Marathon Petroleum earned $5.14B ($17.73/share) in Q2 2026, up from $1.22B, as its refining margin more than doubled to $36.33/bbl on conflict-driven crack spreads despite 4% lower throughput.
Revenue
$52.0B
+53.8% YoY
Net income
$5.1B
+322.5% YoY
Diluted EPS
$17.73
+347.7% YoY
Operating margin
14.1%
Headline: refining profits roughly tripled as fuel prices outran crude
Marathon Petroleum, the largest US refiner, earned $5.14 billion ($17.73 per diluted share) attributable to shareholders in the second quarter of 2026, up from $1.22 billion ($3.96) a year earlier. Almost all of the increase came from one place: the Refining & Marketing segment, where adjusted EBITDA rose from $1.89 billion to $6.66 billion. That is not because MPC refined more oil; it refined less. What changed is the gap between what it paid for crude and what it sold gasoline and diesel for.
The 10-Q attributes the environment to "higher product prices driven by global crude oil supply disruptions as a result of increasing regional conflicts, particularly in the Middle East," and the forward-looking risks section names the U.S.-Iran conflict specifically. Crude got more expensive (WTI averaged $92.70 a barrel vs. $63.68), but refined fuel prices rose even faster, which is what a refiner gets paid for.
Key figures
Metric
Q2 2026
Q2 2025
YoY Change
Sales and other operating revenues
$51,994M
$33,799M
+53.8%
Income from operations
$7,322M
$2,197M
+233%
Operating margin (income from operations / sales)
14.1%
6.5%
+7.6 pts
Net income attributable to MPC
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Adjusted and GAAP EPS are identical this quarter ($17.73): the earnings release lists no adjustments for Q2, so there is no one-off gain flattering the headline number. (The only adjustment in 2026 so far is a $32 million pre-tax clean-fuel tax credit booked in Q1 relating to 2025.)
What actually drove the jump
The crack spread. A refiner's core economics come down to the "crack spread," the difference between the price of the fuels it sells and the price of the crude it buys, quoted per barrel. The industry shorthand "3-2-1" assumes three barrels of crude become two barrels of gasoline and one of diesel. MPC's blended benchmark (weighted across its Gulf Coast, Mid-Continent and West Coast regions) more than doubled, from $15.63 to $33.54 a barrel. The widest moves were in diesel: Chicago ultra-low-sulfur diesel averaged $3.69 a gallon vs. $2.07, and US Gulf Coast diesel $3.68 vs. $2.08. The Mid-Continent crack went from $15.54 to $36.38.
MPC's own realized margin tracked the market almost dollar for dollar: $36.33 per barrel vs. $17.58. Management estimates the market move alone added roughly $4 billion to Refining & Marketing margin versus last year, with another roughly $800 million of benefit from how MPC performed relative to those benchmarks (crude mix and purchase costs, product yields, sales to dealers). MPC's own sensitivity table puts this in perspective: each $1 per barrel change in the blended crack is worth about $1.125 billion of annual segment EBITDA.
Volume went the wrong way, and it didn't matter. Net throughput fell 116 thousand barrels a day, which the 10-Q attributes to "increased planned turnaround activity, primarily in the Mid-Continent region." (A turnaround is a scheduled shutdown of part of a refinery for major maintenance.) Fewer barrels spread fixed costs thinner, so refining operating costs rose from $5.34 to $5.72 per barrel and distribution costs from $5.52 to $5.88. These are small against an $18.75 per barrel margin gain. After all costs, segment EBITDA per barrel went from $6.79 to $24.84.
A cost that grew: renewable fuel credits. Refiners must either blend biofuels or buy credits (called RINs) to meet the federal Renewable Fuel Standard. MPC's purchased RIN expense more than doubled to $683 million from $314 million, "mainly due to higher RIN costs and blending requirements." That cost is already inside the $36.33 margin, so the underlying market spread did even more work than the margin figure alone shows.
No inventory-gain inflation. MPC values its inventories on a LIFO (last-in, first-out) basis, so rising crude prices do not generate the large paper gains that refiners using FIFO accounting can report when they sell product made from cheaper, older crude. That makes this quarter's margin a cleaner read of the actual spread environment.
