years, Stacker ran the numbers on the cost of a gallon of gasoline for each of the last 84 years. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (released in April 2020), we analyzed the average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline from 1976 to 2020 along with the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for unleaded regular gasoline from 1937 to 1976, including the absolute and inflation-adjusted prices for each year.

Read on to explore the cost of gas over time and rediscover just how much a gallon was when you first started driving.