Analysts raised their 2026 oil call to $83.90 WTI, which quietly implies about $80 for the rest of the year

Analysts raised their oil forecasts again this month. The September Reuters poll of 30 economists and analysts put the 2026 average for Brent at $89.05 a barrel, up from $85.08 in August, and West Texas Intermediate at $83.90, up from $80.20, according to OilPrice.com's account of the survey. Respondents cited a Strait of Hormuz that several no longer expect to fully reopen soon, and most do not see the market returning to surplus until 2027.

The obvious read is "forecasters turned more bullish." The arithmetic says something different.

The number behind the number

A full-year average forecast made at the end of September is mostly already decided. Nine months of prices are in the books. Using the Energy Information Administration's daily WTI spot series, WTI averaged $85.19 over the 186 trading days from January 2 through September 29.

That leaves about 65 trading days from September 30 to year-end. For the whole year to average $83.90, those remaining days have to average roughly:

($83.90 x 251 days − $85.19 x 186 days) / 65 days ≈ $80.20 a barrel.

WTI was trading near $93.60 on Wednesday afternoon, up about 2%. So the "raised" consensus still pencils in a fourth quarter about $13 a barrel, or roughly 14%, below where crude is today. Last month's $80.20 call, run through the same arithmetic, implied something closer to $66 for the final stretch; the upgrade is the market's forecasters catching up to prices, not getting ahead of them.

Why the year looks the way it does

The monthly averages from the same EIA series show how lopsided 2026 has been. WTI averaged about $60 in January and $65 in February, then $91 in March, $100 in April and $102 in May as the Gulf conflict hit shipping. It eased to $85 in June, $80 in July and $84 in August, before climbing back to about $97 in September. A year with two very different halves makes a single annual number easy to misread.

A similar exercise with Brent points the same way, but with a caveat: the EIA's Brent series is a physical spot price that has traded well above Brent futures in recent weeks, so we lean on WTI, where the spot and futures prices track closely.

What could keep crude above that path

• OPEC+ is not adding barrels. Eight members are expected to hold November output targets steady at Sunday's meeting, Reuters sources told OilPrice.com. The group produced 38.05 million barrels a day in August, about 5 million below pre-war levels, per the same report.
• Hormuz is only partly back. HSBC's forecast assumes a "structurally impaired" strait, while Goldman Sachs estimates Gulf exports including dark shipments reached 23.3 million barrels a day last week, roughly their 2025 average, according to the poll write-up.
• Inventories are thin. We reported today that the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is 30% smaller than a year ago and diesel stocks sit 14% below normal.

Who should read the forecast carefully

A trucking or moving company setting fourth-quarter fuel surcharges, or a contractor pricing a winter job, will often reach for "the consensus number." Plugging $83.90 into a budget made today is not neutral: it quietly assumes crude falls about $13 from here and stays there. If that decline does not come, the gap shows up in the fuel line. Nothing in the poll says the drop will or will not happen; it is simply what the average requires.

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Live prices are on our crude oil chart and the markets board.

Sources: OilPrice.com on the Reuters September oil poll; OilPrice.com on OPEC+; U.S. EIA, WTI Cushing daily spot price and Brent daily spot price. Trading-day count assumes NYMEX holidays on Thanksgiving and Christmas. Prices are intraday and will change. This is market information, not investment advice.