The other segments
Segment adjusted EBITDA
Q2 2026
Q2 2025
Change
Refining & Marketing
$6,655M
$1,890M
+$4,765M
Midstream (mostly MPLX)
$1,778M
$1,641M
+$137M (+8.3%)
Renewable Diesel
$258M
-$19M
+$277M
Corporate
-$256M
-$243M
-$13M
Midstream is MPC's steady business: pipelines, terminals and gas processing, mostly held through its roughly 647-million-unit stake in MPLX LP. It grew 8.3% on "increased rates and throughputs, including growth from equity affiliates and acquisitions," partly offset by selling non-core gathering and processing assets. In a normal year this segment is the earnings floor; this quarter it was about one-fifth of segment EBITDA. Because outside investors own part of MPLX, $400 million of consolidated net income went to those "noncontrolling interests" rather than MPC shareholders.
Renewable Diesel swung from a loss to $258 million, driven by a renewable diesel margin of $321 million vs. $49 million, which the filing attributes to "improved regulatory credit values." This profit depends heavily on government credit programs, so it can reverse quickly if those credit prices fall.
Why EPS grew faster than profit
Net income rose 322% but EPS rose 348% because there are fewer shares. Diluted shares averaged 290 million vs. 307 million a year earlier (-5.5%). MPC spent $2.5 billion buying back about 9 million shares in Q2 alone ($3.25 billion year to date), and the release says it returned over $2.8 billion in total including dividends. The board added a new $5.0 billion authorization on May 5; $6.13 billion remained at June 30.
The buybacks are funded by the cash windfall. First-half operating cash flow was $11.45 billion vs. $2.58 billion, but about $3.19 billion of that came from working capital, "mainly due to the effects of changes in energy commodity prices and volumes." Put simply, MPC's bills to crude suppliers rose along with prices before it had to pay them. That boost is timing, and it tends to reverse when prices fall. Cash stood at $7.8 billion (including $1.0 billion at MPLX), with nothing drawn on the $5 billion credit line.
The effective tax rate also normalized upward: the tax provision was $1.44 billion on $6.98 billion of pre-tax income (about 20.7%), compared with about 14.3% a year earlier, when the MPLX noncontrolling-interest benefit was a larger share of a much smaller profit.
Takeaway: This quarter is a measure of the crack spread, not of a structurally different MPC. Its margin per barrel rose $18.75, almost exactly the $17.91 rise in the benchmark, while it refined 4% fewer barrels. The midstream business, the part that doesn't depend on the market, grew 8%. With MPC's stated sensitivity of about $1.1 billion of annual EBITDA per $1 of crack, earnings will fall about as fast as they rose once conflict-driven supply disruptions ease.
Outlook
Management's Q3 2026 guidance (from the earnings release):
Total refinery throughput of 3,005 thousand barrels per day (2,820 crude + 185 other feedstocks), up from 2,944 in Q2 as Mid-Continent turnaround work winds down
Refining operating costs of $5.60 per barrel (vs. $5.72 in Q2)
Refining planned turnaround costs of $290 million; distribution costs of $1.65 billion
2026 capital spending (excluding MPLX) of $1.5 billion. The El Paso yield project and the Robinson project (about 10 thousand barrels per day of extra jet fuel) came online in Q2. MPLX raised its 2026 growth capital by $500 million to $2.9 billion, and MPC expects MPLX's 12.5% annual distribution growth in 2026 and 2027 to continue.
MPC does not guide on margins or earnings. Management's longer-term view in the 10-Q is that global demand growth will outpace net refining capacity additions through the end of the decade.
Our read: higher volumes and lower unit costs should help Q3 somewhat, but the result depends almost entirely on whether crack spreads stay anywhere near Q2's $33.54 blended level, which was more than double the year-ago figure and driven by a supply shock rather than demand. Three things to watch:
Crack spreads after the summer driving season. Gasoline demand normally eases after September.
Working capital. The working-capital cash inflow reverses if crude prices fall.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve exchange. MPC will receive about 22 million barrels from the reserve during 2026 and must return about 27 million barrels between April 2027 and July 2029. The extra 5 million barrels are effectively the price of borrowing that supply now.
Midstream and the shrinking share count are the durable parts of this story. The refining margin is not.
Source: MPC Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2026 (filed Aug 4, 2026). Adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EPS, capital-return totals and Q3 guidance are from the Q2 2026 earnings release (Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1, same date).